A friendly MAGA interviewer asked Donald Trump, twice, a softball question on how he would bring down prices.
Sharyl Attkisson, who quit CBS News in 2014 because it didn’t go full-Benghazi, and has since outed herself as an anti-vaxxer, lobbed ‘em up there for the Trumper.
The guy who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple took a couple of weak swings, and came up empty.
“Kamala Harris has been very short on specifics when it comes to economy, other than saying she wants an opportunity economy. What are the specific mechanics of how prices come down, you know, the steps that would be taken in a second term for you?” Attkisson asked, during a Q-and-A with Trump on her Sinclair Broadcast Group talk show “Full Measure.”
Trump’s first stab at an answer:
“So, first of all, she can’t do an interview. She could never do this interview because you ask questions like give me a specific answer. She talks about her lawn when she was growing up. This woman is not equipped to be president.”
“She’s not equipped to deal with President Xi. I took in hundreds of billions of dollars with him. And Putin, we had no war with Putin. Remember, and I’m just going to go off just for this. With Bush, they took a lot, Russia. With Biden, they’re trying to take everything. With Obama, they took a lot. With Trump, Russia took nothing. Just remember that. It’s a little, a little chart. But what happened, and when you look at what took place, was so sad.
“When they took over, they cut the oil way down, and oil started going through the roof. It was going to go to $10 a gallon. It was going to go to numbers that nobody has ever seen. And so, they went back to the Trump drilling. They said, let it go back. That was the only good thing. But they stopped, because I would be there, but four years later, I would be triple what the number was. Right now, they’re just about even where I was. But they only did that because of the fact that they eventually have an election coming up. And you remember at the beginning what happened? That’s one of the reasons that Putin went in, because it went to $100 a barrel instead of $40 a barrel. And he could fight all the wars he wants with those kind of numbers, because he’s a big seller of oil and gas.
“So, what happens is, they went back to what I was doing, just to reopen, just reopen. It wasn’t hard. It’s so crazy what they want to do. They’re going to destroy lives. They’re going to destroy, what they have done to this country, and especially in the sense of allowing millions and millions of people come in, because that’s something. You know, we can fix the gasoline situation, and we can fix the, anything.”
Aside from the fact that, no, there’s no answer there to the question, what are you going to do specifically to lower prices, we need to do some fact-checking on the oil thing here.
Peak U.S. oil production in the Trump years was in November 2019, at 12.99 million barrels per day.
Production dipped at the outset of the pandemic to 9.71 million barrels per day in May 2020, and was back up to 11.15 million barrels per day when Trump left office in January 2021.
Oil production in the Biden administration has been steadily building, passing the 12 million barrels per day mark in August 2022, and standing at 13.21 million barrels per day as of the most recent complete data, in June 2024.
Which is to say, “they” – the Biden administration – didn’t “cut the oil way down.”
On that point, Trump is either himself misinformed, or actively trying to misinform, and I think we all know it’s the latter that’s going on here.
Attkisson, to her credit, for being a sympathetic MAGA interviewer, went back to the question that she’d asked.
“Do prices come down magically, because it’s not them?” she pressed Trump.
“They come down with energy, and they come down with interest rates. We’re going to get, as I told you, we’re going to get energy down by 50 percent in 12 months. We’re going to have it, it’s going to be a major smash on energy. If you look at the energy for, and I’m not just talking about cars, I’m talking about air conditioning, heating, your basic energy operating a bakery, operating any kind of a business, it’s all having to do with energy.
“That was where they started wrong when they cut way back on what I did, and again, just so you understand, they then let it go back to where it was, which he was a very smart thing. Otherwise, you would have had, I think you would had a depression, if you want to know the truth. But energy was rising at a level that nobody had ever seen, and then they said, go back, go back. They would tell people, go back to your wells, go back to drilling, go back to fracking, do whatever you have to do. But if they win, the day after, they’re going all the way. They were only doing that because of an election coming up. They’re going all the way. It’s madness, and what they’ve done to our country is mad.”
That was swing and a miss, strike two.
Attkisson didn’t bother with a third question, probably realizing she’d already heard the same talking point, twice, so, what was the use.
Keep this one at the ready when you read yet another article from the MSM or hear a talking head on CNN or Fox News prattle on about how Kamala Harris doesn’t go into specifics on her policy ideas.
This MAGA lady on the far-right Sinclair literally used the word “specific” in her softball question to Trump on the economy, and his response was a pair of swing-and-a-miss filibusters heavy on insults and lies, and nothing close to specifics on the economy.
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Chris Graham
