Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Lies About Prices, Thoroughly Demolished

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Will Saletan unpacks Donald Trump’s lies about the economy, from food prices, tariffs, and job losses, and contrasts them with hard data highlighting how Trump dismisses economic warnings, blames others for downturns, and promotes approval ratings that don’t exist, raising questions about his grip on reality.

Hey, it's Will Salatan from The Bulwark. And if you voted for Donald Trump, or if you know someone who voted for Donald Trump, I want to show you something. A lot of people voted for Trump because they believed that he understood the economy and they thought that he would bring down prices. That has not happened.

In fact, he's made everything worse. And what I want to show you today is why he's not doing the job his voters thought he would do. I'm going to show you Donald Trump on camera demonstrating that he is unable to recognize or comprehend the damage he's doing to the economy and to millions of Americans. Let's start with a reality check. This is the official Consumer Price Index that was published a month ago. It found that according to the latest data, as of April 10th, food prices were increasing. But after that report was published, Trump went out and repeatedly told Americans just the opposite. Here's what he said at a rally in Michigan two weeks ago.

Grocery prices have gone down. Everything's gone down. And yet I saw this person on MSDNC, but I saw this person. He campaigned on bringing prices down. Every price has gone down. What am I going to do? That was absolutely false. But Trump just kept repeating the lie. Here's what he said the next day in a speech at the White House. Groceries are down. The grocery prices are down. And here's what he said last week in the Oval Office. Groceries are down. All of this stuff is down. By the way, this morning, the government published an updated Consumer Price Index.

It found that food prices, on average, were basically flat since the last report, which means that since Trump took office, they're up about half a percentage point. But Trump didn't just claim that food prices were down. He actually said prices were too low. Watch. We have too many eggs. In fact, if anything, the prices are getting too low. To be fair, Trump was joking when he said that. But what kind of president jokes that the price of food is too low when millions of people are struggling because prices are too high? And that's the next thing I want to show you. When the people around the president explain to him

that his policies are hurting ordinary Americans, he blows it off. Watch this clip from his cabinet meeting two weeks ago. He was talking here about warnings from economists that because of his tariffs, Americans would have a hard time finding or affording items they need. Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. Hey, what's a couple of bucks?

Your kid doesn't need that doll. Suck it up. And Trump wasn't finished. Here's what he said two days later on Meet the Press. You said some dolls are going to cost more. Isn't that an acknowledgment that some prices will go up? I don't think a beautiful baby girl needs, that's 11 years old, needs to have 30 dolls.

I think they can have three dolls or four dolls. The president seems to have his own ideas about how many dolls your kids should have. And it's not just dolls. Here he is in the same interview talking about how many pencils you should have. When you say they could have three dolls instead of 30 dolls, are you saying Americans could see empty store shelves? No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying they don't need to have $30.

They can have three. They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five. So if you can't afford to buy what you used to buy, Trump's message is deal with it. In fact, he says it's okay even if his tariffs cause a recession. Watch. Is it okay in the short term to have a recession? Look, yeah, everything's okay.

Everything's okay? Maybe that's true if you're rich. But for most Americans, a recession is not okay. People lose their jobs. Kids go hungry. But Trump doesn't feel that. Watch what happened last week when a reporter told the president what his tariffs were doing to truck drivers and dock workers at American ports.

Because business has slowed down, as you mentioned. In China. But we're seeing as a result, the ports here in the U.S., the traffic has really slowed and now thousands of dock workers and truck drivers are worried about their jobs. That means we lose less money. When I see that, that means we lose less money. So when you say it slowed down, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. Trump doesn't seem to care about people who are on the verge of losing their jobs because of what he's doing. He thinks if we cut off imports and Americans who rely on those imports to make a living suffer, that's good. This is not normal. This is not how a normal president thinks. A normal president, when his policies are hurting people, steps back.

But Trump has cut himself off mentally from all the evidence that he's taking us in the wrong direction. Let me show you two examples. First, the stock market. Here's what Trump said on March 16th. So I think our economy is going to roar. I think our stock market is going to do great. But that's not what happened. On April 3rd and April 4th, the two days after he announced his tariffs, the stock market fell more than 10%. It decimated the savings of millions of Americans. But Trump blew it off. He said it was Joe Biden's fault. Here's what he posted on Truth Social. This is Biden's stock

market, not Trump's. He said it had nothing to do with the tariffs. And here's what Trump said at his cabinet meeting two weeks ago. Did you catch that part at the end? Trump is already preparing his excuse for the next three months. He's already saying that if the economy continues to decline, it's not his fault. So the president has insulated himself mentally from the stock market and other indicators that were going in the wrong direction. And he's also insulated himself from another warning sign, the polls. Let me show you Trump's job approval rating in the Real Clear Politics polling average. In this graph, you can see that his rating was positive at the beginning, and then it turned negative in March, and it's been negative ever since. His current average is negative by about four to five points. And in this chart from

Gallup, you can see that Trump, in his first three months, had the worst approval ratings of any president in recorded history. A normal president would look at those numbers and recognize that Americans don't like what he's doing. But Trump doesn't see that because he thinks those polls are fake, all of them. Watch what happened two weeks ago when Bill O'Reilly, a conservative TV host who supports Trump, asked him about the bad numbers. So a series of rough polls this week, and I'm wondering how you process that. Does it hurt your feelings when you see numbers come in that are not what you'd like them to be? Well, first of all, they're fake polls.

Trump thinks his real approval rating is about 20 points higher than the polls are showing. Here's what he said at his rally in Michigan on April 29th. But when you watch the fake news, you see fake polls. But on the legitimate polls, I think we're in the 60s. I really, I think we're in the 60s or 70s or something. The 60s? Let me show you the RealClearPolitics table of all the polls that have been published since Trump took office in January. This includes Fox News and all the right-wing pollsters like Rasmussen. There are more than 130 polls in this table.

Not one has an approval rating in the 60s. In the last three months, Trump hasn't even cracked 55. So when he says the legitimate polls have him in the 60s, he's talking about polls that literally don't exist. And here's another thing he said at the rally in Michigan. And as a result of our policies, for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction. Again, that's a total fantasy.

Here are all the polls that have asked whether we're going in the right direction. If you look at the last 40 polls going back about three months, not one of them said we're going in the right direction. On average, the percentage of Americans who say we're going in the right direction. On average, the percentage of Americans who say we're going in the wrong direction is nine points higher than the percentage who say we're going in the right direction. And then on Saturday, Trump posted this picture that makes it look as though his approval rating is 99%. But if you search for that picture on Google, it turns out to be a straw poll

of people who attended CPAC, a right-wing political conference. It's not the media that are posting fake polls. It's Trump himself. Look, I'm not gonna pretend that everything Trump does is wrong. He does have some people around him who see the damage to the economy.

And sometimes those people can get him to back off, like he did on Monday when he temporarily lowered some of his tariffs. And if he keeps listening to those advisors, they might be able to limit some of the harm he's doing. But that's no way to run a country. The president of the harm he's doing. But that's no way to run a country. The president of the United States simply doesn't see and doesn't get

what's happening to real people. And as long as he's in that job, we need to elect governors, state legislators, and members of Congress who will stop him from doing even more damage. See you next time.