Inflation is stuck. Can Trump unstick it?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Inflation played a starring role in last month’s election, and part of Donald Trump ’s pitch was that he would cool things off. “I won on groceries," the president-elect said in an interview Sunday on “Meet the Press." In his nomination-acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July, Trump said he would “end the devastating inflation crisis immediately." Despite his pledge to lower inflation, if Trump follows through on some of his tariff and immigration plans , economists worry he might do just the opposite .

The pace of inflation had significantly cooled before the election. But anger hasn’t subsided, and costs are far higher than they were before the pandemic. On Wednesday, new inflation numbers suggested that progress on driving down rising costs had stalled.

Prices for groceries, for example, were up 1.6% from a year earlier in November. But they were up 27% from February 2020. Overall consumer prices were up 2.7% in November from a year earlier, a far cry from the 9.1% notched in 2022 but still a tad higher than the month before.

New data Thursday showed that a month-over-month change in producer prices was more than economists had expected . Any rise, even a small one, comes on top of already-high prices vexing Americans. What can Trump do? The problem presidents face with inflation is that there is only so much they really can do to cool it off.

Bringing overall prices down would be even harder— and unwelcome . Falling prices, or deflation, would make it harder for borrowers to repay their loans, stifling the economy. Many of the measures that economists might prescribe to reduce inflation, such as increasing innovation, reducing regulatory burdens or boosting