You Don’t Need an Economist to Know You’re Being Lied To — Just Look at Your Grocery Bill

I can only imagine how miserable it must be to work for Donald Trump when the thing you’re paid to lie about isn’t some abstract Wall Street metric or a cherry-picked stock chart, but the one number every single American can verify in five minutes: the grocery bill.

People go to the store. They buy eggs. They buy meat. They buy groceries — yes, that old-fashioned word. And they know they’re paying more than they used to. That’s inflation. You don’t need an economist to tell you that. You need a receipt.

Yet this week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt returned to the role she was hired for: professional denier. And no, she doesn’t deserve sympathy. The job is impossible not because the truth is complicated, but because she’s being asked to talk people out of their lived experience.

Lying About What People Can See

At a press briefing, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins did what journalism is supposed to do — she pressed Leavitt on inflation, rising grocery prices, and the basic reality that Americans are not stupid. They know when they’re being lied to by the president of the United States and the loyal courtiers sent out to insist everything is fine.

Leavitt’s defense rested on a familiar con: a carefully selected average inflation number — 2.5% — spread across Trump’s entire return to office. It’s a padded statistic designed to blur what people feel right now.

What she didn’t say is that inflation didn’t truly re-accelerate until after Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day,” when he imposed destructive tariffs that the world hates, American consumers hate, and only Trump’s paid applause squad pretends to love.

This isn’t economic theory. It’s arithmetic.

The Tariff Reality

Before those tariffs took effect, inflation was roughly where it stood when Biden left office. After Trump lit the match, prices climbed again. Month-by-month data — not smoothed, not averaged, not politically sanded down — makes that clear.

Leavitt wasn’t explaining economics. She was laundering old data to hide current pain.

And when the script fell apart, she defaulted to grievance: accusing the press of bias, claiming reporters ignored inflation under Biden, and insisting that “everything I’m telling you is true” — even as the numbers contradicted her in real time.

That’s not confidence. That’s panic.

We’ve Seen This Before

Was inflation bad during COVID? Of course it was. Supply chains collapsed. Corporations seized the opportunity for blatant price-gouging — shrinking cereal boxes, thinner toilet paper rolls, higher prices everywhere — profiteering disguised as “market forces” during a global disaster.

Everyone lived through it. Everyone paid for it. No spin required.

What’s happening now is different. This is inflation driven by policy — tariffs that raise costs across the economy — and then denied by people whose only job is to protect Trump from accountability.

This entire exercise exists for one reason: to shield the fragile ego of a man who doesn’t understand economics, governance, or policy, but understands grifting down to the bone.

When Journalism Actually Shows Up

Then something rare happened.

CNN followed up. Line by line. Number by number. Receipt by receipt. And the defense collapsed.

Fact-checkers laid out the reality plainly: inflation was 3% when Trump returned to office in January. It was still 3% in September — the most recent month of available data. The “2.5%” figure Leavitt kept repeating was not current inflation. It was an average across months chosen for political convenience.

That’s journalism doing its job.

And it mattered — especially at a time when major media institutions are under pressure to soften coverage, avoid confrontation, and turn newsrooms into polite distribution centers for power. With corporate takeovers looming and outlets drifting toward “Fox News Lite,” real reporting is increasingly treated as a liability.

Which makes it all the more notable that this pushback came from Kaitlan Collins — someone who once worked at the Daily Caller, of all places. Credit where it’s due.

You Can’t Gaslight a Grocery Store

Trump can stand in the Oval Office and claim, “We have the greatest economy in history.” His press secretary can wave averages and accuse reporters of bad faith. None of it changes the checkout total blinking back at Americans every week.

The numbers don’t care about talking points.
And neither do the people buying groceries.

You can spin charts.
You can blame the media.
You can attack journalists.

But you can’t gaslight a grocery store.

And that’s why this lie is unraveling — not because critics are ideological, but because reality is stubborn.