President Donald Trump plans to travel to Pennsylvania on Tuesday to highlight his efforts to reduce inflation even as fears mount about a worsening job market and amid signs that Americans are still feeling squeezed by high prices.
A White House official said Trump would be making the trip to discuss ending the inflation crisis that he says was inherited from his predecessor, Joe Biden. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the trip has not been formally announced. It was not immediately clear where in Pennsylvania Trump would be visiting.
Last month’s off-year elections showed a shift away from Republicans as public concerns about affordability persist. White House officials said afterward that Trump—who has done relatively few events domestically—would put a greater emphasis on talking directly to the public about his economic policies.
The president has said that any affordability worries are part of a Democratic “hoax” and that people simply need to hear his perspective to change their minds—an approach also embraced by Biden, who in early 2024 went to the Pennsylvania borough of Emmaus to take credit for economic improvements after inflation spiked in 2022.
The trip hints at the dilemma faced by Trump. He wants to take credit for rewiring the U.S. economy with his large tariff hikes and extension of income tax cuts, but he also continues to blame Biden for the increase nationwide in inflation rates that occurred this year during his own presidency. Overall, inflation is tracking at 3% annually, up from 2.3% in April when Trump rolled out a sweeping set of import taxes.
“We fixed inflation, and we fixed almost everything,” Trump said at Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting. He called affordability “a hoax” that was “started by the Democrats who caused the problem of pricing.”
Trump won Pennsylvania narrowly last year with 50.4%, besting Democrat Kamala Harris by roughly 120,000 votes. The win was part of a broader sweep in battleground states that helped return him to the White House after his 2020 loss.
AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of voters in the 2024 election, found that 7 in 10 Pennsylvania voters were “very concerned” about the cost of food and groceries. Roughly half expressed the same degree of worry over healthcare costs and the price of gasoline.
While Trump can point to a decline in gasoline prices, he’s now facing inflationary pressures on utilities and a massive increase in insurance premiums for people who get their health care through the Affordable Care Act.
Pennsylvanians who buy their own health insurance coverage are likely to see their costs increase on average by 21.5% because of the expiration of tax credits tied to the Affordable Care Act, the state said in October.
Pennsylvania has yet to see the boom that Trump promised would instantly happen with his return to the White House.
The state has largely preserved its Biden-era job growth under Trump, but its unemployment rate has risen to 4%, from 3.6%, over the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There has been an increase of roughly 24,000 people who say they’re unemployed.
Annual inflation in the Philadelphia area is 3.3%, roughly the same as last year.
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s Beige Book in November documented an economy in decline, saying that hiring has flattened, warehouse workers are getting fewer hours on the job, inflationary pressures are coming from tariffs, and sales of existing homes are decreasing. Separately, the regional Fed branch’s manufacturing survey last month showed that factory activity weakened.
The news outlet Axios first reported Trump’s plans to travel to Pennsylvania.
—By Josh Boak, Associated Press