Donald Trump was in Montana recently, standing in front of a crowd and speaking about the economy with a lot of confidence. "We're richer now," he told them. "We don't have inflation." For many Americans sitting in that crowd, and many more watching from home, those words may have sounded strange. Anyone who has filled up a car tank or paid a grocery bill in the last one year knows that prices have not been staying still.
So who is right? As the US midterm elections in November get closer, the economy has become the big issue on people's minds. A new analysis by the Guardian, written by Lauren Aratani, goes through the data to show what has really happened since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. The picture is not all bad, but it is not all good either.
Start with inflation, which simply means how fast prices are rising. It hit a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022, after the pandemic stimulus money found its way into people's pockets and then into prices. When Trump started his second term in January 2025, inflation had already cooled to about 3%. By April that year it had dropped to 2.3%, the lowest since 2021. For a while, things looked good.
Then the tariffs came. Trump placed taxes on almost everything the United States imports from other countries, and prices started climbing again. Inflation went back up to 3% in September 2025. Later, many of those tariffs were paused and some were ruled illegal by the courts, and prices eased again. By January and February 2026, inflation was back down to 2.4%. Trump's supporters can point to that stretch as proof that his economic plan was working.
Then came the war with Iran, which began on 28 February 2026. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow sea route that carries roughly a fifth of the world's oil, was blocked soon after. Oil prices shot up around the world, and the US felt it too. Inflation rose to 4.2% in May and has stayed above 3.4% since then. It has not been this high since 2023, and it has been almost six years since Americans last saw inflation sitting at a comfortable 2%.
Petrol is where most people feel the pain. The average price of gas in the US was $4.32 a gallon in mid-October, according to the American Automobile Association, which is about $1.30 more than a year ago. In a Harris poll done for the Guardian, 83% of Americans said high gas prices were eating into their money. Even in Texas, a big oil-producing state, a gallon now costs $3.81, up from $2.64 last year. In California, which gets much of its fuel from overseas, drivers are paying $6.21 a gallon.
For those of us in Kenya, none of this is strange. When global oil prices go up, the pump prices in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu go up too, and the matatu fares and the cost of food follow soon after. Every Kenyan household that has sat down to do the monthly budget after a fuel increase understands exactly what Americans are going through right now.
The job market tells another part of the story. In 2025, the US economy added only about 181,000 new jobs in total. In 2024, the figure was 2.2 million. Some months were strong, others were weak, and the numbers have bounced around a lot. Employers are being careful. Harsher immigration rules, uncertainty around tariffs, and more expensive supplies have all slowed hiring. The unemployment rate, though, has stayed low at just over 4%. Economists have a name for this: a "low-hire, low-fire" economy, where companies are neither hiring many new people nor firing many existing ones.
Then there is the stock market, which has been doing very well. The S&P 500, a major index of big American companies, has climbed steadily since Trump took office, bouncing back from the drops that came with his first tariff announcement and the early days of the Iran war. Most economists say the biggest reason is artificial intelligence. Tech companies are pouring billions of dollars into data centres and the special chips needed to run AI. This means that a small group of investors and wealthy households have seen their wealth grow, even while many ordinary workers feel squeezed.
This is the heart of the problem for Trump going into the midterms. A Harris poll for the Guardian found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the country is already in a recession, including some Republicans. Many say higher prices have been their biggest headache, and a third said one surprise bill could be enough to push them into financial trouble. Trump's team will argue that the economy is strong and that the war is a temporary shock. Voters, who went to the polls in 2024 on promises of lower prices, will have their own view when they cast their ballots.
So was Trump right? Partly, yes. Inflation was at 2.3% in April 2025 and the stock market has done well. But saying "we don't have inflation" when the official rate is above 3.4% and petrol costs more than $4 a gallon is hard for most people to believe. The honest answer is that the economy has gone up and down, and the ride has been bumpy for ordinary people.
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