With polls showing Americans holding increasingly dismal views of his job performance and his administration’s economic record, President Donald Trump went to Pennsylvania to convince voters that the pain they are feeling at the grocery store and when they look at their health insurance bills is not his fault.
He was not more than a few minutes into his remarks at a casino in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania when he blatantly lied to those who’d come to see him.
After offering up a set of unverifiable statistics about how many new jobs he’d brought to the Keystone State since returning to office, Trump turned his attention to the $12 billion bailout his administration is offering farmers who’ve been hurt by the double-whammy of low crop prices and high tariffs on farming equipment.
“You know, tariffs are bringing us hundreds of billions of dollars. I just helped our farmers out because they’re starting to do really well. But in order to try and negotiate, some countries played a little cute, and we just gave them right out of the billion, hundreds of billions that we’ve taken in, we gave the farmers a little help, $12 billion and they are so happy,” he said.
The $12 billion bailout is real — he and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the program during a roundtable with farmers in the Cabinet Room on Monday. But Rollins herself told reporters later that day that the funds for the bailout will come from the Commodity Credit Corporation, an agency within the Department of Agriculture that finances farm safety net programs, often through borrowing as much as $30 billion from the treasury and private lenders.
In what was his first appearance since the summer at one of his signature campaign-style rallies, Trump continued on a rambling, off-teleprompter stemwinder of a speech that was intended to assuage concerns about what voters say is his failure to address any of the affordability or cost-of-living issues that led them to chose him over former Vice President Kamala Harris a year ago.
Occasionally, Trump stuck to the script. He recited canned lines about an “amazing … transformation of our country” since his return to the White House 11 months ago and claimed “prices are way down” in part due to his administration’s green-lighting of oil exploration across the country.
He also claimed he has “no higher priority than making America affordable” while accusing Democrats of having “caused” the high prices that persist nearly a year into his second term in office.
“They gave you the highest inflation in history, and we’re … bringing those prices down rapidly, lower prices, bigger paychecks, you’re getting lower prices. Bigger paychecks, we’re getting inflation, we’re crushing it, and you’re getting much higher wages,” he said.
Trump then boasted to the working-class, blue-collar crowd that the “only thing” that is “going up big” is “the stock market and your 401(k)” before downplaying voters’ concerns about prices that have continued to rise since his return to power as a “hoax” perpetuated by his Democratic Party opponents.
“They always have a hoax — the new word is affordability,” he said.
“Democrats talking about affordability is like Bonnie and Clyde preaching about public safety. And they are really the, truly the enemy of the working class when they do it.”
In between racist rants about Somalian immigrants and attacks on multiple Black members of Congress, Trump continued on, accusing his predecessor, former president Joe Biden and his allies in Congress of having “blown up our economy” and “sent prices soaring” while repeating previously-debunked claims about the price of Thanksgiving dinner — weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday.
“They use the word affordability, and that’s their only word. They say affordability, and everyone says, oh, that must mean Trump has high prices? No, our prices are coming down tremendously from the highest prices in the history of our country,” he said.
Throughout his speech, Trump sought to cast the entirety of blame for price increases across a range of sectors on Biden and a range of his appointees, including Federal Reserve Board of Governors Chair Jerome Powell and other Board of Governors members.
At one point, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent looking on, he baselessly suggested that all four Biden appointees to the central bank’s board were illegitimate because their commissions — the formal document appointing them to office after Senate confirmation — might have been signed by an autopen.
“I hear that the auto pen may have signed those commissions, if they signed those commissions. Now maybe I’m wrong, but we’re going to check,” he said.
Trump’s remarks come as the Senate is preparing to vote on a Democratic proposal to extend pandemic-era subsidies for health insurance purchased on Affordable Care Act exchanges to stave off massive increases in insurance premiums that could leave families paying thousands more per year for coverage.
During his first four years in office, he failed to convince Congress to repeal the landmark health care law and he never proposed a replacement for it despite promising to do so multiple times.
His GOP colleagues in Congress have not come up with a serious proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act either, in part because the ACA was based off what was once a Clinton-era proposal from the Heritage Foundation meant as an alternative to a government-run, single-payer health care system.
But Trump has refused to support extending the subsidies despite polling that shows Americans — even many who voted for him — supporting doing so overwhelmingly.
Instead, he told rallygoers that he opposes extending the tax credits because they go to insurance companies and accused Democrats of being “bought and owned” by them while pushing the idea that the government could give direct payments to be used for purchasing health insurance from the same insurance companies.
“I want to give billions of dollars directly to the people … I want to give nothing to the insurance companies … because they’re sucking our country dry with a scam by the Democrats,” he said.
“We want the money to go directly to the people. We want you to go out and buy your own health insurance.”
The president’s return to the rallies that defined his political movement over the last 10 years also comes as Americans are feeling the pain from his tariff policies, which have resulted in price increases for almost all imported goods from nearly every U.S. trading partner.
Although Trump frequently claims that tariffs are paid by foreign countries as if they are entry fees for the privilege of exporting goods to the United States, they are actually import taxes paid by American importers and passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
Voters are paying more for many imports than they did before he imposed the massive taxes on them by executive fiat under emergency powers that are currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court, but Trump offered a bizarre justification of the taxes by claiming they are needed to protect American steel manufacturing.
“You need steel. You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils. That’s under the China policy. You know, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two … they don’t need that many. But you always need steel,” he said.
“You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice, you don’t need 37 dolls so we’re doing things right.”
And although Trump claimed that his signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act would put more money in Pennsylvanians’ pockets because of the “no tax on tips” policies meant to benefit low-wage workers, polling shows Americans aren’t impressed by his record after nearly a year back in office.
According to a recent Gallup poll, only 36 percent of voters approve of his performance as president, giving him the lowest rating of his second term.
A separate Politico poll released this week showed 46 percent of respondents saying the cost of living in America is worse than they can remember at any point, including 37 percent of voters who pulled levers for Trump last year.
Nearly half of respondents also said they blame Trump — not Biden or Harris — for the economy’s current condition.
Read More: Trump accuses Democrats of ‘affordability hoax’ and brags about stock
