Hillary Clinton on Thursday mocked Donald Trump with a brutal historical comparison after the president declared, “I love the inflation.”
The former secretary of state and former first lady shared a side-by-side image on X of Trump and a painting of Marie Antoinette alongside the phrase commonly (though likely falsely) attributed to the doomed French queen, “Let them eat cake.”
Beside the president’s image was his remark from Wednesday: “I love the inflation.”
“Who said it best?” quipped Clinton, Trump’s Democratic rival in the 2016 presidential election.
The jab responded to Trump’s attempt to spin the latest worrying inflation figures, which showed consumer prices rising 4.2% over the past year.
Trump later claimed to the New York Post that he’d actually meant he loved that inflation “wasn’t any higher,” suggesting the cost-of-living crisis he has so far failed to tackle could be much worse because of the economic chaos caused by his Iran war.
“I was talking about inflation numbers that will be so good as soon as the war ends. The numbers will come way down, that’s what I’m talking about,” the president claimed to the Trump-friendly tabloid.
“I’m always taken out of context,” Trump complained. “My inflation numbers will be very low as soon as the war — they’re already very low, but they’ll be very low, because you know the energy brings them up a little bit, because we have to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”