Trump Promised Lower Prices. His Policies Are Raising Them.

“From the day I take the oath of office, we’ll rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again,” Donald Trump promised Americans last summer as he ran for president. “Prices will come down. You just watch. They’ll come down fast.”

Prices have not come down. Ten months after Mr. Trump took office, prices are still climbing. Groceries are more expensive. Electricity bills have spiked. It costs more to buy a new car. The annual rate of inflation was 3 percent in September — almost exactly the same as it was on Inauguration Day.

The president’s failure was predictable. Prices almost never fall across the entire economy. When they do, it tends to be because of a crisis, such as the Great Depression. Mr. Trump is responsible for misleading the American people. But he has not merely failed to keep an impossible promise. Mr. Trump has pursued policies, starting with tariffs, that are making the problem worse by making life in America less affordable.

One way to see the impact is to track inflation over the past year. As the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have worn off, the pace of price increases declined from an annual rate of 3 percent in January to 2.3 percent in April. Then, as Mr. Trump’s policies started to take effect, inflation rebounded to 3 percent. “In some ways, this administration could have come in and done nothing and made progress on inflation,” said Claudia Sahm, a longtime Federal Reserve economist who now works at New Century Advisors, an investment firm. “But the policies they’ve chosen have created extra costs for businesses, and businesses tend to pass on costs.”

The cost of Mr. Trump’s policies is likely to increase in the coming months.

His most inflationary policy is his campaign to build a wall of tariffs around the American economy. Tariffs are taxes on imports, and they are initially paid by the businesses that bring goods into the United States. In the early months of Mr. Trump’s presidency, importers mostly absorbed those costs rather than raising prices to recoup the money from consumers. Some companies said they were waiting to see if the tariffs would last. As time has passed, companies increasingly have shifted the costs of the tariffs to their customers. Goldman Sachs estimates that the share of tariff costs borne by consumers has increased from 22 percent in April to 55 percent in October, and that it will continue to rise, reaching 67 percent by the middle of next year.

As this board has noted in previous editorials, the revival of domestic manufacturing is a worthy goal, and if tariffs were applied judiciously, the benefits might outweigh the costs. But Mr. Trump’s indiscriminate use of tariffs is doing far more harm than good. The current tariffs will cost the average U.S. household about $1,800 per year, the Yale Budget Lab estimates.