President Trump greeted reporters on the White House lawn Friday with a message that doubled as a victory lap: the January Consumer Price Index report landed at 2.4 percent year-over-year inflation, and core consumer prices — stripping out food and energy — hit their lowest level since March 2021.

That's not a projection. That's not a campaign promise. That's the number.

"So the inflation numbers just announced, as you know, are way down, and we have it back on track. We had the worst inflation in the history of our country, and now we have very modest inflation, which is what you want to have."

Trump made the remarks before boarding Marine One en route to Fort Bragg, with First Lady Melania Trump at his side. The tone was matter-of-fact — the kind of confidence that comes from having a number that speaks for itself.

The numbers behind the claim

Core consumer prices rose 2.5 percent year-over-year and 0.3 percent month-over-month. Housing inflation continues to cool. Prescription drug prices actually fell in 2025. And according to White House data, real wages for private-sector workers grew by $1,400 in Trump's first full year back in office, as Breitbart reports.

The wage picture gets sharper when you zoom into the sectors this administration has prioritized:

• $1,700 in real wage growth for goods-producing and manufacturing workers
• $2,100 for construction workers
• $2,400 for miners

These aren't the industries that populate corporate boardrooms in Manhattan or lobbying firms on K Street. These are the workers who build things, dig things out of the ground, and make the economy physically function. That their paychecks are outpacing inflation isn't an accident — it's the downstream result of an administration that actually values productive labor.

The White House frames it plainly

White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai didn't mince words in a Friday statement:

"Today's expectation-beating CPI report proves that President Trump has defeated Joe Biden's inflation crisis: overall inflation fell, and real wages grew by $1,400 in President Trump's first year in office."

Desai also pointed to the administration's broader healthcare agenda as a driver of relief still to come:

"Housing inflation notably continues to cool, while prescription drug prices actually fell in 2025 — with even more price relief ahead for American patients thanks to President Trump's Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan."

He added that the economy is "set to turbocharge even further through long-overdue interest rate cuts from the Fed" — a pointed signal that the administration views monetary policy as still playing catch-up to the reality these numbers already reflect.

Bessent puts the Biden era on the ledger

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box on Friday and did what the previous administration's economic team spent four years avoiding: he stated the cost plainly.

"Joe Biden crashed the economy. Whether it was Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, these policies were a disaster for the American people. As I said, 21.5 percent cumulative inflation, loss of real purchasing power."

Twenty-one and a half percent cumulative inflation. That's the inheritance. Not a transitory blip. Not a supply-chain hiccup that resolved itself. A sustained, policy-driven erosion of every dollar Americans earned, saved, and spent.

Bessent struck an optimistic note on what comes next:

"We saw real wage growth in 2025. I think it could be very strong in 2026, and I think the American people are going to start feeling it."

That last line matters. The economic data has been moving in the right direction for months, but the lived experience of inflation — the grocery bill, the mortgage rate, the sense that you're running just to stay in place — takes longer to fade. Bessent is making a bet that 2026 is the year the numbers and the feeling converge.

The contrast the left can't escape

For years, Americans were told inflation was "transitory." Then they were told it was global. Then they were told it was actually a sign of a strong economy. The explanations shifted with every quarter; the prices never came back down.

Now inflation sits at 2.4 percent. Core inflation hasn't been this low in nearly five years. Real wages are climbing — not for hedge fund managers, but for miners and construction workers. And the same political class that spent the Biden years insisting the economy was fine will now face a simple question from voters: if the economy was already working, why did everything get better when the policies changed?

That's not a rhetorical trap. It's an empirical one. The CPI doesn't have a party affiliation. It just measures what things cost. And what things cost under Biden were more, across the board, relentlessly, for years.

Breitbart News economics editor John Carney noted that core inflation in January reached its lowest level since March 2021 — meaning it took the entirety of Biden's term plus Trump's first year back to undo the damage.

Four years to break it. One year to fix it. The ledger speaks for itself.