In November 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump posted to his Truth Social platform (archived) that the “2025 Thanksgiving dinner under Trump is 25% lower than 2024 Thanksgiving dinner under Biden, according to Walmart.”
The White House’s rapid response account on X (archived) later quoted John Furner, Walmart’s CEO, announcing that Walmart’s Thanksgiving meal basket was “25% less than the basket we had last year” to support the president’s claim.
Trump’s full post was as follows:
2025 Thanksgiving dinner under Trump is 25% lower than 2024 Thanksgiving dinner under Biden, according to Walmart. My cost are lower than the Democrats on everything, especially oil and gas! So the Democrats “affordability” issue is DEAD! STOP LYING!!!
This claim was true when only considering the price of the basket itself each year. However, the contents of the basket differ from year to year, and the 2025 Walmart Thanksgiving meal basket had fewer items in it than did the 2024 basket. Additionally, Walmart’s basket, billed as “inflation free,” is not a good measure of affordability from one year to the next. For these reasons, we’ve refrained from rating this claim.
In the FAQ section of Walmart’s October 2025 announcement of its annual Thanksgiving meal basket, the company said its 2024 basket was about $55 while the 2025 basket cost $39.93, “which is about 25% less than last year.”
A Walmart spokesperson confirmed these numbers for Snopes in an email. Additionally, Walmart CEO John Furner posted to his LinkedIn account (archived) that the 2025 meal basket was 25% cheaper than the 2024 basket. The White House’s rapid response account included a screenshot of this post when it quoted Furner.
However, that same FAQ section of the 2025 announcement that also noted that Walmart’s meal basket “will differ each year based on customer insights and preferences.”
We confirmed fluctuation from basket to basket by comparing the list of items from last year’s basket to this year’s basket. The 2024 Walmart Thanksgiving basket included 29 total items, whereas the 2025 basket had 22 items.
Snopes crunched the numbers on the individual items included in both the 2024 and 2025 Thanksgiving meal baskets using AisleGopher, a third-party website that tracks the prices of items sold at Walmart over time. We compared 2024 and 2025 prices for items in the Thanksgiving basket for both years, as well as for items that were in just one basket or the other. While we could cross-check which items were available in 2025 based on the current basket’s online store page (archived), Snopes had to determine the items in the 2024 basket by picking out items that most closely resembled the name and weight of the items listed in the 2024 basket’s announcement.
While AisleGopher’s data was the best source for tracking Walmart’s prices from 2024 to 2025 that Snopes could find, it does have some flaws. For a few of the items, AisleGopher did not have price data that dated back to Thanksgiving 2024 and/or the summer leading up to it. In these cases, Snopes used the earliest price available. As a result, the data in the table below are estimates collected to show general trends in pricing from year to year.
The Walmart spokesperson told Snopes in their email that the items in the 2025 basket were about 14% cheaper than they were at the same time of year in 2024. That roughly matches the 15% price decrease Snopes found from comparing the prices of all items that appeared in the 2025 basket against their 2024 prices. Items that appeared in both baskets showed a 9% drop in prices from 2024 to 2025.
The prices of items that appeared in the 2025 basket but not the 2024 basket fell 17%. This is in contrast to items included in the 2024 basket but not the 2025 basket; those items were 3% cheaper in 2024 than they were in 2025.
The discrepancy could be explained, in part, by how Walmart handles groceries that are popular during the Thanksgiving season.
Walmart called its 2024 basket “inflation-free,” using that exact terminology thrice in its announcement of the basket. And the pricing of the items in the baskets outside of the Thanksgiving season supports this.
According to Snopes’ analysis of AisleGopher data, most items in either basket were significantly more expensive prior to September or October, then sharply dropped in price one or both years. While not the case for every item on the list, many of the items were more expensive in summer 2025 than they were in summer 2024.
In fact, everything in the two baskets was about 18% more expensive during the summer than at Thanksgiving, and 1% more expensive in summer 2025 than in summer 2024. However, there was a far starker difference in summer prices for the few items that appeared in both the 2024 basket and the 2025; those items were 19% more expensive in summer 2025 than they were the year prior.
Therefore, the price of Walmart’s Thanksgiving basket was not a good indicator for affordability and inflation from one year to the next, even when comparing the prices of the individual items used to create the basket in 2024 and 2025.
