President Donald Trump has a triumphant message on inflation. Some of his party’s television ads sound very different.
Even as consumer prices continue rising, Trump continues to falsely claim that they are falling – and even that they are down since he returned to office, though they are actually up 4.3% over that period. In the past two weeks alone, Trump has claimed that “I’ve largely taken care of inflation,” that “the prices are all coming down,” that “the prices are coming down very rapidly,” and that prices have already fallen “very, very, very substantially.”
Fact-checkers have challenged such claims for months, but you don’t have to take it from us. Some Republican midterm candidates have been running commercials that acknowledge reality – implicitly rejecting the narrative of their party’s chief spokesman on one of the year’s most important issues.
“On our farm here in Belle Plaine, we see it every day: gas, groceries, everything’s expensive. Iowa families are hurting,” Zach Lahn, the Republican candidate for governor of Iowa, says in one recent ad, going on to claim his Democratic opponent is out of touch.
“Housing costs keep rising, and it’s getting harder to afford a place to live,” another Iowa Republican in a competitive race, Rep. Zach Nunn, says in an ad in which he proceeds to pitch a proposal to train more skilled workers and builders.
