What did Donald Trump do today?

He found a huge inflation spike on the "tariff shelf."

Speaking to reporters today from the Oval Office, Trump told a shaggy-dog story about his advisors coming to him with an unusual mystery: there was too much money in the Treasury, and they couldn't explain it. "I said, check the tariff shelf," Trump claims he responded. "And they said, 'How did you know that?'"

Trump's story is ridiculous, but there's a grain of truth to it: while revenues from taxes imposed on imported goods are still a tiny fraction of the government's income, they are up sharply. And, inevitably, so are the prices Americans pay for those heavily taxed goods. 

The latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on inflation were released today, and they are very bad for American consumers. The Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures wholesale prices of domestically produced goods, was up 3.7% year-on-year and a staggering 0.9% over the single month of July. (On an annual basis, that would be about 11% inflation.)

The reason the PPI is up so sharply is clear: even goods produced in the United States need raw materials purchased from abroad, so when those raw materials are heavily taxed on import, prices rise at every point down the line.

There was other policy-related news on inflation today, too: vegetable prices were up an astonishing 38.9% in July. Supermarket prices for produce can be volatile in the winter, but not in the middle of a growing season, and this month's spike was the largest ever recorded in the summer since data first started being collected in 1947. 

Part of the reason for skyrocketing produce prices are that many vegetables are imports, too. But the main issue is labor, or the lack of it. Depending on what day he's been asked about it, Trump appears to believe that he will soon or already has put in place a complicated scheme to arrest, deport, "retrain," re-import, and employ foreign workers to do the farm jobs they have always done in the United States. 

In reality, no such plan exists, and farmers have been reporting crops rotting in fields since Trump began raiding farms in order to try to meet a self-imposed deportation quota.

Why does this matter?

• Americans who aren't billionaires need a president who is capable of understanding what everyone has been telling him for months about how his policies hurt them economically.

• Even by Trump bullshit story standards, "check the tariff shelf" is pretty embarrassing.