Lara Trump wanted to make a point about inflation on Sunday, and she found a chart she liked. A video comparing cumulative price increases across the last 10 presidential terms, set to dramatic background music and sourced from an Instagram account called Yung Geeski, seemed to make the case cleanly: Biden at the top with 21.2%, and Trump’s second term sitting at 4.7% near the bottom.
She captioned it: “Wow. Great chart @yunggeeski_ This chart compares cumulative inflation across the last 10 presidential terms, with every presidency starting from the same baseline.”
View this post on Instagram
Her father-in-law shared it on Truth Social within the hour.
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
The chart had one small detail that was difficult to overlook. Trump’s second term number was locked at month 18 and then held perfectly flat through month 48, which meant the chart was not comparing presidential records so much as predicting the future and presenting that prediction as established data. Lara included a footnote acknowledging the gap: “Trump II is only through Month 18 because, inconveniently, we have not yet developed time travel.”
The time travel problem was not even the most entertaining part. Whoever designed the graphic had assigned each president a distinct color, and Trump’s first term had been given the color orange.
The comments filled with laughing emojis before the economics debate had even started. “His color is orange,” one user wrote, with a self-described Trump supporter adding: “what? Im a Trump supporter… its just funny they chose Trump 1 color to be orange… because you know ‘orange man bad’ lol.”
Once the orange jokes settled down, the substantive responses arrived, and they were considerably less amused.
“Fake news unfortunately,” one person wrote. “This is all false!!” said another. Several followers pushed back on the lived reality sitting behind the numbers. “Hate to break it to you, as a person who has to watch their retirement funds closely, my economic situation is no different today than it was under Biden. Gas is still expensive (and I live in TX), as are groceries.”
Another asked a question the chart could not answer: “Showing a chart like this just gas lights Americans living TODAY. I understand the sentiment but do you think I care who ranks the highest when I’m living in THIS economy?”
Those frustrations are grounded in something real.
Gas is averaging $4 a gallon nationally this week, driven in large part by the disruption to oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz since the Iran war began. Consumer prices are up 3.5% year over year, and Trump’s net approval rating on inflation has fallen to minus 50 points according to CNN polling, a figure that has no historical precedent at this stage of a presidency.
Featured image via Instagram screengrab
