Americans have confronted plenty of data over the last week on inflation, and all of it is deeply discouraging. Earlier this week, we learned the consumer price index reached its highest level in nearly three years, as the inflation rate climbed above wage growth. That came on the heels of nearly identical news on the core personal consumption expenditures price index. Soon after, wholesale prices also posted their highest annual increase in more than three years.
Not surprisingly, this has led to multiple national polls showing more than three quarters of Americans believe Donald Trump’s policies have made the cost of living worse, not better.
The result is an obvious and multifaceted problem for a president who’s directly responsible for having created the economic conditions that are fueling the affordability crisis he was elected to address.
Part of the broader challenge relates to policy, since the White House doesn’t have a plan to address the rising cost of living, other than to hope things better after the war in Iran eventually ends. Another part is political, with Republicans likely to suffer a backlash at the hands of angry voters as the midterm elections draw near.
Then there’s the rhetorical angle, punctuated by a president who apparently no longer knows what to say about the problem he made worse.
A few weeks ago, for example, Trump misstated basic details about recent history on the inflation rate. That continued earlier this week, when the Republican insisted the inflation rate was 1.7% “just before the war,” which wasn’t even close to being true.
In Trump’s latest interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, which aired Thursday night, he kept this going, boasting that he’s successfully lowered prices “incredibly.”
This comes a week after the president also bragged about a “very substantial” drop in gas prices that did not happen in reality.
What Trump continues to make clear is that he just doesn’t have anything coherent left in the tank. The president is peddling a combination of ignorance and self-defeating lies that the public recognizes as nonsense, not because of fact-checkers, but because of their own life experiences.
This underscores the potency of Trump expressing public indifference to the economic effects of the unnecessary war he launched in the Middle East. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he declared this week. “I don’t think about anybody.”
Yeah, we’ve noticed.
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