Ben Shapiro: “When President Trump says things are becoming more affordable, people don’t believe that they are becoming more affordable because they aren’t really more affordable”

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Again, all of this is going to be potent and all of that’s true.

The problem for Republicans is they are the party in power. When you are the party in power, things change. People tend to attribute the problems in the world to you. And so if they go to the grocery store, and it’s very expensive — and make no mistake, it is very expensive at the grocery store. A week of groceries is going to cost you a lot more than it did two years ago. It’s stabilized somewhat over the course of the last year, but that doesn’t mean the prices went down. It just means the prices remain very high. And wage gains have not really eaten into that yet.

I mean, the price of everything feel very expensive to people right now, and people are not wrong to feel that. And when President Trump says things are becoming more affordable, people don’t believe that they are becoming more affordable because they aren’t really more affordable. They might be more affordable compared to where it would have been if Biden were president, but we are no longer in that world. And you can’t keep living in that world as the sitting president of the United States.

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SHAPIRO: Now, he’s not wrong about any of that, but there has never yet been a politician who tells people that their feelings about the economy are wrong, who ends up doing well in a midterm. It’s just a — I remember when Barack Obama did this, he said, well, people do they just don’t understand. They just don’t understand what I’m saying to them. I remember when he did that. I remember that Joe Biden used to, oh, they don’t even understand how the gains were — how we’re making right now. And it didn’t work for him. And so if people just don’t feel good about the cost of groceries, you can’t make them feel good by telling them things are great. It just — it doesn’t work that way, unfortunately, because sometimes people are wrong in in how they — but it doesn’t work that way. 

And it also happens to be true that people are just paying a lot more in groceries than they did even a couple of years ago. And when you go to the grocery store very often, you don’t think about what you paid last year for groceries. You think, what did I pay five years ago for groceries? And the answer is a lot less. A lot less. And some — of course, a lot of that is Joe Biden. And over the course of the last year, again, inflation has really moderated. It’s down in the 2.7 to 3% range, which is still too high on an annualized basis. But it’s a lot lower than it was under Biden when for one year it spiked up into double digits. With that said, do people feel good about the price of groceries? The answer right now is no. They do not feel great about the price of groceries.