Trump 'giving Republicans heartburn' with 'flippant' remarks on crucial topic: analyst

A former staffer for President Donald Trump gamely attempted during a CNN appearance to find a silver lining in his surprising comments about inflation.

The 79-year-old president was asked Wednesday about inflation shooting up 4.2 percent last month, and he declared, "I love the inflation," and his former White House communications director from early in his first term tried to clean up a statement that seems tailor-made for Democratic campaign ads.

"It's absolutely going to be a big, fat campaign ad for Democrats," said Mike Dubke. "They are going to use it. I think what the president, in context, he was basically quoting [a 1968 song by] Blood, Sweat and Tears, 'What Goes Up Must Come Down.' I think that he's assuming that once we cease hostilities with Iran and oil prices come down, that the momentum going into the midterm elections is going to create a situation where people feel good about the economy."

Dubke cautioned that the president might be overly optimistic in his assumption.

"The unfortunate part, I think, right now is that runway, until we get to the midterms, is shrinking, and so we really we if that's going to happen, it's got to happen soon," Dubke said.

Trump's remark isn't the first recent example of him veering wildly off-script on the economy, according to CNN's Aaron Blake.

"This has been a trend with President Trump," Blake said. "I would say, dating back to last year, we might remember at the time, inflation was starting to become a real political problem for him, and he was supposed to go out and give some speeches and rallies in places like Pennsylvania, where he talked about affordability and what he was going to do about these very real concerns that the American people had, and it just became clear that he didn't really want to talk about this. He was talking about affordability was a hoax and things like that."

The polling shows voters have taken note of Trump's comments and formed a strongly negative opinion, he said.

"So this has been a very long-running problem for the White House and for Republicans in the midterms, where the president just treats these issues very flippantly, and the American people, if you look at the polling, have seen that and said that this guy is not taking this issue seriously enough," Blake said. "There is a CNN poll showed two-thirds of Americans think that the president is not taking inflation seriously. It was as high as three quarters in a CBS News poll that I've been watching for a while."

"So this is a very real issue, and he does not seem to be changing his tack on this," he added, "and I think it's giving Republicans real heartburn right now."

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