Jim Geraghty of National Review Online compares the president’s recent rhetoric with economic facts.
Only an exceptionally small percentage of midterm election voters are spending much time thinking about the 2020 election. We’re all in a different place in our lives compared to six years ago. I strongly suspect that if the president wants to improve the outlook for Republicans in the midterm elections — in Virginia, Minnesota, and South Dakota, voting starts in 66 days — he needs to talk about the here and now, and I don’t mean the White House ballroom or the reflecting pool.
In the RealClearPolitics average, Trump’s job approval rating is 40.9 percent, and his disapproval rating is 56.5 percent. On Sunday night, the president claimed he had a 59 percent approval rating on Truth Social, with no further details. In the same post, Trump wrote, “Prices coming down along with the lowering of oil and gas.”
This morning, the inflation rate was 3.5 percent, year over year, a bit better than the consensus expectation of 3.8 percent, and better than the 4.2 percent figure from May. But that’s still well above the 2 percent goal of the Federal Reserve. The last time the inflation rate was below 2 percent was March 2021, when it was 1.7 percent.
Once again, Trump keeps insisting that any sign that the rate of inflation is coming down means “prices” are “coming down,” and those are not the same things. …
… As for gas prices . . . yeah, the national average of $3.85 for a gallon of regular gas is down about 20 cents from a month ago. But I don’t think anybody’s really that satisfied with gas prices; they’re still about 70 cents higher than a year ago. And they’re actually up a few cents in the past week.
I have insisted, over and over again, through Biden’s presidency and Trump’s second term, that a president cannot spin people about the condition of their own household finances. You cannot Jedi mind-trick people into thinking they’re doing better than they actually are. Apparently, no one in the White House wants to hear this, or cares.
