Anyone remember this BS from Trump? “Starting on Day 1, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.” They just lie, and lie, and lie when confronted about anything about how the economy is doing with Trump back in office.
JD Vance made an appearance on this Friday’s The Ingraham Angle on Fox, and was asked about NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s appeal by Ingraham, and as the two of them took swipes and Mamdani while conflating Democratic Socialism with Socialism and communism, Vance also repeated the whopper that any issues with housing or food costs right now are all Joe Biden’s fault.
INGRAHAM: Mamdani’s popularity is strong in New York, um Socialist, communist, whatever you want to call them. But his big push is for, quote, affordability.
And for young people, and I think this is something you touched on in Hillbilly Elegy, for people who feel like there’s no hope, that no matter what they do, they can’t really get ahead, they’ve tried, but they can barely make ends meet, that word affordability, and I’ll give you free stuff, is very powerful.
VANCE: Yes, it is.
INGRAHAM: What does that tell you about the future, especially if this economy runs into snags, does this message of Mamdani’s get more attractive?
VANCE: Well, first of all, we have to give the president a lot of credit here because he inherited one of the worst inflation crises in American history, And we’ve had very stable inflation over the last seven or eight months, sort of 2 to 3 percent, right where economists typically say that you want it.
But there’s a lot of work to do because prices got so high under the Biden administration.
I actually think most conservatives, this is where I disagree with a lot of my friends on the right, we make a mistake in dismissing Mamdani as a socialist, as a communist. These things are all absolutely true. I don’t care about that.
What I care about is why are young people so attracted to this message? And the reason is they feel like the American dream is unaffordable. If you’re a 25-year-old kid who can’t afford a home, if you’re a 25-year-old kid whose wages don’t allow you to take a nice vacation once a year, who don’t allow you to actually enjoy your life, then you’re gonna be attracted to somebody who’s promising free stuff.
Do I agree with the solutions? No. But Laura, you we just finished celebrating the life of Charlie Kirk just last week. He’s a great guy, but Charlie was smarter about this than almost any conservative I’ve ever talked to, because he recognized that what we have to do is give young people a stake in the future. Housing is too expensive. Groceries are too expensive.
Now, I would say they’re too expensive because we inherited a disastrous Biden economy and we’re making progress. It’s only been eight months, but we’ve made a lot of progress.
But unless we give young people a stake in the future, we can’t dismiss their concerns as socialism. They’re going to choose socialism if given an option between free stuff and a bad life. We have to make sure they have an option between free stuff and a real life of dignity, of purpose. That’s what the American conservative movement can provide to them, but we’ve got to do a better job at articulating it or they’re going to continue to be attracted to people like Mamdani.
Somehow the topic of Trump’s tariffs never came up during this discussion. Imagine that. Vance doesn’t care one iota about working people. He cares about giving tax breaks to his rich buddies.
