Donald Trump’s most senior economic adviser flailed as he was challenged on air Sunday about the cost of Thanksgiving meal prices.
White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett awkwardly insisted he “didn’t understand” the question when pressed on This Week with Jonathan Karl about his boasts about Thanksgiving food prices being false.
“The president claims that Thanksgiving costs are down 25%. I mean, does [Trump] know that’s not true?” asked Karl.
Hassett fell back on an oft-cited claim from Trump that a Walmart Thanksgiving package is cheaper this year, but Karl came prepared with receipts.
“Wait, wait. I got to stop you,” he said, before referring to an infographic that explained how the cheaper price was due to the package having six fewer products, seven fewer units, and 15% more generic brands.
“So, I mean, Thanksgiving, if you are going to the store to buy groceries for Thanksgiving, it’s going to be more expensive this year,” he summarized.
“I really don’t understand where you are going in the sense that Joe Biden gave us—Joe Biden gave us twenty percent inflation—” Hassett began, before being stopped by the host.
“He is not president. Donald Trump is president,” Karl stated.
Hassett ignored the interruption, and again moved his attention to the former president. “You want us to fix the hole that Joe Biden caused right away.”
He later added: “This is something that is being fixed fast, and real incomes are up after dropping about three thousand under Joe Biden.”
The Trump loyalist continued his focus on Biden, but didn’t directly answer the question about the affordability of groceries as the holiday season begins.
“There is a whole bunch of stuff where the price is lower, gasoline, mortgage rates—mortgage rates have gone way down. It’s cheaper to buy a home now than it was, did you know that?” Hassett argued.
While Hassett claimed that things were on the up under MAGA rule, some people have become wary of the economic advisor’s claims after his suggestion that he might make up some statistics to fill in for missing government shutdown figures.
“The household survey wasn’t conducted in October, so we’re gonna get half the unemployment report,” Hassett told America’s Newsroom while speaking about jobless data Thursday. “We’ll maybe be able to concoct something, but we’ll never actually know for sure what the unemployment rate was in October.”
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