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| - This image showed a fake post that never appeared on Trump's Truth Social page. Even so, he genuinely and repeatedly made similar promises during his campaign.
In the weeks following U.S. President Donald Trump's second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, online users shared a purported screenshot of a Truth Social post dated Oct. 26, 2024, in which Trump promised to immediately lower the prices of eggs and gasoline upon taking office:
EGGS & GAS PRICES - OUT OF CONTROL!!! Crooked Joe and the radical left DESTROYED affordability for hardworking Americans. It's a TOTAL SCAM! On DAY ONE, I'll SLASH prices—so fast it'll make their heads spin. Big Oil? Big Farms? They'll listen to ME, not lobbyists. NO MORE RIPOFFS!!! MAGA!!!
However, we scrolled back in Trump's Truth Social posts to late October and located no such post, leading us to determine someone else created the image as a fake. The oldest posts featuring the screenshot dated to February 2025. If the purported Trump post had genuinely existed, other posts featuring screenshots of it would have appeared in November, December and January. Further, a website named Trump's Truth, which serves as an archive of Trump's Truth Social activity, displayed no record of the post. Substack writer Walt Wang published some of these same details in his own fact-check article.
We performed a reverse-image search for the image and located numerous users sharing the fake screenshot on Facebook, iFunny, Reddit and X. Some of the posts displayed with yellow highlighting around the text for "EGGS & GAS PRICES" and "On DAY ONE, I'll SLASH prices," for example in a Feb. 12 Reddit post on the r/facepalm subreddit that received more than 29,000 upvotes.
Trump's promises
Though this post was a fake, Trump repeatedly pledged during his campaign to immediately begin lowering prices on groceries, gas and other consumer-related purchases. He also told NBC News' Kristin Welker (at 36:38) in December 2024, following his election victory, "I won on the border, and I won on groceries. It's a very simple word, groceries, like almost you know, who uses the word? I started using the word. The groceries." In the same thought, he continued, "And I won an election based on that. We're going to bring those prices way down."
On Feb. 12, The Associated Press reported about the onslaught of the bird flu outbreak contributing to rising egg prices, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' consumer price index reporting a dozen Grade A eggs costing an average of $4.95 in January. Trump blamed former President Joe Biden for rising inflation in a Truth Social post on the same day, writing (archived), "BIDEN INFLATION UP!"
Below, we've documented two of the more prominent examples of Trump making "Day 1" promises about lowering consumer prices, in particular about grocery and gas costs:
News conference with tables of groceries
On Aug. 15, 2024, Trump held a news conference outside the clubhouse of his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. Standing between tables filled with groceries — including cartons of eggs — he addressed the issue of rising consumer prices, including speaking on the costs of groceries and gas.
"When I win," he declared (at 27:32), "I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day 1. We will end Kamala's war on American energy and we will drill, baby, drill. We're gonna drill, baby, drill. That's gonna bring down prices of everything because energy brought it up." (It's unclear whether Trump intended "Day 1" to belonging to the sentence about bringing prices down or the one about American energy.)
Also, after talking about cereal and milk, then referencing "everything," he said (at 45:09), "We're gonna bring prices way down and we get it done, get it done fast."
Trump made a similar statement about bringing prices down "fast" in a March 2024 video shared on social media. "Now, you have to pinch pennies in your own shopping cart to cover the cost, and you look at it on a weekly basis, how much more it is," he said. "It just keeps going up and up. It's a disgrace but I will fix it, and I will fix it fast."
RNC speech
A second example of Trump making "Day 1" promises about the costs of groceries and gas occurred during his July 18, 2024, speech accepting his party's presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention. Trump said:
It can't come fast enough. We have to get it done. First, we must get economic relief to our citizens. Starting on Day 1, we will drive down prices and make America affordable again. We have to make it affordable. It's not affordable. People can't live like this. Under this administration, our current administration, groceries are up 57%, gasoline is up 60 and 70%, mortgage rates have quadrupled and the fact is it doesn't matter what they are because you can't get the money anyway.
Trump's assertion of groceries rising 57% did not square with signs visible behind the tables of food at his August 2024 news conference in Bedminster. Those signs displayed purported "price increases since Kamala Harris took office," referencing Harris' presidential run after Biden dropped his reelection bid. The signs showed price increases between 23% and 27.2% for different categories of groceries, not anywhere near 57%.
Also, on Aug. 14, the day before Trump's news conference flanked by tables of groceries, the official @TeamTrump account on X posted (archived) a graphic about a 22% increase in grocery costs under the Biden-Harris administration, citing the BLS.
According to month-over-month data from the BLS, during Biden's term from January 2021 through January 2025, food prices increased about 26% and gas prices rose around 40%. The NerdWallet finance company reported that operating costs, supply chain disruptions and the desire for corporate profits as potential reasons for the rise in inflation. It asserted: "No single factor can explain why food is so much more expensive now than before the [COVID-19] pandemic."
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