KJP Blames COVID Job Loss, Small Business Collapse and School Closures on Trump and Republicans

CAPEHART: “You said the magic word, ‘economy,’ because it fits the question I was going to ask you. We got some good news, some good economic news this week, with the GDP growing at a faster pace than most people expected. And yet, still there is inflation. There is the fear of looming recession. Poll after poll showed that voters trust, they say they trust Republicans more than Democrats when it comes to the economy. What is the administration’s response to that persistent view among the electorate?”

JEAN=PIERRE: “So, first, we have always said we understand what the American public is dealing with. We understand there are high costs and we understand they are feeling very squeezed right now. The President always says this, you hear him say this all the time. He wants to make sure we give Americans a little bit more breathing room, which is what his dad used to say when he grew up in Scranton and dealing with these kitchen table issues. So, when the President walked into this administration, the economy was in ruins. It was in absolute ruins. We saw unemployment was above 6.4%. Hundreds of thousands of jobs, small businesses were shutting down. The majority of schools were shut down. And if you think about the previous president, we saw something that we hadn’t seen before, which is he had lost more jobs since President Herbert Hoover. So now, because of this president’s policies, unemployment is at 3.5%, historic low, we haven’t seen that in 50 years. We see 10 million jobs have been created. And he moved even further by making sure we lower those gas prices, right? Because of Russia and the war that Putin has started, we saw gas prices go up. Now it is down by $1.25 per gallon since the peak of June. That is because this president took historic actions to make sure that gas prices were coming down. We still have more work to do. That is why the Inflation Reduction Act is so important. We still have more work to do. That’s why the President made sure that hearing aids for folks went down, 30 million people are going to be able to get hearing aids at a cost that is not $3,000 a pair. So those are the types of actions he will continue to take to lower cost.”