PresidentDonald Trumpon Tuesday said the plight of Americans finding it harder and harder to make ends meet and rising gas and consumer prices simply aren’t on his mind asthe months-long Iran war and impasseover the Strait of Hormuz continue tofuel surging inflationin the United States.
Trump made the stunning brush-off statement as he departed the White House for Beijing, where he will be feted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a state visit, including a lavish Thursday night banquet at the Great Hall of the People.
Asked about the continuingpocketbook pressures faced by everyday consumersas a result of the war he started more than two months ago, Trump told reporters: "I don't think about American financial situation — I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot letIranhave a nuclear weapon."
The president’s blunt comments came just hours after the Labor Department releasedinflationdata showing theConsumer Price Indexspiking 3.8 percent from the same point last year, including a .06 percent jump last month in the CPI. Gasoline prices, meanwhile, surged by a whopping 5.4 percent last month alone as the ongoing standoff between the U.S. and Iran has blocked the waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply transits each year.
His remarks also came just hours after the release of a new survey showing Americans overwhelmingly blame the president for the record-high gas prices and rising mortgage rates and food costs that have followed.
According to a CNN/SSRS poll, some 77 percent of respondents said Trump’s policies have driven the cost of living up, with most people blaming his decision to go to war with Iran and theimplementation of tariffs as the driving factors.
Trump became irate when pressed by reporters on whether his policies have done anything to fulfill his campaign promise to lower prices that consumers had blamed on the Biden administration when they voted to return him to the presidency for a second, non-consecutive term in 2024.
He claimed his administration’s efforts are “working incredibly” because inflation had cooled to roughly 1.7 percent before he elected to start a war against Iran and ignore longstanding concerns that Tehran would react by closing down the Strait of Hormuz and thereby crippling the global economy.
At the same time, he suggested that anyone who is concerned about Americans’ economic conditions wants Iran to acquire nuclear weapons while also claiming that the economy is in good shape because stocks are high.
“Anybody that wants them to have a nuclear weapon is a stupid person. So we said we're going to take the greatest stock market in history and we're going to go down a little bit. And actually that turned out to be incorrect, because our stock market is now at the highest point in history, which frankly, surprised a lot of people,” he said.
Source: Drudge Report
