Only 18% of Americans believe that affordability has improved since President Trump reclaimed the presidency last January, according to a brand-new poll from YouGov-MarketWatch poll. When pressed further, 41% of survey participants said the Trump administration was to blame. This poll has reignited a familiar political argument: The price of essentials like food and housing prices is still high, thus the president has failed on his election promise to lower prices. The implication is that prices for things like groceries should have gone down by now, and because they haven’t, the White House deserves the blame.
That framing is convenient. It’s also wrong.
This isn’t to say presidents have no influence over food prices. They do. Consider, for example, President Donald Trump’s policies regarding tariffs and immigration. Tariffs on imported goods, including food products and agricultural inputs like fertilizer, packaging, and equipment, raise costs throughout the supply chain. Those costs are passed on to consumers.
Labor policy matters just as much. American agriculture is heavily dependent on immigrant labor, especially for seasonal and labor-intensive work. While changes to H-2A wage calculations last year helped reduce some cost pressures for employers, that progress has potentially been undermined by anti-immigration rhetoric and mass coverage of enforcement crackdowns. It matters little that employing immigrant labor is less expensive this year if there aren’t enough laborers to fill the needs to begin with.
Also, Mexico’s economy is becoming less based around the country’s agriculture sector and more based around the service sector, which is also reducing the supply of Mexican workers willing to do seasonal agriculture work in the US. With labor becoming scarcer, farm production is decreasing while prices rise.
Those factors notwithstanding, much political commentary make no accounting for natural forces that affect food prices. There is nothing Trump nor any other president could do to control them. Weather is the most obvious example. Drought across cattle-producing regions has shrunk herds to historic lows, keeping beef prices elevated. Flooding in the Midwest and California has disrupted planting and harvests. These are supply shocks rather than policy failures.
Or look what happened in recent years to eggs, which became a symbol of grocery inflation during the avian influenza outbreaks that wiped out millions of laying hens over multiple years. Egg prices were volatile for a long time, but as flocks recovered and supply stabilized, prices came back down. That matters. It shows that much of what consumers experienced wasn’t permanent inflation or corporate manipulation but instead a predictable result of a biological supply shock working its way through the market.
The poll results also show that Americans have been misled by the increasingly fashionable claim that grocery stores are price-gouging, with 40% of voters blaming high prices on corporate greed. In 2024, the FTC put out a report finding evidence that grocery revenues increased, but the underlying economics cuts strongly against the theory. Grocery retail is among the most competitive sectors in the U.S. economy, with thousands of regional and national competitors and profit margins that rarely exceed one to three percent. The FTC’s case relies heavily on revenue increases rather than evidence of sustained excess profits. But higher revenues during inflationary periods often reflect higher costs being passed through the supply chain. Food retailers are price takers, not price setters, constrained by intense competition and highly price-sensitive customers. If grocery chains truly had the ability to gouge at scale, those thin margins would look very different, and antitrust courts would already be stepping in. They haven’t.
What many unhappy pundits ultimately get wrong is the idea that grocery prices should behave like a political scoreboard. Food prices respond slowly. Herds take years to rebuild. Fields can’t be replanted in a news cycle. Labor shortages don’t disappear because a politician doesn’t want them to. Trump is the president, not a wizard or the dictator of food prices.
So, let’s be honest about this. Tariffs raise prices. Immigration policy affects labor supply. Those are policy choices, and they have consequences. But pretending the federal government can micromanage grocery prices is not.
If policymakers want lower grocery prices, the solution isn’t scapegoating. Creating policies that expand supply, stabilize farm labor, reduce trade barriers, and allow markets to adjust, even when the adjustment takes time and doesn’t fit neatly into an election cycle.
High grocery prices are a real problem. Let’s stop pointing fingers, stop talking as if the government should control market forces, and instead implement real solutions.
