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In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, President Donald Trump claimed that his administration is successfully addressing the affordability crisis, despite complaining last month that the term “affordability” had been invented by the media to smear him.
Trump’s post — which borrowed a headline from an article on a right-wing website, which he provided the link to — claimed that prices were improving for Americans on three key issues.
“Cheaper drugs, cheaper beef, cheaper gas. Trump lines up fall affordability before Labor Day,” the post from the president claims.
The words match exactly a headline from a website called Just the News, which is rated as “extreme right” by the media watchdog Media Bias/Fact Check. That site also rates Just the News as “mixed” in terms of providing factual evidence to its readers, “due to numerous failed fact checks and the promotion of conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda.”
The article in question purports that supposedly lower prices in the U.S. put Trump and Republicans “in a better position to motivate voters going into the midterm elections in November,” and that “Americans are enjoying lower prices to stay healthy, eat and travel.”
Most Americans disagree.
According to an Economist/YouGov survey published earlier this week, nearly three in four Americans, 74 percent, rate the current state of the economy as only “fair” or “poor,” with just 23 percent calling the current economic situation “good” or “excellent.” Moreover, 57 percent describe the current trend of the economy as “getting worse.”
Indeed, prices have gone up for each commodity that Trump claimed to be making more affordable in his Truth Social post.
For example, though some prescription drug prices have gone down, several experts in drug pricing have pointed out that much of the credit may not lie with TrumpRX, as the president maintains, but rather with his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, who signed into law a measure that requires some drug makers to negotiate costs with Medicare.
Importantly, health care costs are soaring for millions of Americans due to the Trump administration’s failure to push for (and the Republican Congress’s refusal to take up) an extension of tax credits for people on the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) exchange markets. Those lapsing credits have led to millions of Americans losing their insurance, with millions more paying thousands of additional dollars in deductibles for plans they can attain.
Grocery prices are still high, too, including for many staple items, such as beef, which Trump cited specifically in his post. The president made the questionable decision to remove tariffs on imported beef to deal with higher prices — a move that could endanger the health of people consuming the product. And even with that move in place, prices haven’t yet lowered, with overall costs for ground beef increasing by 18.3 percent since Trump took office.
Many Americans are so desperate due to the affordability crisis that they aren’t eating enough. A recent report, called “The Secret Financial Lives of Americans,” found that 37 percent of Americans have gone to sleep hungry because they lacked the finances to buy food. Around one in eight Americans also admitted that they’ve resorted to stealing in order to feed themselves.
Gas prices also remain high — and will likely stay high for months to come — due to Trump’s decision to launch an unauthorized war on Iran in late February. As of Wednesday, gas prices are at $4.12 per gallon on average across the U.S. — a 40 percent increase from the week before the war started, and a 47 percent increase from the start of 2026.
Gas prices for this Labor Day weekend are expected to surpass their highest costs ever for the holiday, surpassing the record set in 2012, when the average cost of a gallon of gas was $3.83, a far cry from “lin[ing] up fall affordability” as Trump claimed in his post.
Despite campaigning on lowering gas costs to $2 per gallon and promising to lower grocery costs “on day one” of his second term, Trump has suggested that the term “affordability” was made up by reporters to hurt him politically.
In December, Trump called the term a “hoax” against him. And just last month, he claimed the media invented the term.
“In my first day, the press said, ‘What are you going to do about affordability?’ It was a word they devised — affordability. They never used that word before,” Trump claimed in a speech last month.
Notably, in 2019, during his first term in office, Trump signed an executive order that included the word “affordability.”
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