Trump Weirdly Calls Groceries ‘An Old-Fashioned Word’ In Oval Office Lovefest With Mamdami
President Donald Trump extolled the accuracy of what he called an “old-fashioned word” as he riffed about “affordability” and “groceries” during a chummy Oval Office meeting with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
Trump has been fighting a battle over “affordability” since the Election Day bloodbath, insisting concerns over prices are a “con job,” and repeatedly claiming he’s already solved the issue. A raft of new new polls show Trump getting clobbered on the economy — a potential indication voters aren’t convinced he’s particularly expert on the issue.
The president stunned political observers with an Oval Office meeting that’s being described as a “lovefest” with the mayor-elect he has consistently derided and called a “communist” even as he announced the meeting.
In one exchange, Trump riffed about “costs” and the fashionable ways in which they are discussed nowadays:
REPORTER: Mr. President. Mr. President. Mr. President, the concept of living is something that you and Mr. Mamdani seem to agree on. Right. Democrats have run New York City for a long time, Mr. Mamdani. Do you see Democrat policy specifically as being a problem? And I’d like that to be a question that both of you can answer in New York City.
MAMDANI: Look, I think that there are many things in our city where we have to own the responsibility of. It’s things that existed long before the president was the president. And those are also — part of the message of our campaign was to take on a broken politics of the past. And I ran against a number of candidates who represented different versions of that past.
And what we found time and again is that working people were left behind in the politics of our city. And what we’re looking to do is put those people right back at the heart of our politics so that we don’t have a situation where we’re in the wealthiest city in the history of the world, and yet one in five can’t even afford $2.90 for a MetroCard.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: You know, we had some interesting conversation. And some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have. But a big thing on costs, you know, the new word is “affordability.”
Another word is just “groceries.”
You know, it’s sort of an old-fashioned word, but it’s very accurate.
And they’re coming down. They’re coming down high. They were, you know, we had, both of us, we had the highest inflation in the history of our country the last four years under the Biden administration. And we’ve got inflation down now to a normal number. It’s going to go even a little bit lower than that. Katie, do you have something on that?
Watch above via CNN.
