CNN anchor Brianna Keilar and former Trump financial advisor Stephen Moore (YouTube Screengrab)
CNN anchor Brianna Keilar reports oil prices are surging as President Donald Trump pledges to escalate his war against Iran. Trump offered no exit strategy or timetable at his Wednesday night state address. Meanwhile, states that Trump won in 2024 are seeing disproportionate increases in gas prices, with Utah up $1.46, Arizona up $1.37, as well as the states of Florida, Idaho, Kentucky and others.
“How long can people really bear that?” Keilar asked former Trump advisor Stephen Moore.
Moore assured Keilar that Americans will “get through this” and argued that prices were higher (when adjusted for inflation) at times during the 1970s.
But Keiler pointed out Trump’s polling showing Trump’s approval on the economy plummeting to a “new career low 31 percent, which is down eight points overall since January.”
“It's down 14 percent with Republicans since January. That is really a dip. Is he risking [anything] with these Biden style assurances that everything is fine?” said Keilar. “I'll be honest, I'm even hearing a little bit of that from you as well, that everything is fine, that it's going in the right direction when that is not what people are acutely feeling.”
Keilar then corrected Moore for beginning his answer with a comment on “inflation.”
“Can we just be clear? This isn't inflation,” Keilar corrected. “This is the effect of a foreign policy decision [Trump’s war] on something that people can't avoid.”
“I can't answer this and you can't answer it,” said Moore. “It's the question the American people really have to ask themselves. … Are you willing to absorb that short term pain … to create potentially a more prosperous and freer world.”
To this, Keilar cited a recent video of Trump saying “don't send any money for daycare because the United States can't take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal.”
“We have to take care of one thing: Military protection,” said Trump. “We have to guard the country.”
But Moore said he agreed with Trump, saying “Clearly the number one responsible of the United States government is our national security.”
Keilar was about to end the interview, but declared “I'm going to push it back a little bit here.”
“He's supposed to be speaking to what people are feeling, which is that their health care costs are bananas. Their gas prices are bananas. Daycare is insane,” Keilar told Moore. “Is he out of touch?”
But if Trump is out of touch, so was Moore, who declared: “The question is whether it's the federal government's responsibility to deal with those problems.”
- YouTube www.youtube.com
