US President Donald Trump delivers remarks during the "A New Golden Age" summit at the US Institute of Peace, renamed The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace by the Trump administration, in Washington, DC, US, October 8, 2026.
On Thursday, a Fox Business host outright apologized after admitting that the inflation dogging President Donald Trump’s second administration is here to stay. According to longtime Fox financial analyst Cheryl Casone, not only is inflation not “transitory,” as Trump’s allies have argued, but another rate hike is coming and it’s just a matter of when.
“Investors have been handling high gas prices and whatever inflation there is in the economy, and they've actually been handling the higher rates as well,” claimed Fox Big Money host Jackie DeAngelis. “They're not happy about it, but they've been dealing with it.” Indeed, polling shows that Americans are not happy about it, with 25 percent approving of Trump’s overall handling of the economy, 17 percent approving on cost-of-living, and 65 percent saying his policies – specifically tariffs and the war with Iran – have directly contributed to rising costs.
“Do you really believe that they're going to they're going to do another hike before the midterms?” wondered Casone, noting that the Fed seemed to be signaling another hike was on the way and guessing it would come in December. “Inflation is not going away. It’s not transitory,” she admitted suddenly. “I can't believe I just said that. Sorry, everybody.”
Despite Trump’s promise to bring prices down “on day one,” inflation has remained persistent over the course of his second term, with core inflation standing at roughly 3.4 percent, well above the Fed’s 2 percent target. The key factors driving that inflation have been tariffs and the fuel cost hikes caused by Trump’s war with Iran. According to a new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published earlier this week, for example, “levies put in place last year by the Trump administration drove up consumer goods inflation by an estimated 2.9 percentage points as of February.” As the Washington Post explains, “That disrupted a slight downward trajectory in inflation; without tariffs, ‘goods prices would have fallen slightly,’ the researchers found. The study estimates that ‘about a quarter of a tariff increase is passed through to consumer goods prices.’ Tariffs added to price increases for both imported and domestic goods, it found.”
On Fox, the panel went on to discuss rising mortgage rates, ultimately concluding that Americans would just get used to it. As one panelist put it, “Remember back in the 80s, there were higher rates. You just have to renormalize that to the Gen Z right now. Seven, eight percent mortgages sound ridiculous, but as we get further down the road and we're just used to that, it becomes the normal.” Polling consistently shows that housing affordability is among Americans’ top concerns.