CNN host Anderson Cooper has sounded the alarm on Donald Trump’s real priorities as the president faces a range of mounting problems.
On Wednesday’s Anderson Cooper 360°, the host tore into Trump for focusing on his vanity projects and Truth Social AI clips instead of climbing inflation and cost-of-living issues.
With inflation rising, gas is averaging $4.33 a gallon, according to AAA. The president also took a brutal blow on Wednesday after the release of the Consumer Price Index, with Bureau of Labor Statistics data that showed that consumer prices rose 3.7 percent in September from a year earlier and that inflation rose faster than expected last month.
However, at a rally in Arizona on Wednesday, as Cooper showed on CNN, the 80-year-old president had a different story.
“All your prices have been tumbling down. Prices are coming down very fast. Oil is coming down. Inflation is down,” Trump said.
Cooper offered a more realistic picture.
“The words of a man who says he wants voters to pretend that he is on the ballot, telling them things they see with their eyes are not true,” Cooper, 59, said.
“Inflation not down. It’s up. Prices not coming down. They’re going up. Oil not coming down.” Crude, he noted, was sitting at $106 a barrel. “None of what you heard him say there was true,” he added.
Anderson then played a clip of Trump from the Arizona rally that the host said, “continued painting a picture for voters that most now neither see or feel.”
“We’re in the golden age,” Trump said. “And despite all of the obstruction from radical-left lunatics, our nation is doing better now than it has ever done before.”
Cooper then cited a CNN poll in which just 33 percent said the president was doing a good job, before taking aim at his other projects.
“Voters, according to polling at least, do not seem to see it that way,” Cooper said.
“Red-state voters,” he added, kept telling CNN reporters including John King “that the president is not doing enough to address their problems.”
“As for what he is doing, well, let him tell you again,” Cooper said, airing video of Trump speaking of his one of his vanity projects.
“Has anyone seen the new heliport that I built, the White House?” Trump asked. “... They were going to sue me on that. But then they saw it. They said, it’s so beautiful. We won’t sue him.” Trump referenced the more-than-$5 million helipad he unveiled at the White House last month.
“That was probably not in the teleprompter,” Cooper said, looking troubled. He also noted Trump’s ad-libs about his $600 million ballroom and his planned triumphal arch.
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment on Cooper’s segment.
Trump frequently talks about his numerous White House renovations.
In August, Trump gave reporters a tour of the granite helipad going up on the South Lawn, and boasted that the adjoining ballroom had “a military component with the drones and the bomb shelters.”
Days earlier, after an appeals court ordered construction halted on the $600 million ballroom, Trump branded the preservation group suing to stop it “TREASONISTS” in a 579-word Truth Social rant.
Responding to the inflation numbers earlier Wednesday, White House spokesperson Matthew Middleton told the Daily Beast, “The President has always been clear about temporary disruptions as a result of the Iran conflict, but this administration will continue to deliver economic wins for the American people over the next two years.”
