Welcome to the News Hour. New inflation figures show President Trump's tariffs are starting to have an impact on consumer prices.

Overall, inflation held steady at 2.7% year over year, but so-called core inflation, which is closely watched by the Fed and does not include volatile food and energy prices, ticked up 3.1%.

That's the largest increase in five months.

The report was the first from the Bureau of Labor Statistics since President Trump fired its

commissioner, Erica McIntyre for earlier this month, accusing her without evidence of rigging

economic data. That firing came just hours after the release of a weaker than expected jobs report.

Late yesterday, the president nominated her replacement, E.J. Antony, chief economist at the Heritage

Foundation. That's a conservative think tank. For more now, we are joined by Michael Strain.

He's the director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Michael, thanks for joining us.

Let's just start off with these new inflation numbers. Overall inflation holding steady was

helped, we should note, by drops in gas and energy prices. But the fact that core inflation did

tick up, how do you look at that, what's behind it? And what does it say about the overall economy right now?

Thank you. I think it's troubling. As you say, we saw an increase in core inflation. This is,

I think, become a trend. I think we can say that we are in an economy where underlying

inflation seems to be accelerating.

Importantly, underlying inflation is accelerating from a level that's already too high.

So we have inflation that's well above the Fed's target and inflation that seems to be accelerating.

And what's the role of the tariffs in all of this, especially given the sort of staggered rollout we've seen, the on-again, off-again nature of the president's tariffs policy?

Is that fueling some of that inflation here?

Yeah, the tariffs are clearly playing a role.

And you can see that some of the goods that are most exposed to tariffs are showing pretty

substantial increases in their prices.

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