Trump said there is "no inflation" in the US
In September 2025 Trump said the US had "no inflation". This is false. Inflation was positive at the time, and by April 2026 the annual rate reached about 3.8%, the highest since May 2023.
What we know
In September 2025 Trump stated that there was "no inflation" in the United States. PolitiFact and other fact-checkers noted that inflation was clearly positive at that time, meaning consumer prices were still rising year over year.
Inflation did not stop. By April 2026 the annual inflation rate had climbed to roughly 3.8%, the highest reading since May 2023. Prices were not only rising but rising at an accelerating pace during part of this period.
Saying inflation is "gone" is a category error. Zero inflation would mean prices, on average, were flat compared with a year earlier. Falling prices would be deflation. Neither was happening, so the claim was false when it was made.
The distinction between disinflation, meaning inflation slowing down, and deflation, meaning prices actually falling, is a basic concept in economic reporting that professional data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks monthly without ambiguity. Between September 2025 and April 2026, the CPI report showed inflation move in both directions at times, but it remained positive throughout, meaning the overall price level for a typical basket of goods and services kept climbing even during months when the rate of increase slowed. Saying inflation is "gone" during this stretch would have required at least one month of flat or negative year-over-year pricing, which the data does not show.
This kind of claim is difficult to sustain over time precisely because it is checkable against a single, widely cited government data series released on a fixed monthly schedule. Fact-checking organizations including PolitiFact track this specific pattern of premature declarations of victory on inflation, comparing them against the next month's CPI release, and found several instances where a claim of "no inflation" or inflation being "defeated" preceded a report showing inflation had in fact risen. This creates a documented, repeatable pattern rather than a single misstatement made under pressure. The persistence of this specific claim across several months also matters for how it should be understood. A single premature statement made in the heat of a speech might reflect exaggeration under pressure, but repeating a claim that inflation had ended on multiple occasions across a period when government data continued to show positive and, for a time, accelerating inflation indicates the claim was not corrected after being publicly checked, which is part of why fact-checking organizations continued to track and re-rate it each time it recurred. For most households, the practical effect of this distinction is straightforward: even a slowing inflation rate still means the same grocery basket, rent payment, or utility bill costs more than it did a year earlier, which is why economists caution against treating a lower inflation rate as equivalent to lower prices. Public data releases like the monthly CPI report leave little room for dispute once published.
Common claims
- There is no inflation in the country anymore.Not supported
- We completely eliminated inflation.Not supported