Bessent accuses Warren of manipulating inflation with her 'Trumpflation tracker'

In contrast to those figures, the Treasury's chart responds with annualised rates. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, stands at 2.5% under Donald Trump, compared to 4.7% during Joe Biden's term. In August, the year-on-year rate was 2.4%, the lowest since March 2021. Food prices rose by 2.1% annually and rent by 3.0%.

"Another day, another Economics 101 lesson for Professor Warren," wrote the secretary.

The difference lies not in the data, but in the arithmetic. The Treasury's chart measures how fast prices rise in each term. The senator's chart measures how much the same products have increased since December 2024 and adds that extra cost month by month. They are two distinct questions: how much life becomes more expensive each year and how much it has increased since Trump returned to the Oval Office.

In terms of wages, the Treasury claims a rise of 1.5% in inflation-adjusted weekly earnings since January 2025, compared to a drop of 3.9% during Biden's four years. The senator's series starts in February 2026, at the beginning of the war with Iran, and excludes the first months of the Republican term. In healthcare, it estimates a rise of 14.6%, 929 dollars, based on a projection that its own methodology describes as an illustrative estimate.

This debate is not a statistical entertainment from Washington. Inflation data in the United States influences Federal Reserve rates, which in turn affect the dollar, the cost of debt, and financing conditions across the Eurozone. A core figure of 2.4% brings closer the possibility of lowering the cost of money.

The most direct channel is the exchange rate. A strong dollar makes energy imports more expensive, which are paid in that currency, and improves the position of Spanish tourism against American visitors. Spanish companies with business in the United States, such as Iberdrola, Ferrovial, Santander, and BBVA, finance part of their activities in that market and feel every movement of the Federal Reserve in their costs.

The discussion also resonates in Madrid and Brussels, where there is debate over how the price data is communicated and what part of the increase the citizen perceives in their shopping basket. The difference lies in institutional architecture: in Spain, the index is published by the INE; in the United States, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the same one whose health index the senator's panel does not use.

The White House does not dispute the data. It disputes the framework. Since prices became the primary political issue for American voters, the Treasury has transformed affordability into a genre of its own, with charts that compete with those published by the opposition. The logic is simple: in a legislative campaign, whoever sets the indicator sets the debate.

Behind that strategy is the coalition that returned Trump to the White House: middle-income households and workers without a college degree who vote with their shopping bills in hand. For that electorate, statistics are not a technical matter.

The American precedent supports the fight. In 1995, the Senate commissioned a panel led by Michael Boskin to review whether the price index exaggerated inflation; it concluded that it overestimated it by about one point per year, and the data was revised. Fifteen years earlier, in 1980, Ronald Reagan won with a question of whether the voter was better off than four years before, built on the 'misery index', the sum of inflation and unemployment.

For Spain, the result matters less than the trend. If American core inflation consolidates below 3%, the FOMC (the Federal Reserve committee that decides interest rates) has more room to cut, and with it, relief in the financing of Spanish debt. The unknown is the timing: the charts will be updated each month and will coincide with the upcoming FOMC meetings and the legislative campaign.