On April 29, 2025, President Donald Trump sat down with ABC journalist Terry Moran in the Oval Office to discuss his first 100 days in office. When asked about prices, Trump said, “Look, since I came in gasoline is down, groceries are down, egg prices are down — many things are down, just about everything.”
Unfortunately for Trump — and the American consumer — most analysts, as well as the latest economic data, would disagree. While it’s true that prices have come down in a few specific categories — fresh vegetable prices were 3.0% lower in March, compared to March 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) — most grocery prices were up and predicted to go higher.
For instance, the USDA projects overall food prices to increase by 3.5% in 2025, with food-at-home prices rising by 3.3%. That’s more than the historical average annual increase of 2.6% from 2005 to 2024.
If you’re a beef lover, expect to pay 6.3% more. And the much-talked-about egg prices? The USDA anticipates a 54.6% increase in 2025, mostly due to the impacts of avian flu outbreaks.
Nobody’s quite sure what’s going to happen with the tariffs but it’s pretty clear that food prices are going to continue to go up because of them. If he wakes up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and remembers that he needs to punish Mexico, he’ll slap some on their agriculture exports (along with the aluminum and auto parts tariffs that he already put on) and then the games will really begin. You just never know.
And no, “groceries” is not an old fashioned word. I don’t know where he got that. We still call them grocery stores fergawdsakes. He’s living in another dimension , where billionaires don’t ever have to utter the word I guess. But more importantly, prices are going up (as they always do) not down and his continued insistence that the cost of living is going down may be one thing that catches up to him. This is one of those things that people are very aware of.