President Donald Trump announced the return of inflation while denying he had anything to do with the development less than a month into his second term.
Trump and Elon Musk sat for a joint interview with Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday night on Fox News. After Musk spent more than a quarter billion dollars to return Trump to the White House, the president named the Tesla CEO as leader of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” ostensibly a cost-cutting enterprise. Since taking the reins, Musk’s team has terminated scores of federal employees and frozen funding that was already appropriated by Congress. Those moves have sparked a spate of lawsuits pointing to the questionable legality of the decisions.
Musk has claimed he is looking to cut federal spending by $2 trillion, but has since scaled that number back to $1 trillion. That is still a massive amount of the federal budget, which is around $7 trillion.
“The overall goal is to try to get $1 trillion out of the deficit,” Musk told Hannity. “If the deficit is not brought under control, America will go bankrupt. This is a very important thing for people to understand. A country is… no different from an individual in that if an individual overspends, an individual can go bankrupt, and so can a country. And the massive waste, fraud, and abuse that has been going on, which is leading to a $2 trillion a year deficit, that’s what the president was handed on Jan. 20.”
“We inherited it,” Trump responded. “And inflation is back. I’m only here for two and a half weeks. Inflation is back. No, think of it. Inflation’s back and they said, ‘Oh, Trump.’ I had nothing to do with it. These people have run the country. They spent money like nobody’s ever spent. They were given $9 trillion to throughout the window.”
Despite the fact that inflation has ticked up, Trump is standing by his pro-tariff policies, which tend to increase prices.
Watch above via Fox News.
