The Press Secretary has done nothing but lie for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Now she has no answers.
That’s why Karine Jean-Pierre tucked her tail and ran after being asked this question.
President Biden’s chief spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, once again demonstrated her knack for misleading statements on Tuesday by falsely claiming that grocery prices have “come down” recently.
This assertion flies in the face of federal data, which clearly shows that grocery costs have surged by 21.1% since Biden took office in 2021, with a persistent 1.1% increase over the past year alone.
Jean-Pierre made this unfounded claim during her regular briefing when a reporter pressed her on whether Biden agrees with Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign trail assertion that “price-gouging continues” with groceries.
“Yes, we’ve talked about this,” Jean-Pierre responded before confidently declaring, “To be clear, we’ve seen grocery prices come down over the past year or more, and so that is important, and a lot of that has been the work that’s been done by this administration.”
However, the Labor Department’s data tells a different story. Grocery prices have not decreased, despite a slowdown in the rate of increase during Biden’s final year in office.
In a feeble attempt to cover for Jean-Pierre’s blunder, a White House official later told The Post that she “meant grocery inflation — which has fallen to 1.1%.”
But this clarification did little to stem the wave of mockery that followed her error.
The RNC Research account on Twitter didn’t miss a beat, highlighting her mistake with a scathing tweet: “Karine Jean-Pierre continues to show why she is the least competent press secretary in history.”
Meanwhile, Harris has been doubling down on her narrative of corporate greed driving up grocery prices, even releasing an ad on Tuesday where a narrator promises that Harris will “make groceries more affordable by cracking down on price-gouging.”
Last month, Harris announced plans for price controls on groceries, a move that was met with swift and withering bipartisan criticism.
Even the Washington Post editorial board, which typically leans in favor of Democrats, took issue with her plan.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump wasted no time in using this to his advantage, labeling Harris a “communist” and dubbing her initiative the “Maduro plan” in reference to the disastrous economic policies of Venezuela’s socialist leader, Nicolas Maduro.
The food industry has pushed back against Harris’ claims, pointing out that the rise in grocery prices is largely due to overall inflation driving up labor and energy costs.
“We understand why there is this sticker shock and why it’s upsetting. But to automatically just say there’s got to be something nefarious, I think to us that is oversimplified,” Andy Harig, a vice president at FMI, a trade group representing food retailers and suppliers, told the Wall Street Journal.
Trump has made inflation under Biden, including skyrocketing grocery prices, a central theme of his campaign.
“People are voting with their stomachs,” Trump said last month, “meaning they’re going to the grocery store, they are paying 50, 60, 70% more for food than they did just a couple of years ago.”
Jean-Pierre’s latest gaffe only underscores the growing disconnect between the Biden administration’s rhetoric and the harsh realities faced by everyday Americans.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
