President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings on inflation have him joining predecessors Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter in a fraternity of failure, CNN’s chief data analyst declared Wednesday.
Trump “hit rock bottom” in May when an Ipsos poll showed him 50 percentage points underwater on the crucial economic issue, a precipitous decline from the minus-6 points he notched in January 2025, Harry Enten said.
In June, Trump’s inflation disapproval rating eased slightly, but not enough to make a difference, Enten said.
“Did he improve? Yeah. Maybe a tiny, tiny bit at minus-47 points,” Enten said during a segment posted online by Mediaite. “But the bottom line is the long-term trend for Donald Trump’s net approval rating on inflation is down, down, down.”
Enten said that Trump’s net approval rating on inflation was “historically bad at this point in a presidency” and that it “takes the cake” when compared to those of Biden and Carter, who were at minus-43 and minus-44.
“You do not want to be — if you’re Donald John Trump — in the brotherhood with Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter on inflation, because inflation ruined their presidencies,” he said.
In a statement to The Independent, White House spokesman Kush Desai said, “President Trump has always been clear about the fact that oil and gas prices — and thus overall inflation — will rapidly drop as soon as the Iran situation is resolved.”
Enten also said Trump’s poll numbers on inflation were what “Republicans do not want to see going into a midterm election.”
“Even if this slightly lower number holds, you can bet that Republicans would be in for a whole heck of a lot of pain come November,” he said, referring to Trump’s net approval rating of minus-47 points.
On Tuesday, the Labor Department said inflation slowed slightly in June, with consumer prices dropping 0.4 percent from May for the largest monthly decline in four years.
The annual inflation rate also declined to 3.5 percent, down from 4.2 percent in May and lower than the 3.8 percent expected by analysts polled by The Wall Street Journal.
But that rate remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target, and The Journal said inflation appeared likely to rise in July due to the recent increase in oil prices following the resumption of Trump’s war against Iran.
“I wouldn’t bet on these more modest inflation readings continuing for the remainder of the year,” Mike Reid, head of U.S. economics at RBC Capital Markets, told The Journal.
On Tuesday, Trump falsely claimed that he’d improved the inflation he “inherited” from Biden, who left office in January 2025, when the annual rate was 3 percent.
Trump also falsely claimed that Biden left him with inflation that was “the worst in the history of our country,” saying: “He might have been sleepy, but boy could he create inflation like nobody.”
Under Biden, the annual inflation rate hit a high of 9.1 percent in June 2022, marking the largest 12-month increase since February 1981, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The February 1981 annual rate was 11.4 percent, after falling from 14.8 percent in March 1980, according to the U.S. Inflation Calculator website. Those figures are all easily eclipsed by the March 1947 annual rate of 19.7 percent, which is the highest in modern American history.
