Crackpot economist, key Trump trade adviser, and Project 2025 contributor Peter Navarro spoke at the Republican National Convention the same day he was released from prison, and during his speech he misled the audience about the current state of inflation in America. Even though inflation is a top concern among voters and has been extensively covered, many reports on Navarro’s speech focused only on his prison term.

In his speech, Navarro blamed President Joe Biden for inflation, saying: “Biden inflation. You’re going to hear a lot of this because it's so freaking true. Biden inflation is coming after what's left of your savings and eating your wages.”

Navarro’s foray into inflation was as brief as it was false and incomplete. Headline inflation, commonly measured by the Consumer Price Index, has plummeted drastically since its mid-2022 peak of 9% and has been stable near 3% for nearly the past year. Economic experts have stated that total wage gains for most American workers have outpaced inflation since President Joe Biden began his term, and inflation is also projected to continue declining through next year under another Democratic term.

Navarro didn’t mention his own preferred policies during his speech, which economists across the political spectrum agree would make inflation worse.

Economists have said that heavier tariffs on China, pushed by Navarro in his 31-page passage in the Project 2025 policy book Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise and endorsed by Trump, would worsen inflation. Sixteen Nobel prize-winning economists additionally signed a letter last month warning that Trump's dangerous economic policies would “reignite” inflation and undermine the strength of the American economy. And a survey of economists by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month found that “most economists believe inflation, deficits and interest rates would be higher during a second Trump administration than if Biden remains in the White House.”

Yet when it came to covering Navarro’s RNC speech, there was little mention of his talk about inflation, even though it has consistently been one of the biggest issues in the presidential election, according to numerous polls.

The Journal noted Navarro’s “debatable claim on inflation” in a live feed on the convention last night, pointing to its survey of economists in which “a majority said inflation would be higher if Trump were re-elected.”

But many others ignored Navarro’s mention of inflation: NBC News, CNN, The Associated Press, and The New York Times all focused their articles on Navarro’s completion of his prison sentence just hours prior to his speech and didn’t mention inflation.

CNN and The Washington Post even fact-checked some of Navarro’s speech — which mainly featured a rant against the January 6 select committee, which he refused to comply with a subpoena to appear before, leading to a conviction for contempt of Congress — but they skipped the part about inflation.

Unfortunately, this lack of coverage follows a poor pattern of a lack of reporting on the effects of Trump’s future plans. Even though economists have commented in many news stories about how Trump’s tariff, mass deportation, and other policy plans would worsen inflation, major newspapers ignored this fact in the vast majority of their print coverage of inflation in the past few months. And even two weeks after another policy proposal that would worsen inflation was first reported — that Trump may seek to devalue the U.S. dollar — cable and broadcast television news networks failed to mention it.