“The president is trying to gaslight Americans into believing that everything is fine.”
Customers scan groceries at a Walmart Supercenter self-checkout area in Doral, Florida on October 10, 2025.
(Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Brad Reed
Dec 02, 2025
C0MMON DREAMS
President Donald Trump on Tuesday blew off US voters’ concerns about affordability, even as polls show most voters blame him for increasing prices on staple goods.
At the start of a Cabinet meeting, Trump falsely claimed that electricity prices are coming down, despite the fact that Americans across the country are struggling with utility bills being driven higher in large part by energy-devouring artificial intelligence data centers.
The president then claimed more broadly that voter concerns about increased costs were all figments of their imaginations.
“The word ‘affordability’ is a Democrat scam,” Trump declared. “They say it and they go onto the next subject, and everyone thinks, ‘Oh they had lower prices.’ No, they had the worst inflation in the history of our country. Now, some people will correct me, because they always love to correct me, even though I’m right about everything. But some people like to correct me, and they say, ‘48 years.’ I say it’s not 48 years, it’s much more, but they say it’s the worst inflation we’ve had in 48 years, I’d say, ever.”
Later in the Cabinet meeting, a reporter asked Trump if he believed voters were growing “impatient” with his policies, which have not produced the kind of broad-based decline in prices he once promised.
Trump, however, doubled down.
“I think they’re getting fake news from guys like you,” he said. “Look, affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats, who caused the problem of pricing.”
The president’s claims about affordability being a “scam” issue are at odds with what US voters are telling pollsters, however.
A Yahoo/YouGov poll released late last month, for instance, found 49% of Americans say that Trump’s policies have done more to raise prices in the last year, compared with just 24% who say that he’s lowered their costs. The survey also found voters are more likely to blame Trump for higher prices than they are to blame former President Joe Biden.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump routinely campaigned on affordability and vowed to start lowering the cost of groceries starting on the very first day of his presidency. Since then, however, Trump has slapped heavy tariffs on a wide range of imported goods, which economists say have led to further price increases.
Many Democrats were quick to pounce on the president declaring affordability a “scam.”
“There you have it folks,” wrote Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.) on X. “From ‘I will lower prices on Day 1’ to this.”
Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) argued that Trump was trying to make Americans’ economic anxieties disappear by telling them not to believe their own bank balances.
“The president is trying to gaslight Americans into believing that everything is fine,” he observed. “The reality is millions of Americans are worried about their checking accounts and whether they can put food on the table, afford healthcare, and pay their bills.”
Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) said that Trump’s dismissal of voters’ affordability worries are “easy to say when you are a billionaire who has never had to choose between groceries and the light bill.”
“Working families in Texas know the real scam is his tariffs, his higher premiums, and his complete failure to offer any plan to address the housing crisis or actually lower prices,” Garcia added.
Trump Is Lying About Grocery Prices; What Else?
You cannot trust someone who says things you know from your own experience to be false.
People shop at Sabor Tropical Supermarket in Miami Beach, Florida.
(Photo by Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Mitchell Zimmerman
Dec 02, 2025
You cannot trust someone who says things you know from your own experience to be false.
People shop at Sabor Tropical Supermarket in Miami Beach, Florida.
(Photo by Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Mitchell Zimmerman
Dec 02, 2025
Common Dreams
Remember the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
President Donald Trump has fooled too many people too many times—many more than twice. Perhaps many people are ready to believe anything Trump says because he attacks people who they enjoy seeing targeted. But what if this time it is people like us who are actually the targets of Trump’s attacks?
What else can you make of it when Donald Trump tells flagrant falsehoods about something important to our families’ well-being: The fact that rising prices are eating up our income? What should you make of it when Donald Trump denies something you know to be true from your own experience?
In 2024 Trump promised voters that when he was elected, “Inflation will vanish completely.” He even vowed, further, that “prices will come down, and they’ll come down fast, with everything.” “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”
It’s time to ask ourselves: Who’s running the con job? And what else has Donald Trump been saying that just ain’t so?
It has been nearly a year. Prices have not gone down. Everyone knows this. But Donald Trump refuses to admit it.
On October 31, Trump was interviewed for the CBS News’ program “60 Minutes.” When reporter Norah O’Donnell pointed to the fact that “grocery prices are up,” Trump blew up.
“No, you’re wrong,” he insisted. “Right now they’re going down... Inflation, I’ve already taken care of… We have no inflation. We have no inflation.”
Trump asserted prices have already dropped. “Every price is down,” he said in early November. “Everything is way down.” Gasoline prices have “plummeted” and “we’re at almost $2 for gasoline.”
Really? At a gas pump near you? Here in the real world, on Thanksgiving weekend, the national average gas price was $3 a gallon.
“Everything” is certainly not “way down.” Prices are obviously going up again.
You are not alone if you see a disconnect between Trump’s pontificating and our reality.
On November 19, Fox News released a poll on the cost of living. Eight-five percent of Americans say they are paying more for groceries than last year. Four out of five say the cost of utilities has gone up. Two-thirds say their healthcare expenses and their housing expenses have increased. “Everything is” not “way down.”
Nope. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the jump in food and other prices for the first nine months of Trump’s presidency. (Beef up 13%. Oranges up 15%. Electricity 7%. Natural gas 6%. Gasoline 6%.)
The US Department of Agriculture certainly did not tell Trump that produce prices are “way down.” The USDA said food prices would “rise faster than the historical average rate of growth” in 2025—and projected they would continue to rise nearly as fast in 2026.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for September 2025 (the latest month for which data is now available) shows prices 3% higher than one year ago.
No one misinformed President Trump. He invented his own lies.
Just making things up that sound good is second nature to Donald Trump. Remember he was going to make Mexico pay for the wall? Cap credit card interest rates at 10%? Make in-vitro fertilization treatment free? End the Ukraine war on Day One? (Trump now claims that was “said in jest.” Ending a war is a joke?) Provide a tax credit for family caregivers? (Forgotten on Day One, and certainly when Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave the richest 1% of Americans a $75,000 tax break!)
But it takes a special kind of chutzpah to tell people who see their grocery prices going up that their grocery prices are going down. Trump, like one of the Marx Brothers in a 1933 movie, is saying, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
If you believe your own eyes about the prices you see in the supermarket and on your utility bill, Trump thinks you’re a sucker—taken in by “a con job by the Democrats.”
It’s time to ask ourselves: Who’s running the con job? And what else has Donald Trump been saying that just ain’t so?
Here’s one easy example: Who is paying the tariffs on the things you buy that come from overseas?
Donald Trump told voters over and over during the 2024 campaign that they would not be paying for tariffs. Tariffs are “a tax on another country,” Trump insisted. “It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”
That was a lie. Ask any business person. Tariffs are a sales tax that US importers are paying, and since they are passing the expense on in higher prices, you are bearing the expense. They are part of the reason prices are going up.
Trump recently admitted the lie. In response to the soaring prices of tariff-burdened foods like coffee, tea, and bananas (coffee is up 20%), Trump recently cut those tariffs, saying that would bring down coffee prices “in a very short period of time.” The only way a tariff cut can bring down prices is when tariffs were the reason prices went up in the first place.
Sometimes Trump’s lies are so obvious it’s hard to believe even MAGA supporters take them seriously. Consider the lie about renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
“I called the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America,” Trump explained, “because to me, it was always the Gulf of America. We have 92% of the frontage. Why isn’t it the Gulf of America?”
Let’s look at the map:
The black line shows US coastal frontage from Texas to Florida. The red line shows the rest of the Gulf’s coastal frontage, along Mexico and part of Cuba. Does it look to you like the black line is 92% of all the shoreline? No one could claim that with a straight face. Except Donald Trump. He thinks Americans are too dumb to notice his lies.
Here is a more consequential lie for the 83 million people—about 1 in 5 Americans—who rely on Medicaid for comprehensive coverage of health and long-term care. What Trump called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” made savage cuts in the Medicaid program, based on One Big Ugly Lie.
Trump said he was going to leave Medicaid alone. “We’re not doing any cutting of anything meaningful,” he said. “We’re not changing Medicaid.” Immediately after his Big Beautiful Bill was passed, Trump repeated the claim that “we’re not going to touch” Medicaid.
False. Trump’s bill will, over a 10 year period, hack $1 trillion off Medicaid funding, by making it more difficult for individuals to qualify or remain qualified for Medicaid, reducing benefit and reimbursement rates, and other changes. Over 14 million people will lose health coverage.
The American Medical Association condemned the bill:
Care will be less accessible, and patients may simply forego seeing their physician because the lifelines of Medicaid and CHIP [the Child Health Insurance Program] are severed… This bill will make patients sicker… Acute, treatable illnesses will turn into life-threatening or costly chronic conditions.
About $1 trillion taken from Medicaid is just about the right amount to offset the One Big Beautiful Bill’s $1 trillion tax gift to the top 1% of Americans. These are people who make more than $1,149,000 each year. They will get a much-needed $75,400 tax break next year.
Finally, let’s look at Trump’s lies about undocumented immigrants. He wants to deport over 10 million people, an action that Trump’s own Labor Department has said is already making food shortages and increased agricultural prices likely, and is impacting home construction, meat packing, and the availability of home health aides.
Trump seeks to justify the disruption and downright cruelty by saying he’s only deporting “the worst of the worst.” But there aren’t millions of criminals among the immigrants who came to America without proper authorization. They came seeking a better life or desperate to escape brutal gang violence in their homelands, and the overwhelming majority are law-abiding and hardworking.
Even Fox News reports that the “worst of the worst” claim is false: “The majority of people currently detained by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] have no criminal convictions. Of those who do, relatively few have been convicted of high-level crimes.”
A US government-funded study confirmed the point, finding that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”
Common sense tells us Trump is lying. ICE is not seizing people for deportation by the millions by targeting particular individuals found guilty of serious crimes. By the US government’s own explanation in court, ICE “contact teams” try to find undocumented immigrants by looking for individuals who have a Spanish accent or look Hispanic and who are found in locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, and agricultural sites.
Remember the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
President Donald Trump has fooled too many people too many times—many more than twice. Perhaps many people are ready to believe anything Trump says because he attacks people who they enjoy seeing targeted. But what if this time it is people like us who are actually the targets of Trump’s attacks?
What else can you make of it when Donald Trump tells flagrant falsehoods about something important to our families’ well-being: The fact that rising prices are eating up our income? What should you make of it when Donald Trump denies something you know to be true from your own experience?
In 2024 Trump promised voters that when he was elected, “Inflation will vanish completely.” He even vowed, further, that “prices will come down, and they’ll come down fast, with everything.” “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”
It’s time to ask ourselves: Who’s running the con job? And what else has Donald Trump been saying that just ain’t so?
It has been nearly a year. Prices have not gone down. Everyone knows this. But Donald Trump refuses to admit it.
On October 31, Trump was interviewed for the CBS News’ program “60 Minutes.” When reporter Norah O’Donnell pointed to the fact that “grocery prices are up,” Trump blew up.
“No, you’re wrong,” he insisted. “Right now they’re going down... Inflation, I’ve already taken care of… We have no inflation. We have no inflation.”
Trump asserted prices have already dropped. “Every price is down,” he said in early November. “Everything is way down.” Gasoline prices have “plummeted” and “we’re at almost $2 for gasoline.”
Really? At a gas pump near you? Here in the real world, on Thanksgiving weekend, the national average gas price was $3 a gallon.
“Everything” is certainly not “way down.” Prices are obviously going up again.
You are not alone if you see a disconnect between Trump’s pontificating and our reality.
On November 19, Fox News released a poll on the cost of living. Eight-five percent of Americans say they are paying more for groceries than last year. Four out of five say the cost of utilities has gone up. Two-thirds say their healthcare expenses and their housing expenses have increased. “Everything is” not “way down.”
Nope. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the jump in food and other prices for the first nine months of Trump’s presidency. (Beef up 13%. Oranges up 15%. Electricity 7%. Natural gas 6%. Gasoline 6%.)
The US Department of Agriculture certainly did not tell Trump that produce prices are “way down.” The USDA said food prices would “rise faster than the historical average rate of growth” in 2025—and projected they would continue to rise nearly as fast in 2026.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for September 2025 (the latest month for which data is now available) shows prices 3% higher than one year ago.
No one misinformed President Trump. He invented his own lies.
Just making things up that sound good is second nature to Donald Trump. Remember he was going to make Mexico pay for the wall? Cap credit card interest rates at 10%? Make in-vitro fertilization treatment free? End the Ukraine war on Day One? (Trump now claims that was “said in jest.” Ending a war is a joke?) Provide a tax credit for family caregivers? (Forgotten on Day One, and certainly when Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave the richest 1% of Americans a $75,000 tax break!)
But it takes a special kind of chutzpah to tell people who see their grocery prices going up that their grocery prices are going down. Trump, like one of the Marx Brothers in a 1933 movie, is saying, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
If you believe your own eyes about the prices you see in the supermarket and on your utility bill, Trump thinks you’re a sucker—taken in by “a con job by the Democrats.”
It’s time to ask ourselves: Who’s running the con job? And what else has Donald Trump been saying that just ain’t so?
Here’s one easy example: Who is paying the tariffs on the things you buy that come from overseas?
Donald Trump told voters over and over during the 2024 campaign that they would not be paying for tariffs. Tariffs are “a tax on another country,” Trump insisted. “It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”
That was a lie. Ask any business person. Tariffs are a sales tax that US importers are paying, and since they are passing the expense on in higher prices, you are bearing the expense. They are part of the reason prices are going up.
Trump recently admitted the lie. In response to the soaring prices of tariff-burdened foods like coffee, tea, and bananas (coffee is up 20%), Trump recently cut those tariffs, saying that would bring down coffee prices “in a very short period of time.” The only way a tariff cut can bring down prices is when tariffs were the reason prices went up in the first place.
Sometimes Trump’s lies are so obvious it’s hard to believe even MAGA supporters take them seriously. Consider the lie about renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
“I called the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America,” Trump explained, “because to me, it was always the Gulf of America. We have 92% of the frontage. Why isn’t it the Gulf of America?”
Let’s look at the map:
The black line shows US coastal frontage from Texas to Florida. The red line shows the rest of the Gulf’s coastal frontage, along Mexico and part of Cuba. Does it look to you like the black line is 92% of all the shoreline? No one could claim that with a straight face. Except Donald Trump. He thinks Americans are too dumb to notice his lies.
Here is a more consequential lie for the 83 million people—about 1 in 5 Americans—who rely on Medicaid for comprehensive coverage of health and long-term care. What Trump called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” made savage cuts in the Medicaid program, based on One Big Ugly Lie.
Trump said he was going to leave Medicaid alone. “We’re not doing any cutting of anything meaningful,” he said. “We’re not changing Medicaid.” Immediately after his Big Beautiful Bill was passed, Trump repeated the claim that “we’re not going to touch” Medicaid.
False. Trump’s bill will, over a 10 year period, hack $1 trillion off Medicaid funding, by making it more difficult for individuals to qualify or remain qualified for Medicaid, reducing benefit and reimbursement rates, and other changes. Over 14 million people will lose health coverage.
The American Medical Association condemned the bill:
Care will be less accessible, and patients may simply forego seeing their physician because the lifelines of Medicaid and CHIP [the Child Health Insurance Program] are severed… This bill will make patients sicker… Acute, treatable illnesses will turn into life-threatening or costly chronic conditions.
About $1 trillion taken from Medicaid is just about the right amount to offset the One Big Beautiful Bill’s $1 trillion tax gift to the top 1% of Americans. These are people who make more than $1,149,000 each year. They will get a much-needed $75,400 tax break next year.
Finally, let’s look at Trump’s lies about undocumented immigrants. He wants to deport over 10 million people, an action that Trump’s own Labor Department has said is already making food shortages and increased agricultural prices likely, and is impacting home construction, meat packing, and the availability of home health aides.
Trump seeks to justify the disruption and downright cruelty by saying he’s only deporting “the worst of the worst.” But there aren’t millions of criminals among the immigrants who came to America without proper authorization. They came seeking a better life or desperate to escape brutal gang violence in their homelands, and the overwhelming majority are law-abiding and hardworking.
Even Fox News reports that the “worst of the worst” claim is false: “The majority of people currently detained by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] have no criminal convictions. Of those who do, relatively few have been convicted of high-level crimes.”
A US government-funded study confirmed the point, finding that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”
Common sense tells us Trump is lying. ICE is not seizing people for deportation by the millions by targeting particular individuals found guilty of serious crimes. By the US government’s own explanation in court, ICE “contact teams” try to find undocumented immigrants by looking for individuals who have a Spanish accent or look Hispanic and who are found in locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, and agricultural sites.
Enrique Lozano’s ice cream cart was left behind after ICE grabbed him.
ICE’s targets are not the worst of the worst. In Culver City they seized a beloved ice cream man. Law-abiding young people, who were brought here as small children, are being targeted when they are about to graduate from high school. Day laborers at Home Depot. Shoppers in a Walmart parking lot. Patients in a hospital.
Trump’s lies about immigrants are shameful.
It would take an encyclopedia to list and correct all the lies Donald Trump has told. When you encounter Trump’s pronouncements on matters such as whether federal troops are needed in our cities—whether crime is out of control—whether all third-world immigrants are a threat—whether voter fraud is a real problem—whether civil rights laws discriminate against white people—whether the 2020 election was stolen from Trump—or whether anything Donald Trump does not like to hear must be fake news, ask yourself: Are groceries cheaper?
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Mitchell Zimmerman
Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller "Mississippi Reckoning" (2019).
Full Bio >
ICE’s targets are not the worst of the worst. In Culver City they seized a beloved ice cream man. Law-abiding young people, who were brought here as small children, are being targeted when they are about to graduate from high school. Day laborers at Home Depot. Shoppers in a Walmart parking lot. Patients in a hospital.
Trump’s lies about immigrants are shameful.
It would take an encyclopedia to list and correct all the lies Donald Trump has told. When you encounter Trump’s pronouncements on matters such as whether federal troops are needed in our cities—whether crime is out of control—whether all third-world immigrants are a threat—whether voter fraud is a real problem—whether civil rights laws discriminate against white people—whether the 2020 election was stolen from Trump—or whether anything Donald Trump does not like to hear must be fake news, ask yourself: Are groceries cheaper?
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Mitchell Zimmerman
Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller "Mississippi Reckoning" (2019).
Full Bio >
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