‘Numbers Don’t Lie!’ CNN’s Abby Phillip Torpedoes Trump ‘Affordability’ Rants — With Receipts

CNN anchor Abby Phillip torpedoed President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that “affordability” concerns are fraudulent because prices are down by presenting a blizzard of receipts.

On Friday night’s edition of CNN NewsNight, Phillip opened her show by refuting Trump’s claims:

PHILLIP: Tonight, affordability seems to be the buzzword of the moment. Democrats have been riding high on their sweeping election wins this week, which were largely a referendum on the economy and, of course, affordability. But President Trump thinks that they were all running on a lie.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: If you look at affordability, which they campaigned on, they lied because they talked about, oh, prices are up. No. Prices are down under the Trump administration and they’re down substantially. We did a great job on groceries and affordability. The only problem is the fake news. You people don’t want to report it.

They said, oh, I don’t want to talk about affordability. The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: But the numbers don’t lie. Grocery prices are not lower. They are up since August and up since Trump’s inauguration. And compared to last September, cost of food has increased 2.7 percent.

How about specific groceries, like coffee, which many people are just saying, meat, baked goods, fruits, vegetables, they all cost more. Beef is the only item that Trump has admitted to getting more expensive. And today, he announced that he is asking the Justice Department to investigate meat packing companies for, quote, illicit collusion, price fixing and price manipulation.

Maybe Trump is thinking in downplaying these grocery prices is that Americans aren’t feeling it. Well, that is not true either. A recent poll found 62 percent of Americans say that the cost of food is going up while only 7 percent say that it is going down.

And, Natasha, I want you to break this down for me because this week — first of all, there are two things happening. We’ve been in a government shutdown, so we don’t have actually a great employment picture in the country, but what we do know is this. 153,000 jobs were cut last month. This is according to a report by Challenger, Gray and Christmas, but that’s 175 percent increase compared to last year, a million layoffs so far this year, which is a 65 percent increase year- over-year.

So, it feels like there are things happening in the economy that are not positive and people are starting to whisper about belt tightening.

Watch above via CNN NewsNight.