President Donald Trump looked to distance himself from the recent increase in inflation, sharing in a recent interview that he had “nothing to do with” the most recent rise in prices.
Trump shared his thoughts on the economy during a sit-down interview with Fox News, which also featured tech billionaire Elon Musk. The interview aired on Tuesday. During the interview, Trump blamed Biden for the recent price increases.
“Inflation is back. No, think of it: Inflation’s back,” the president said. “And they said, ‘Oh, Trump,’ and I had nothing to do with that.”
“These people have run the country. They spent money like nobody has ever spent.… They were given $9 trillion to throw out the window — 9 trillion,” he went on to say.
When explaining why Biden was to blame for the inflation that hit a month after he left office, Trump said several laws passed during the previous administration were to blame, including one Trump jokingly referred to as the “Green New Scam” and the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which was signed into law in 2022.
“The greatest scam in the history of the country. One of them. We have a lot of them, I guess. But one of them. Dollar-wise, probably,” Trump said.
The remarks from Trump come after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its Consumer Price Index that prices rose by 3% last month compared to January 2024 and 2.9% compared to December.
Among the items to see an increase include groceries, which are up 1.9% compared to a year ago, and gas, which is up 1.8% compared to last month.
While Trump has placed blame for the rise on former President Biden, experts have said that Trump’s economic plans of tariffing foreign imports and lowering taxes could cause inflation to return.
During his interview on Tuesday, Trump also discussed the legal challenges he’s faced in his first month in office.
“You write a beautiful executive [order] and you sign it, you assume it’s going to be done, but it’s not,” Trump said.
Other remarks he shared included praise for Musk, who he said would be assisting in cutting federal spending and increasing efficiency. The bulk of this is being done through the Department of Government Efficiency, which claims to have already saved the U.S. government $55 billion.
When discussing pushback over the cuts, Musk said he is taking it as a positive sign.
“They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful... What we’re really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president,” Musk said. “And what we’re finding is that there’s an unelected bureaucracy - speaking of unelected, there’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the president and the cabinet.”