After newly released Consumer Price Index figures showed that the year-over-year inflation rate was 3.8% in April, the highest in nearly three years, President Donald Trump tried to reassure Americans about rising prices – in part by falsely claiming the inflation rate was just 1.7% prior to the war with Iran.
“If you go back to just before the war, for the last three months, inflation was at 1.7%,” Trump said Tuesday. Later in his comments to reporters, he said that “if you go from before, just before the war, we were, for the last three months, 1.7%, and now what you have is – as soon as this war is over, you’re going to see inflation go down to probably 1.5%.”
In reality, the inflation rate was not 1.7% in any of the three months before the war.
The year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index was 2.7% in November 2025, 2.7% in December 2025 and 2.4% in January 2026. The rate was 2.4% again in February 2026, for which nearly all the data was collected before the war that began on the last day of the month. It has not been as low as 1.7% since early 2021, amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, also wasn’t at 1.7% in any of these pre-war months. It was 2.8% in November 2025, 2.9% in both of December 2025 and January 2026, and 2.8% in February 2026. It jumped to 3.5% in March 2026; the April 2026 data hasn’t been released yet.
Trump has often spoken of core inflation, which...
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