President Trump began the week by stepping up his effort to try to counteract the unease Americans feel with rising prices and his own handling of the issue.

The venue Monday evening, which is expected to be the first of at least a few stops in the weeks ahead, was a summit for the fast food giant McDonald’s (MCD).

Before an audience of franchisees and suppliers, the president attempted to reverse some recent losses he and his party have suffered around the issue of affordability.

"We're looking at affordability,” he promised at the event at the Westin in downtown Washington as he argued that persistent inflation is “almost at the sweet spot.”

He added of his party: “Affordable should be our word, not theirs.”

The president’s push comes as the cost of living has come to the political fore. Voter anger over rising prices pushed outsized Democratic wins in recent elections, and polls show that many Americans place much of the blame on the president.

One average of approval ratings on inflation from RealClearPolitics shows Trump with a cellar-dwelling 35.6% approval rating for his handling of the issue.

The erosion of his poll number is “leading Trump to start taking on affordability himself as a policy priority,” Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer pointed out in a recent note to clients,

He added a warning that it’s likely to be a persistent issue, saying “these pressures are likely to expand going forward, both as midterm elections near and as retailers come under pressure to raise prices after selling through their pre-positioned stockpiles of goods to avoid tariff increases.”

The president has clearly noticed his political vulnerability on the issue and is leading a multi-faceted pushback.

The success of that effort remains to be seen, but the tactics — from dismissing voter concerns to cherry picking data — are remarkable in part because of the direct parallels to President Biden's unsuccessful response to price pains just a few years ago.

Both presidents struggled with the issue and, at times, simply veered into attempts to deny the reality of the problem or say it was their predecessors’ fault.

And both tried to lay the blame at the other's feet. Trump has often highlighted what he calls "Biden's inflation crisis" — in spite of being in office for 10 months now and with his tariffs likely behind at least some of the increases.

Trump has also repeatedly and falsely claimed that prices are going down.

When he was pressed about Americans’ anxiety on Fox News recently, the president shot back that "I don't know that they are saying that" as he brushed off poll after poll after poll showing his economic approval rating underwater by double digits as "fake."

The president offered a new message of sorts on Monday that a little inflation was fine.

“We’ve normalized it,” he told the assembled audience. Asserting that the ideal is 1% inflation, Trump said, “We almost have it at the sweet spot.”

The most recent inflation data available — the consumer price index for September — shows inflation held stubbornly at an annual rate of 3%, which is well above Trump’s 1% target not to mention the Federal Reserve's target of 2%.

“We have a couple of items, like coffee, which are a little bit high. We are going to get that down,” Trump acknowledged.

Working to Trump's advantage is the fact that the headline inflation number is far below the inflation seen under Biden, which peaked at an annual rate of 9.1%. By contrast, the most recent inflation reading under Trump was for September with an annual rate of 3%.

But the eye-popping increases among certain goods — beef is up around 15% and electricity costs are up more than 6% in 2025 — have created an outsized effect on perceptions.

Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz, offered in a recent appearance at Yahoo Finance's Invest summit, that lower-income consumers are "near recession" as measures of consumer sentiment reach three-year lows.

Three years ago was, of course, when Biden was facing an inflation crisis of his own and trying to counteract the political blowback.

One of the hallmarks of Biden and his team's response was an attempt to deflect with economic jargon — his team tried describing inflation as "transitory."

Trump, of course, has likewise often relied on cherry-picked economic jargon to try to convince voters that prices aren't as bad as they feel they are.

Trump's aides have often talked about tariffs leading to a "one-time price increase" vs inflation which can be persistent and long-running — a distinction voters don't appear to be making.

And Trump has again and again touted a Walmart promotional Thanksgiving meal basket that is cheaper in 2025 than in 2024 as one of his favorite talking point even as fact checks — including one from CNN and another that was appended to a White House post — have pointed out that this year's basket is different from last year's, most notably in that it contains significantly fewer items.

Notably, Trump moved to unilaterally exclude high-consumption goods like coffee, bananas, and beef from reciprocal tariffs. The conundrum for Trump: That effort at a solution reads as an acknowledgement that his tariffs have contributed to price increases but may have only limited effects in bringing them back down.

A recent report from Oxford Economics noted that "in a bid to alleviate grocery costs, the Trump administration is ready to lower tariffs on certain food products. However, we estimate the reduction in overall inflation would be a rounding error at most."

Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

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