Trump accuses Democrats of ‘affordability hoax’ and brags about stock market in speech intended to tout economic record
With polls showing Americans holding increasingly dismal views of his job performance and his administration’s economic record, President Donald Trump went to Pennsylvania to convince voters that the pain they are feeling at the grocery store and when they look at their health insurance bills is not his fault.
He was not more than a few minutes into his remarks at a casino in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania when he blatantly lied to those who’d come to see him.
After offering up a set of unverifiable statistics about how many new jobs he’d brought to the Keystone State since returning to office, Trump turned his attention to the $12 billion bailout his administration is offering farmers who’ve been hurt by the double-whammy of low crop prices and high tariffs on farming equipment.
“You know, tariffs are bringing us hundreds of billions of dollars. I just helped our farmers out because they’re starting to do really well. But in order to try and negotiate, some countries played a little cute, and we just gave them right out of the billion, hundreds of billions that we’ve taken in, we gave the farmers a little help, $12 billion and they are so happy,” he said.
The $12 billion bailout is real — he and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the program during a roundtable with farmers in the Cabinet Room on Monday. But Rollins herself told reporters later that day that the funds for the bailout will come from the Commodity Credit Corporation, an agency within the Department of Agriculture that finances farm safety net programs, often through borrowing as much as $30 billion from the treasury and private lenders.
In what was his first appearance since the summer at one of his signature campaign-style rallies, Trump continued on a rambling, off-teleprompter stemwinder of a speech that was intended to assuage concerns about what voters say is his failure to address any of the affordability or cost-of-living issues that led them to chose him over former Vice President Kamala Harris a year ago.
Occasionally, Trump stuck to the script. He recited canned lines about an “amazing … transformation of our country” since his return to the White House 11 months ago and claimed “prices are way down” in part due to his administration’s green-lighting of oil exploration across the country.
He also claimed he has “no higher priority than making America affordable” while accusing Democrats of having “caused” the high prices that persist nearly a year into his second term in office.
“They gave you the highest inflation in history, and we’re … bringing those prices down rapidly, lower prices, bigger paychecks, you’re getting lower prices. Bigger paychecks, we’re getting inflation, we’re crushing it, and you’re getting much higher wages,” he said.
Trump then boasted to the working-class, blue-collar crowd that the “only thing” that is “going up big” is “the stock market and your 401(k)” before downplaying voters’ concerns about prices that have continued to rise since his return to power as a “hoax” perpetuated by his Democratic Party opponents.
“They always have a hoax — the new word is affordability,” he said.
“Democrats talking about affordability is like Bonnie and Clyde preaching about public safety. And they are really the, truly the enemy of the working class when they do it.”
In between racist rants about Somalian immigrants and attacks on multiple Black members of Congress, Trump continued on, accusing his predecessor, former president Joe Biden and his allies in Congress of having “blown up our economy” and “sent prices soaring” while repeating previously-debunked claims about the price of Thanksgiving dinner — weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday.
“They use the word affordability, and that’s their only word. They say affordability, and everyone says, oh, that must mean Trump has high prices? No, our prices are coming down tremendously from the highest prices in the history of our country,” he said.
