Donald Trump decided to make some campaign ads for Democrats during a speech at The Villages in Florida this Friday.
TRUMP: The Democrats start screaming, "Affordability, affordability!" — but they're the ones who caused the problem. They may have one good talking point, I'll give them that. But they are so bad. Affordability.
The first time I heard that word — just two days in — I watched one of these congressmen get on TV and say, "Affordability, prices are too high!" But we've already brought prices way down. They handed us tremendously high prices, and they'll do it again if they ever take over.
As Paul Krugman discussed in a post on his Substack this Friday, Republicans and Trump have an affordability problem with Trump's promise to bring prices down on "day one" and to bring gas prices down, and with them spiking now that he and Bibi decided to attack Iran.
Their solution has been to just go on television and lie about it as we saw from Sen. Tim Scott and Rep. Buddy Carter, and of course, Trump.
As Krugman also discussed, that plan isn't going to work for obvious reasons:
What’s striking about these efforts to create an alternate reality isn’t merely the fact that politicians are lying. It’s the fact that they’re lying about a subject in which the truth is more or less literally in everyone’s face every day. Lies about, say, immigrant crime are difficult for ordinary Americans to check. But gas prices are displayed on giant signs all around America — and drivers face a reality check on fuel costs every time they fill their tanks.
Why, then, do Republicans believe that these lies will work for them politically?
Part of the explanation is their belief that they can flush the majority of Joe Biden’s presidency down the memory hole, that they can pretend that Trump took office just after the inflation surge of 2021-2022, not after the “immaculate disinflation” — falling inflation without high unemployment — that followed. That is, their story about gas prices looks like this:
And their story about overall inflation looks like this:
Will these games with the timeline persuade voters that Trump is actually doing a good job on prices? No. That ship has already sailed (and sunk). As the chart at the top of this post shows, independents disapprove of Trump’s handling of the cost of living by a remarkable 5-to-1 margin, and false claims on Fox News won’t change that.
That won't stop them from continuing their gaslighting.
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