The White House has gone into full defense mode after Donald Trump was found taking credit for price cuts that had nothing to do with him.
On Monday, the 80-year-old president posted on Truth Social that Walmart would be “lowering prices, by a lot, at my Administration’s request,” including cutting the cost of beef by 15 percent as part of the country’s 250th birthday celebrations.
Trump took a victory lap, praising the announcement as a “huge deal” for millions of Americans suffering through a cost-of-living crisis. The president’s second term has been dogged by high food prices, despite Trump making lowering them a central pledge of his 2024 campaign.
However, a Walmart spokesperson told The Bulwark that the company’s price cuts had already been in place at its stores for a week before Trump tried to suggest he had convinced the country’s biggest retailer to implement them.
White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai then melted down on X while replying to Sam Stein, managing editor at The Bulwark and a former politics editor at the Daily Beast, who had shared an article by the site’s economics editor, Catherine Rampell.
“The President and Walmart’s announcement was that the sale is extending all summer long. This is a big win for Americans. The media’s obsessive need to try to undermine any good news when it affects President Trump is pathological.”
Desai also tried to suggest that the White House had something to do with Walmart’s discounts, writing in an earlier X post that the Trump administration “stays in close contact with retailers to ensure savings are getting passed on to American consumers, and results like this prove the strategy is working.”
Shortly after Trump’s Truth Social boast, Walmart issued a statement detailing its signature Rollbacks and Sam’s Club offers, which the chain typically introduces during the summer. The statement mentioned price reductions on beef and other products but made no mention of Trump or the administration.
On July 7, one day after Trump’s Truth Social post, The Wall Street Journal reported that an Agriculture Department official had called some of the country’s largest grocers to urge them to lower their beef prices.
However, during a call with Walmart, the company told the USDA that it already planned to lower prices on a range of items, including beef, and that the reductions had been in place since June 29.
Walmart executives had also been discussing lowering prices for months to help consumers, as they expected billions of dollars in tariff refunds after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping import levies in February.
“We think the single best return that we can have on a dollar of capital right now is to invest in the customer and invest in price,” Walmart Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said on an earnings call in May, according to the Journal.
The Daily Beast has contacted Walmart for comment.
