President Donald Trump lost his cool Friday when pressed on the topic of “affordability,” a top issue that helped fuel Democrats’ across-the-board election wins earlier this week.
Trump said earlier in the week that the main drivers of Republican losses were the government shutdown and the fact that he himself was not on the ballot.
Still, Trump repeatedly claimed during his bilateral meeting at the White House with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that prices, ranging from food to energy products, had plummeted since January.
The president specifically pointed to an announcement from Walmart earlier this week that the price of their Thanksgiving dinner package this year was down 25% from 2024. Trump brought the Walmart anecdote up again Friday, only to be challenged by a reporter who pointed out that the Thanksgiving deal being offered this year contains fewer items. Trump took issue with that rebuttal.
“They’re giving you prices, so that would mean that the whole series of pricing and costs, you know, the groceries and everything else, it was a con job,” he said. “It was a con job, affordability. They call — it was a con job by the Democrats. The Democrats are good at a few things, cheating on elections and conning people with facts that aren’t true.”
Furthermore, Trump took issue with the claim that he does not want to discuss the issue.
“When did I not want to talk about it? I talk about it all the time,” he continued. “We are much better than [former President Joe] Biden and all of them now, just so you understand. Do you remember that the Biden administration had the highest inflation in 48 years? The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden.”
Trump proceeded to ask White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who was not in the room at the time, to take part in the dogpiling.
“Affordability is what the American people elected the president to do, and he is doing it, and you guys refuse to cover it,” she said after an aide pulled her back into the president’s meeting. “The previous administration created the worst unaffordability crisis in American history, and I’ve been watching the TV all day saying that he doesn’t want to talk about affordability. That’s what he’s working on every day.”
The president then added over the top, “That’s what I’m talking about right now. But you know why they refuse to cover it? Because they’re fake news.”
Trump’s comments strayed significantly from those of James Blair, the president’s deputy chief of staff, earlier this week. Blair told Politico in an interview that the president is “very keyed into what’s going on, and he recognizes, like anybody, that it takes time to do an economic turnaround.”
“Why did Zohran Mamdani do so well [Tuesday] night? He relentlessly focused on affordability,” Blair added.
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“People talk about communists, they can say all these things, but the fact is he was talking about the cost of living.”
Trump’s comments can be seen in full below: