The Democrats’ latest con job is blaming President Donald Trump for former President Joe Biden’s legacy inflation and claiming that Zohran Mamdani-style socialism will solve the “affordability problem” rather than make it far worse. If the Ocasio-Cortez-Sanders-Jeffries crowd gets away with this propaganda, the next “red wave” to wash over America will be a Marxist-controlled Congress in 2026.
Without question, families continue to feel the sting of Biden’s high prices — at the grocery store, at the gas pump, and in their monthly rent. Lower-income families feel it most, because they devote almost one-third of their budgets to food and another quarter to shelter — exactly the categories where Biden-era inflation has hit hardest.
President Trump and his economic team viscerally understand this pain and are working overtime to bring relief. Yet solving inflation isn’t like flipping a switch — it’s more like turning an aircraft carrier around: steady and deliberate, but agonizingly slow in some categories to show progress. As a practical and increasingly political matter, the impact of the new Trump policies is governed by lags that, in some sectors, stretch longer than the 10 months he has been back in office.
Food: A tale of two market lags
Consider food, which accounts for about 14% of the average household budget and roughly 20% of the total rise in consumer prices since 2021.
Food inflation exploded during 2022 and 2023 as a perfect Biden-Yellen-Buttigieg storm hit: massive fiscal stimulus pushed by a profligate Democratic House and Senate that overheated demand, fuel and fertilizer costs that surged under Biden’s green war on domestic energy, and Pete Buttigieg-era supply chain breakdowns that drove up the price of everything from feed to packaging.
Layer on top of that a series of weather shocks — Midwest droughts, Western heat waves, and avian flu outbreaks — and it was the worst of all worlds for households.
To understand the lag problem clearly now, let’s look at the stark divergence between chicken (and egg) inflation and beef inflation.
When President Trump came back into office in January, egg and chicken prices were off the charts — egg prices had surged nearly 65% year-over-year, and chicken prices were elevated accordingly. This “chicken and egg” inflation became the poster child for Biden-legacy inflation. The root cause: Biden’s Green New Deal-style restrictions drove up feed and energy costs, tighter environmental rules squeezed producers, and labor and logistics “Buttigieg bottlenecks” compounded the supply squeeze. And the coup de grâce was the so-called “great Biden chicken slaughter” — over 100 million birds culled in a massive, panic-driven overreaction that deepened shortages and drove prices to historic highs.
President Trump’s Agriculture Department under Secretary Brooke Rollins moved quickly — stabilizing feed prices, streamlining inspections, restoring production incentives, and accelerating disease-response protocols. Within months, egg and broiler chicken supplies rebounded, and prices collapsed by nearly 50% from their 2024 highs.
Why did the Trump administration get such rapid results? Because the poultry cycle operates on a lightning-fast, industrial-like clock. It takes only about 45 days for a newly hatched chick to become a supermarket-ready broiler chicken. When policy fixes remove bottlenecks, the system resets almost immediately.
Now look at beef. While beef and veal prices rose only about 3% a year on average during the first Trump administration, they climbed at nearly 6% a year under Biden, with a near double-digit spike in 2021 and additional mid-single-digit jumps in 2022, 2023, and 2024 that compounded on top of each other.
That was no accident. Biden’s green war on U.S. energy drove up fuel and fertilizer costs; his regulators layered new compliance burdens on land, water, and livestock operations; and a general inflation surge pushed up everything from feed grain to trucking. At the same time, a brutal multiyear drought across key cattle states in the West and Great Plains scorched pasture and hay supplies, forcing ranchers to liquidate cows and heifers just to survive. The result is the smallest U.S. cattle herd in 73 years — a supply shock baked into the system by Biden-era policies and weather that together pushed beef prices to record highs.
President Trump is focused like a laser beam on reversing this Biden-legacy inflation. But unlike with chicken, the beef cycle moves more like a biological cycle than an industrial one, which is to say at a glacial pace.
From breeding a calf to finishing it for slaughter, this cycle typically takes 18 to 24 months — and that’s before factoring in drought, feed costs, and water availability. It’s the long shadow of Biden’s policies colliding with the long biological cycle of U.S. beef production.
And that’s the larger point. Beef shows the toughest corner of the food-inflation battlefield: where biology, weather, and bad policy all intersect. Chicken and eggs snap back quickly because their production cycle is measured in weeks.
Of course, many food prices remain too high. Beef, pork, and processed meats are still up nearly 25% from their pre-Biden levels. Bread and cereal prices have climbed close to 30%. Milk, cheese, and other dairy products remain about 20% higher, and fruit and vegetable prices have barely come down from their 2023 peaks. Coffee, sugar, and restaurant meals, all staples of working families, are still painfully expensive.
We get it. That is why the Trump strategy does not rely on a single lever. It recognizes that beating food inflation requires attacking every input — energy, fertilizer, water, logistics, and market power — simultaneously.
Here, “Drill, baby, drill” isn’t just about energy — it’s about food. Lower oil and natural gas prices cut the cost of fertilizer, fuel, and transportation across the entire agricultural chain. Reviving domestic drilling and refining capacity has already begun to ease those input costs, giving farmers and truckers breathing room and helping keep grocery shelves stocked at affordable prices.
At the same time, the administration is rebuilding America’s fertilizer production base, restoring reliable water access in Western states, unclogging port and rail bottlenecks, and seeking ways to break the grip of the four giant food-processing firms, two of them foreign-owned, whose oligopolistic power distorts prices and squeezes both ranchers and consumers. The goal is not Soviet-style micromanagement of agriculture, but to unleash it, so that America’s farmers and ranchers can once again feed the nation without relying on foreign suppliers or bureaucratic permission slips.
Spoiler alert: There are no plans to open Soviet-era Mamdani bodegas — just a plan to make food affordable again, the old-fashioned way: by producing more of it.
Shelter: The largest driver of core inflation
Now, what about shelter, where “shelter” includes the run-up in both rents and homeowners’ equivalent rent? This is quintessential Biden-legacy inflation and, by far, the single largest driver of core inflation. It now makes up roughly one-third of measured household spending and close to 40% of the core inflation basket — and has accounted for a very large share of the increase in core consumer prices since 2021.
Like the beef cycle, shelter suffers from one of the longest lags between implementing policy cures and seeing results — often as long as 12 to 18 months. President Trump is only about 10 months into his new term, and the official shelter indexes are still reflecting the peak of the Biden-era excess.
Under Biden, Washington flooded the economy with trillions of dollars in deficit spending, helping ignite the worst inflation in four decades. As prices surged, the Federal Reserve, forced to chase the inflation Biden created, launched the most aggressive rate-hiking cycle since the early 1980s, driving mortgage rates from the 3% range to well above 7% and doubling borrowing costs for builders and homebuyers alike. At the same time, Biden’s energy restrictions pushed up the price of heating, transportation, and key building materials, while EPA red tape and local permitting bottlenecks stalled new housing projects and kept supply chronically tight.
Meanwhile, Biden’s open border propelled millions of illegal immigrants into an already strained housing market, especially in major sanctuary cities, even as higher interest rates froze new construction and pinched existing homeowners. More people were chasing too few units, and the cost of financing and building those units had just spiked.
It is no surprise that rents soared in 2022 and 2023. Those earlier increases are still working their way through the Consumer Price Index, even as market rents themselves have flattened or, in many areas, begun to edge down.
This isn’t a data error — it is how the index is built. The shelter component reflects lease renewals and long-term contracts that adjust slowly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also rotates its housing sample gradually, so even when asking rents on new leases cool, the official shelter inflation rate lags behind. The result is a stubbornly slow decline in reported core inflation even as real-world housing pressure starts to ease.
The good news is that the underlying shelter cost curve is now bending down. Private-market data show rent growth slowing sharply from its 2022 peak, new leases stabilizing at much lower year-over-year increases, and vacancy rates drifting up as the big wave of apartments permitted earlier in the cycle finally comes on line. That is exactly why it would be a huge mistake to succumb to the Pied Piper of rent controls — the Mamdani-Marxist “solution” that would only choke supply, drive landlords out of the market, and guarantee even higher rents down the road.
Instead, President Trump is aggressively attacking the affordable-housing crisis on multiple fronts. The goal is simple: expand supply, don’t suffocate it. His strategy combines lower borrowing costs, streamlined permitting, and 100% expensing for new construction — measures designed to revive housing starts, boost apartment completions, and finally get rents moving in the right direction.
Obamacare’s hidden inflation engine
Now, what about healthcare, one of the most frustrating sources of inflation for lower- and middle-income families? Here, while healthcare counts for only about 7% of the Consumer Price Index, it consumes far more of lower- and middle-income household budgets — for many families, healthcare costs can run 10%-25% of income, and, for the poorest households, in some cases upwards of 30%, depending on coverage, geography, and medical needs.
During the recent budget standoff, Democrats shamelessly played their Obamacare fiddle, trying to force Republicans into shoveling still more money into the same broken system. They demanded billions in additional subsidies — sweetened by coverage expansion for illegal immigrants valued at roughly $500 million. This is the same failed formula that has driven premiums, deductibles, and drug prices higher for a decade: pour in more taxpayer money, watch insurers and hospital chains book the profits, and then demand even more when prices rise again.
Fortunately, congressional Republicans held their ground. The shutdown peace deal now guarantees a January 2026 vote on key Obamacare provisions, finally creating an opening to address the law’s structural flaws — ones that inflate benefits on paper while fueling medical inflation in practice.
The problem is built into the system itself. When Washington boosts Obamacare subsidies without changing how prices are set, the insurers, hospital conglomerates, and pharmacy benefit managers that dominate the market simply raise prices to capture the new dollars before they ever reach patients through higher charges, higher negotiated rates, and opaque billing practices. Families end up with the same or less care at a higher cost while taxpayers fund the spread. Premiums climb, deductibles stay high, and drug prices keep setting records.
President Trump is moving to fix the market itself. He has already ordered a crackdown on hidden rebates and kickbacks in the pharmacy benefit chain, is enforcing real price transparency so patients can see what hospitals, insurers, and pharmacy benefit managers actually charge, and launched competition-focused reforms to loosen the grip of entrenched middlemen.
At the same time, he is advancing new initiatives to expand direct-care and telemedicine options, strengthen consumer choice, and pursue aggressive antitrust scrutiny of the rent-seeking cartels and concentrated hospital and insurer networks that dominate large parts of the system. The goal isn’t to cut care — it’s to shift power away from the bureaucrats and middlemen who profit from confusion and toward the patients who pay the bills.
But it takes two parties to tango, and too many Democrats would rather weaponize rising healthcare inflation to blame President Trump and posture for the 2026 midterm elections than help solve the problem. For too long, rising medical costs have been treated as inevitable. They aren’t. Reforming incentives, not writing bigger checks, is how President Trump will bring costs down over time and restore true affordability.
Transportation and energy: The mobility squeeze
Transportation and energy together account for roughly one-fifth of the costs that drive household inflation — core expenses that touch every working family. Under Biden, both surged. Vehicle prices jumped as supply chain chaos and electric vehicle mandates choked off production. Auto loan rates nearly doubled as Biden inflation took off, insurance premiums climbed sharply in many states and metropolitan areas, and diesel and gasoline prices hit historic highs while the Biden administration drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve amid constrained domestic production.
President Trump’s strategy reverses that damage from the ground up. His “Drill, baby, drill” initiative is restoring energy independence, stabilizing fuel costs, and lowering the input prices that ripple through trucking, shipping, and air transport. At the same time, his deregulation agenda is unclogging ports, supporting domestic auto manufacturing, and investing in freight-rail infrastructure — cutting both the cost and the time of moving goods and people. By lowering the cost of vehicles and repairs, encouraging domestic production of parts, and easing regulatory burdens that drive up claims, this agenda is designed to put sustained downward pressure on auto and trucking insurance premiums that have exploded under Biden.
Together, these steps attack what economists call the mobility cost share of inflation, where transportation and energy combined make up roughly 18 to 20% of a typical family’s budget. Lower fuel, insurance, and vehicle costs mean lower prices at the store, cheaper commutes, and more breathing room for working people.
Wages and productivity: The other half of affordability
Let’s look now at the other half of the affordability equation. The rule here is simple: if real, inflation-adjusted wages rise faster than prices, purchasing power increases — and with it, affordability.
On this front, Trump is the undisputed king. During his first term, real median weekly earnings for full-time workers rose by roughly 8%, the fastest sustained gain in modern history. In contrast, under Biden, real wages fell about 3% between 2021 and 2023 as millions of illegal immigrants flooded the labor market and suppressed wages and inflation raced ahead of paychecks — an unmistakable Biden inflation tax that stripped working citizens and families of their purchasing power.
If the past is prologue, President Trump’s real-wage record tells you exactly what comes next. To boost investment, productivity, and long-term wage growth, he has set in motion a suite of policies designed to lift real earnings without rekindling inflation. Higher productivity means businesses can afford to pay workers more while keeping prices stable.
Central to this push is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which eliminates federal tax on tips and overtime pay — instantly increasing take-home income for service and hourly workers without triggering price hikes. It restores 100% expensing for machinery, housing, and equipment, encouraging the kind of investment that raises output per worker.
President Trump’s regulatory reform agenda targets the hidden costs that smother productivity and wages. His administration is dismantling Biden-era restrictions on domestic energy production; streamlining manufacturing and infrastructure permitting; reversing costly environmental, social, and governance mandates; and cutting through the bureaucratic red tape that traps billions of dollars in compliance overhead. Every hour and dollar freed from paperwork goes back into expansion, hiring, and paychecks.
And Trump’s energy policy ties it all together. “Drill, baby, drill” keeps oil and natural gas prices low, reducing production and transportation costs across the economy. That, in turn, raises real wages by stretching every dollar earned — at the pump, in the factory, and at the grocery store.
This is the heart of Trumpnomics: affordability and prosperity built on production, not price controls. As productivity climbs and inflation cools, people will finally see real, sustained gains in purchasing power — something the Biden years promised but never delivered.
The verdict: A tale of two policy agendas
Ultimately, the fight against inflation and for affordability is a tale of two policy agendas.
Biden’s economic legacy is one of reckless stimulus and regulatory suffocation. He flooded the economy with trillions in deficit spending, declared war on domestic energy, and unleashed an avalanche of costly rules that strangled production. He subsidized idleness through endless transfer payments, fueled housing inflation with credit expansion, punished small businesses with higher taxes and mandates, and allowed an open-border immigration surge that drove up rents and healthcare costs.
Rather than reform the structural flaws of Obamacare that drive medical inflation, Biden perpetuated its failures — pouring billions more into subsidies that enriched insurers and hospital conglomerates while doing little to lower costs for patients. The result: the most punishing inflation in half a century and a sustained erosion of real living standards not seen since the Jimmy Carter administration.
Trump’s agenda is the mirror opposite. He wants interest rates cut responsibly. He is expanding supply — housing, energy, food, and manufacturing — rather than suppressing demand. He is lowering taxes on work, eliminating the federal tax on tips and overtime, restoring full expensing to unleash investment, and dismantling the regulatory maze that stifles growth. His energy renaissance is bringing down fuel and fertilizer costs. His healthcare and housing reforms target the middlemen and bottlenecks that inflate prices. In short, Trump is fighting inflation at its roots, on the supply side, while Biden simply fed it from the demand side.
TRUMP SHIFTS ON ECONOMY TO ‘WE FEEL YOUR PAIN’
But this will take time. The inflation lags built into the system are long, and the data still reflect the excesses of the last administration. Those impatient, or prone to grumble within Trump’s own base, should recall what happened in 1982, when President Ronald Reagan inherited double-digit inflation from Carter. Reagan’s supply-side reforms were working, but the pain was real and political. By the fall of 1982, inflation had begun to cool, but unemployment had climbed above 10%, mortgage rates topped 15%, and small businesses were going under by the thousands. Families felt the squeeze long before the recovery took hold. Voters took their anger to the polls, and Republicans shed seats in the House, handing Democrats a bigger majority that locked Washington into two years of gridlock. Yet once the correction ran its course, the economy surged, Reagan won a 49-state landslide in 1984, and the boom that followed became one of the strongest and most enduring in U.S. history.
Trump begins from a far stronger position, light years ahead of where Reagan was in 1982, with inflation already trending down, energy prices stabilizing, and real wages beginning to rise. But the challenge remains formidable. The damage left by Biden’s policies runs deep, unwinding it will be a tough slog before the full benefits of Trump’s reforms take hold, and the pain is real. Yet, as history proved with Reagan, staying the course pays off — the correction gives way to expansion, and the recovery becomes the boom.
Peter Navarro is the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Follow him at www.peternavarro.com.