Dr. Oz Gets Embarrassing Inflation Fact-Check on Fox News

Dr. Oz thinks butter costs a dollar.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator and TV doctor revealed just how out of touch he was with the average American on Fox News Monday night.

“You have no idea what things are gonna cost. I brought you some things [for] example,” he told Fox’s Laura Ingraham, holding a pack of butter. “Stick of butter, bag of peanuts. Butter in America, it’s about a buck [for] a stick like this.”

Ingraham checked him immediately.

“Where are you shopping? It’s not a buck, it’s like $4,” she said.

“I just bought this, so it’s close to that,” Oz stumbled. “Maybe it’s going bad!”

Butter is about $4 according to the Department of Labor, but someone as wealthy as Oz likely would never remember that.

“I want to challenge Dr. Oz. I will fly out on my own dime to D.C. and we can go to every grocery store he chooses, but at least 20 and we’ll stop when he finds butter for $1 lb,” former American Heart Association Chairman Craig Beam commented. “I’ll arrange a video crew to film it all.”

It’s ridiculous that Oz confidently brought a whole pack of butter on air just to be wildly incorrect about how much the average American—whom the Trump administration claims to care about—is paying for it. This isn’t the first time Oz has exposed his lack of connection to the average consumer. In 2022, during a failed Senate run in Pennsylvania, he was widely lambasted for posting an embarrassing video of him shopping at “Wegner’s” (not a real store) complaining about how much crudités cost. It’s clear he’s just as clueless now as he was then. It’s that kind of ignorance, that kind of apathy, that defines the Trump administration. It’s painfully obvious that they just don’t care.

At a rally in Nebraska Tuesday night, President Trump told his supporters exactly what he thinks about the well-being of the American people.

Trump first said that the prices of goods and services, which have gone up thanks to his ill-advised Iran war and tariff policies, were “just a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe—keeping our country safe.

“They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay,” Trump said. “And it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”

Conservative activists have argued that Trump didn’t really mean that losing the two cities is a “small price to pay,” but that he was referring to high gas prices. In that generous interpretation, Trump was arguing that his war, which has killed scores of civilians in the Middle East and an estimated 23 U.S. soldiers, is preventing Iran from waging large-scale attacks on American cities. But Iran’s targets during the war have been U.S. installations in the Middle East, and it wasn’t targeting American cities before the war, either.

California leaders, however, have taken his words at face value.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass blasted Trump’s words as “irresponsible,” saying the remarks “could potentially compromise” the city’s safety.

“The role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives,” Bass said in a statement. The mayor of San Diego, Todd Gloria, concurred, saying his city was “not collateral damage.”

“We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay,’” Gloria wrote in a post on X. “Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

California’s Democratic nominee for governor, Xavier Becerra, also criticized the president’s speech.

“Thirteen million Californians call LA and San Diego counties home,” Becerra said. “Their lives are not a ‘small price to pay’ or a punchline for Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile, gas prices continue to go up thanks to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and its allies in Yemen, the Houthi militia, controlling the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea. As of Tuesday morning, the average price of gas nationwide is $4.37 per gallon, while diesel fuel is a whopping $6.32 per gallon.

Trump’s claims that the war is almost over belie the fact that talks aren’t going anywhere right now. The president rejected Iran’s peace proposal on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month, and mediators haven’t made much headway. Meanwhile, the conflict has escalated in recent days as the Houthis have attacked Saudi Arabia’s airports, with the Saudis bombing Yemeni targets in response. The midterms are less than one month away, and Trump has nothing to show for his war.

President Donald Trump had a petty meltdown on social media Monday after news outlets reported on the light attendance at his weekend rally in Ohio.

Trump held a rally at a 4,500-person-capacity high school gymnasium in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday. By the time he finished speaking, several areas of an upper deck had completely emptied out, The New York Times reported.

Multiple photographs of the event confirmed that there were empty seats in the upper sections, but in a series of lengthy posts on Truth Social Monday, Trump claimed the reporting was false and called for the news outlets stating otherwise to be arrested.

“The Ohio Arena was already full to the brim—And yet these people were still trying to get in,” Trump wrote in one post, including a 30-second clip of a large line of people waiting in the parking lot outside ahead of the rally. It’s not clear, however, that these people were not admitted.

The president claimed that there had been no empty seats (though photographs show that isn’t true), and that “thousands of people had to be turned away” from the event.

“The New York Times, and many other Artificial Media Outlets, should be arrested for their dishonesty and disservice to our Country,” Trump wrote. “When Bernie Sanders has 500 to 1,000 people, they make it sound like it’s the biggest event that ever took place. When PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP has 50,000 people, they make it sound like nobody showed up!”

In another post, Trump continued to insist that the so-called “arena” was “totally MAXED OUT.” (Again, it was a high school gymnasium.)

Trump then tried desperately to spin the empty seats, which he’d previously claimed did not exist. “What does happen at all of my SOLD OUT Rallies, is that the people in the upper sections tend to migrate down to the Main Floor—The ‘migration’ process always happens! The Times knows this, and so does everyone else. I never have empty seats—Never have, and never will!”

“In actuality, my Events for very good Republican Politicians are probably more crowded than ever. There are no empty seats, there haven’t been for years, and there never will be. The Rallies are ‘HOTTER’ than ever,” he wrote.

The Times wrote that Trump’s dismal turnout in Ohio was part of a wider trend of waning enthusiasm for the president’s speaking events, which have come to feel less like pep rallies and “more like a farewell tour.”

Trump even took aim at his favorite show, Fox & Friends, on Sunday for choosing not to cover the less-than-bursting event.

President Trump’s reaction to the death of a lab worker in Russia due to a suspected plague is not reassuring.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Trump was asked if he was concerned, and he tried to explain the U.S. government’s response, saying that he was concerned about what he called “the pneumonia plague.”

“Well, I hate to see them having it, it’s a rough, it’s a rough disease, you know that’s a disease that we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have gotten stronger and smarter, they’re like an army. And we don’t have the same medical,” Trump said. “Even with great advancement, the germs have really become relatively stronger than they were, and things that used to work on pneumonia don’t work as well anymore, so, uh, but we’ll help. Anybody that has that kind of a problem, we’re always willing to help, we’ll help.”

Trump’s word salad evokes memories of his disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic during his first term, as well as his bizarre explanations. It’s pretty clear that the president was briefed on the suspected outbreak in Russia, which has led to a quarantine in the Siberian region of Irkutsk, but didn’t understand what he was told.

Unexplained pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China is also how news of the Covid-19 outbreak spread. That led to a pandemic that left about 2.05 million people worldwide dead of confirmed Covid-19 cases, with the U.S. making up 400,000 of those deaths, close to 20 percent of the total.

Trump’s claim that the U.S. is “always willing to help” belies the fact that his administration has cut funding to Ebola response in Africa, which has exacerbated the spread of the infectious disease on the continent. Hopefully, this outbreak in Russia is contained early, because Trump can’t be trusted to handle another pandemic.

The Democratic Party will refuse to approve any of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominations in the event it takes back control of the Senate, drawing perhaps the strongest line in the sand against the White House to date. 

“The bottom line is: One of the reasons we want to do everything we can to take back the Senate is not let Trump put such horrible justices—MAGA justices—on the Supreme Court and the lower courts,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NBC News in a Monday report. 

The rest of the ranks echoed the sentiment. 

“No, we’ve got to do exactly what McConnell did to us,” said Senator Ruben Gallego, referring to Mitch McConnell’s 10-month obstruction of President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, a spite-fueled move that resulted in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the court instead. “I don’t think, you know, you want to go down that road.… But clearly, you know, McConnell and Trump used ... their power, whatever you want to call it, to change the makeup of the courts. And I think we have to start moving it back.”

“Well, given the history of Trump nominees, I think it is slim to none that we would support a nominee from this administration,” Senator and senior Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal said. “Because we’ve seen this movie, we know how it ends, which is a politician in robes who is following Trump’s orders on most major questions.”

This report comes just a day after conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito told CBS News he was considering retirement, saying it was “something I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term.” Alito is 76 years old, and fellow conservative Justice Clarence  Thomas is 78, leading both sides of the aisle to start thinking about their replacements. 

“A major reason why I’m running to serve South Carolina and why it’s so important to keep the Senate conservative this November. Should Justice Alito choose to retire next year, a Republican-majority Senate will be needed to vote and hopefully confirm a Supreme Court nominee from President Trump,” Senator Darline Graham wrote on X last Friday. “If Democrats control the Senate, they will not even allow a vote. And if they allow a vote, they will defeat a Trump-nominated candidate regardless of their qualifications.”