Donald Trump’s handpicked Republican National Committee chair reached for a spectacular cop-out after being handed the receipts on the president’s broken promises.
RNC leader Joe Gruters was taken on an awkward trip down memory lane during an appearance on NewsNation on Sunday, when host Blake Burman played a montage of Trump’s 2024 campaign pledges that have since gone unfulfilled.
During various rallies, Trump vowed to “end the devastating inflation crisis immediately,” “cut the price of energy and electricity in half,” and to get gasoline “below $2 a gallon.”
Burman then laid out the economic reality for Gruters, who has been charged with keeping Republicans in control of their slim majorities in Congress.
“But here’s part of the record,” Burman said. “Inflation: 3.5 percent—that is now, according to government figures, higher than the 3.2 percent for nationwide earnings.”
“Gas, not $2 a gallon. As we all know, it’s double that at $4,” he continued. “Electricity prices haven’t been cut in half, as the president talked about. They continue to go up and to the right, and GDP is at 1.5 percent.”
Burman confronted Gruters with the question hanging over Republicans with just 85 days until the midterms: “Why do Republicans deserve to keep power in Washington if that’s part of the scorecard?”
But rather than make a case for Republicans’ economic agenda, Gruters took a swipe at voters’ “memories” as he sought to turn the clock backward with a bizarre excuse.
“People have short memories, and they forget that Biden or Biden’s economic, uhh, disastrous, uhh, the, you know, reign led us to the high, much higher inflation, higher gas prices,” the 49-year-old RNC chair said. “And this president from day one has been working on getting these things under control.”
Burman cut in to deliver a reality check: “Inflation was 3 percent when he took office... and now it’s higher than that, Joe.”
Gruters appeared to inadvertently make the case for Joe Biden’s success in bringing inflation down, saying, “Inflation was at 9 percent under Biden.”
He added, “This is certainly Biden’s price—prices, uhh, that we’re still dealing with and we’re still getting under control.”
“So is it the Biden economy then?” Burman pressed, eyebrows raised. “I mean, if it’s Biden’s prices...”
“It’s Biden’s disastrous economic record,” Gruters replied, before claiming that Trump had secured billions of dollars in investments “that you’re not going to see right away.”
He appeared to allude to the economic fallout from Trump’s war with Iran, saying: “Sometimes these national security issues come up. Listen, he’s a peace through strength guy.”
“He’s going to get this under control, and we’re going to get prices back down. But, yes, people need to have faith that the Republican Party and this president cares about them, and we’re going to move this forward,” he continued.
It may be too late for Trump and the GOP. Just 32 percent of voters approve of Trump’s economic performance, according to an AP-NORC poll published last week, and Democrats have overtaken Republicans on economic trust for the first time in nearly a decade.
