Time Magazine corrected a fact-check of President Donald Trump after the story wrongly asserted his first term ended in January 2020, misstating the level of inflation when he left office.
The Friday article, written by reporters Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah, originally said inflation was at 2.5% at the end of Trump’s presidency; federal data show it was 1.4% when he left office in January 2021. Time issued a correction Monday — but it acknowledged only the mistaken date, not the faulty inflation figure that followed.
“The original version of this story misstated when Trump’s first term ended. It was January 2021, not January 2020,” the correction states.
Fact-checking what Trump said in his interview with TIME: https://t.co/SOOwO1IsEz
— TIME (@TIME) April 25, 2025
Time’s fact-check sought to rebut more than a dozen claims Trump made in an interview on April 22 marking his first 100 days back in office. In the passage in question, the writers contrasted the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target with what they said was a 2.5% rate “at the end of Trump’s first term” — a reference point that would have placed the president’s departure a full year early, while the economy was still digesting the initial shock of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) stood at 1.4% in January 2021, the month Trump left office, before climbing to a forty-year high of 9.1% under former President Joe Biden in June 2022 and receding to 2.4% this March, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
“In January 2020, toward the end of Trump’s first term, the inflation rate was 2.5%. By the end of his term a year later, it was 1.4%. Under Joe Biden, it rose to 8% in 2022, the highest inflation the country had seen since 1980, when it hit 13.5% By the end of Biden’s term, inflation dropped to 2.9%,” Time’s updated paragraph states.
Time’s updated “fact-check” references Biden’s 2022 annual inflation of 8%, sidestepping the 9.1% monthly spike logged in June of that year — the highest recorded in more than four decades. Using the annual figure instead of the monthly peak blunts the extent of the price surge under Biden.
Time Magazine did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation
