Trump Has a Wild New Excuse for Why Inflation Isn’t His Fault

Inflation is up, but Donald Trump would sooner find any other scapegoat than deal with the critical economic issue.

“Inflation is back,” Trump said passively during an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I’m only here for two and a half weeks.”

“Inflation is back and they said Trump—I had nothing to do with it,” Trump said. “These people that run the country, they spent money like no one’s ever spent it.”

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly pledged to lower costs for American consumers on “day one.” But three weeks into his second administration, Trump has repeatedly avoided answering the hard questions on exactly how he’s going to provide relief for Americans’ wallets.

U.S. inflation was up in January—the consumer price index indicated that prices rose by 3 percent that month compared to a year earlier, according to data released last week from the Labor Department.

Rent alone made up 30 percent of that increase, according to The Washington Post’s economic columnist Heather Long, who noted on X that the “core” consumer price index—which excludes the volatile prices of food and energy—had practically stalled since June.

But Americans were still feeling sticker shock for some key grocery staples in January, when the price of a dozen eggs soared by 13.8 percent and averaged $4.95 across the country—a price tag that’s still up by 53 percent from last year, according to The New York Times. Egg prices are only expected to increase amid a widening outbreak of avian flu, which has temporarily shuttered New York City’s poultry markets and skyrocketed the cost of a standard dozen eggs to more than $12 in Key Foods and CTown amid a nationwide egg shortage.

Earlier this month, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the Trump administration doesn’t “have a timeline” for alleviating the nation’s critically high cost of living.

Regardless of whether Trump is willing to take the blame for the economic churn, the nation is still pointing its finger his way. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found that Trump’s approval rating sank, while the share of Americans who felt the economy is on the wrong track rose to 53 percent. That was 10 percent higher than was reported during a January 24–26 poll, when 43 percent of Americans felt the same way.

Just 32 percent of polled Americans approved of Trump’s performance on inflation, according to the Reuters poll.

Elon Musk won’t stop showing just how little he understands about the U.S. government.

The billionaire technocrat joined President Donald Trump Tuesday night in an interview on Fox News’ Hannity, to attempt to justify the Department of Government Efficiency’s invasion into the sensitive files of government agencies and the Trump administrations’ efforts to gut the federal government.

Musk falsely reasoned that he could do whatever he wanted because of a mandate from U.S. voters.

“All we’re really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And what we’re finding is an unelected bureaucracy,” said Musk, who himself is unelected and increasingly unpopular among voters.

“There is a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and Cabinet. You look at D.C. voting and it’s 92 percent Kamala,” Musk noted.

“If the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented. And that means we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy,” he said. “And so I think what we’re seeing here is sort of the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore the will of the people.”

“Is this making sense?” Musk asked.

No, it isn’t, and it’s because of Musk’s ironic disposition toward the founding document that is the U.S. Constitution, which sought to establish three branches of government that act as checks and balances on each other.

Neither Musk nor Trump care about the actual structure of the government, or that it was created in direct response to the tyranny of monarchy. That’s why they so openly attempt to skirt the rules about destroying federal agencies such as USAID, which can only be done by an act of Congress, and float impeaching judges who say things they don’t like. To them, there is only the executive branch, the reins of which Musk seems to have happily taken off of Trump’s hands.

Trump on Tuesday announced he would unveil an aggressive set of tariffs, confirming the worst fears of manufacturers across the auto, semiconductor, and pharmaceutical industries.

“It’ll be in the neighborhood of 25 percent,” the president said, when asked about the specific rate he’d be placing on foreign automobile imports. When asked about semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, he noted they’d be “25 percent and higher, and it’ll go very substantially higher over the course of a year.”

Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that the tariffs on automobiles could come as soon as April 2.

In Trump’s telling, the tariffs are designed to strong-arm companies into bringing their manufacturing onto U.S. soil. About 20 percent of car sales in the United States last year were imports from Canada and Mexico. But 25 percent tariff on those sales would upend the auto supply chain and likely cause costs to rise dramatically, which would then of course lead prices for consumers to rise as well.

“Whether it’s auto tariffs that he comes up with on the fly or a general tariff, the net result is closures of plants all over the U.S. at the same time as Canada and Mexico,” Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association president Flavio Volpe told Politico.

Time will only tell how Trump plans to convince American consumers that they should keep footing the bill—while the price of everything from automobiles to gaming consoles to Ozempic skyrockets.

Now that he has been confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to put his frightening ideas about public health into action.

Kennedy made a speech to HHS staff at the Washington, D.C., headquarters Tuesday and announced that he planned to begin investigations into whether anti-depressant medications and the childhood vaccine schedule are responsible for chronic diseases in the United States. The speech was intended for staff only, although a livestream link was distributed.

“Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said, and urged staff to keep an “open mind.”

“We will convene representatives of all viewpoints to study the causes for the drastic rise in chronic disease,” Kennedy added. “Some of the possible factors we will investigate were formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized.”

Kennedy’s comments on childhood vaccines contradict his testimony during his Senate confirmation hearings, where he told the Senate Finance Committee, “I support vaccines. I support the vaccine schedule. I support good science.”

Several medical studies have debunked claims that vaccines and SSRI anti-depressant medications are linked to chronic illnesses or conditions such as autism. But now that Kennedy has been confirmed, it seems that he can stop pretending to support such health measures.

Over the weekend, several thousand probationary federal health employees were fired, only one day after Kennedy’s confirmation. With fewer employees to oppose him, Kennedy can put his debunked theories about public health into practice, and the consequences could be disastrous.

Promises kept? Not quite.

Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday purporting to expand access to in-vitro fertilization, but the mandate falls short of his actual campaign promise to make IVF free.

“🚨PROMISES MADE. PROMISES KEPT: President Trump just signed an Executive Order to Expand Access to IVF! 👶” announced Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s emoji-happy press secretary, in a post on X.

“The Order directs policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments.” she wrote.

Crucially, the order does not mandate any of these things, only recommends them. The order’s “recommendations will focus on how to ensure reliable access to IVF,” according to a fact sheet about the order obtained by NOTUS.

In August, Trump claimed that if elected to a second term, he would have either the government or insurance companies cover the cost of IVF, which can cost thousands of dollars.

“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump said in an August interview with NBC. “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

When pushed to clarify exactly who would shell out for these procedures, he said that one option would be to make insurance companies pay “under a mandate.”

A White House official told NOTUS Tuesday that this order was the Trump administration’s “first step” toward realizing that promise.

During a press conference on Tuesday, Trump bragged about the toothless order. “I’ve been saying that we’re gonna do what we have to do,” he said. “And I think that the women, AND families—husbands, are very appreciative of it.”

It should come as no surprise that Trump is going to do what he has to do, just not what he said he would do.