President Donald Trump rattled off some false claims to dismiss the idea that Americans are paying more at the grocery store.
The president hosted several Central Asian leaders in the East Room of the White House on Thursday night, where he took questions from reporters. At one point, Fox News White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich asked the president for his reaction to a federal judge’s ruling just hours earlier.
U.S. District Judge John McConnell ordered the Trump administration to issue full payments to beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, whose funding the administration claimed last week would lapse on Nov. 1 because of the ongoing government shutdown. Last Friday, two federal judges, including McConnell, ordered the government to continue funding the program, which the administration did, but only partially. On Thursday, McConnell told the administration to fully fund the program. The government is appealing the ruling.
“A federal judge said tonight that the administration has to fully SNAP,” Heinrich noted to Trump. “And the Justice Department said they’re going to appeal it. What’s your message to folks as they work this out in the courts and in Congress as we’re heading into Thanksgiving?”
Trump handed the hot potato to Vice President JD Vance, who called the order “an absurd ruling because you have a federal judge effectively telling us what we have to do in the midst of a Democrat government shutdown.”
The president
“Biden went totally crazy, gave it to anybody that would ask,” Trump alleged. “And it’s many times the number of people who were on it. This wasn’t meant for that. It was meant for people that had real problems. In many cases, people that were down and out, people that could be saved. It wasn’t meant for people that could do whatever they wanted.”
Trump then reiterated his dubious claim that the cost of a Thanksgiving meal is down 25%, according to Walmart. However, Walmart reduced its basket of items from 21 last year to 15 this year, and replaced some of the brand names with generic ones.
The president then said he doesn’t want to hear about affordability:
So, I don’t wanna hear about the affordability because right now, we’re much less. If you look at energy, we’re getting close to $2 a gallon gasoline. With Biden, it was $4.50, $5. Another thing, inflation. We had the worst inflation in the history of our country. Now, we have virtually no inflation at all. It’s down at a very number and a very normal number. So, the affordability is much better with the Republicans. The only problem is the Republicans don’t talk about it, and Republicans should start talking about it
and use their heads because we have great numbers.
Despite Trump’s claim that gas is almost at $2 per gallon, the national average is currently $3.08
The president has repeatedly claimed that grocery prices are down since he took office, but that is not true. Prices are 2.7% higher than they were in September 2024, and 1.4% higher than in January when Trump took office. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released this week shows that a majority of Americans say they are paying more for groceries and utilities.
Watch above via C-SPAN.