Trump 'bungled' key issue — and his 'useless gimmicks' are making it worse: analyst

President Donald Trump won his second term by convincing enough Americans that then-President Joe Biden wasn't doing enough to lower prices of basic necessities, and Biden — along with Vice President Kamala Harris, by extension — were unable to persuade Americans that upward GDP growth, low unemployment numbers and a downtick in inflation rates were making the aspects of daily life more affordable.

But according to Bulwark columnist Catherine Rampell, Trump is now doing the same thing that cost Democrats the 2024 election: Insisting that the economy is strong, even as voters see that the cost of living is relentlessly rising. Rampell wrote on Thursday that Trump has learned "it’s easy to win while running as an outsider promising 'affordability,'" but that "it’s much harder to actually do anything about it."

"It’s doubly hard if you insist the problem doesn’t exist in the first place and suggest voters should just shut up about it. Triply hard if your economic policy agenda (cough-cough, tariffs) cuts in the opposite direction, making life more expensive," she continued. "Trump and his fellow Republicans have learned nothing from how badly Joe Biden and the Democrats bungled inflation. Instead they’re repeating some of the same mistakes and adopting the same useless gimmicks. Only this time, they’re also pursuing policies that make the problem worse."

Rampell observed that while Democrats swept last week's elections by hammering the issue of high prices for groceries, gasoline, housing and healthcare, Trump simultaneously claimed that his political opponents were perpetuating a "con job" on Americans. He's maintained that "prices are way down" under his administration (though Rampell countered with Federal Reserve data showing that prices are up by three percent on average in September of 2025 compared to September of 2024). Trump also famously told a reporter during a November White House event: "I don't want to hear about the affordability."

The Bulwark writer argued that Trump was simply carrying out "a more strident version of what Biden and the Democrats did during the first year of his term" by downplaying rising inflation as "propaganda" and Republican lies. She also noted that in the absence of government economic data due to the recent 43-day shutdown, Trump has relied on corporate press releases from Walmart and Doordash to argue that food prices have gone down under his leadership.

However, Rampell cautioned against the credibility of that data. She reminded readers that Walmart's 2025 Thanksgiving price list has fewer products than its 2024 list, and that the products on this year's list include more generic brands than name-brand items.

"When it comes to prices, for instance, firms always have an incentive to say they’re offering an unbeatable deal right now," she wrote. "In any event, Trump’s efforts to gaslight Americans about grocery prices clearly isn’t working."

Click here to read Rampell's full column in The Bulwark.