CNN host Jake Tapper hit President Donald Trump’s eyebrow-raising economy brag with a brutal reality check.
On Tuesday, Trump, 79, told Politico’s Dasha Burns that he would give himself a modest “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” in how he has dealt with the economy.
When pressed, he leaned on an old excuse. “I inherited a mess,” he said. “Prices were at an all-time high when I came in. Prices are coming down substantially,” he claimed, despite the facts showing a different picture.
Tapper seized on this during his CNN show, The Lead, on Tuesday evening. He invoked just a handful of a flurry of recent polls that suggest Americans aren’t buying Trump’s economic bluster.
“The reality, however, is that Americans continue to struggle with rising costs and are increasingly holding Trump responsible,” Tapper declared, busting out the surveys.
He said: “A recent CBS News survey shows just 36 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy. That’s not an A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus. That’s an F.
“And according to a Fox News poll last month, 62 percent of Americans say they blame Trump for the current economic conditions. Thirty-two percent blame Biden.”
In the Fox News survey, 46 percent of voters said they had been financially harmed by Trump’s policies, including his tariffs.
Large majorities reported rising household expenses, with 85 percent saying grocery costs had gone up over the past year and 78 percent saying the same about utilities. Sixty percent said grocery prices had climbed “a lot” compared with a year ago.
In a poll Tapper didn’t mention, Reuters/Ipsos found in mid-November that Trump’s overall approval stood at 38 percent, his lowest yet, driven by broad anger over rising prices and cost-of-living pressures.
A separate New York Federal Reserve survey of U.S. households in November found that personal finances and expectations for future economic conditions had worsened, even as inflation expectations stayed stuck.
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