Former President Donald Trump blasted his successor again on Monday during an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, while detailing what policies he believes President Biden should adopt to keep inflation in check and energy prices lower as winter approaches.
Pointing out that gasoline prices now are about double what they were when he was in office, he said that recent small price declines won’t last “because it’s going up like a rocket ship.”
He added that inflation overall is “snowballing worse than ever,” and that the cost of energy is the “biggest problem.”
“If you have a bakery, if you have anything, you have to heat it, you have to have the machinery, it’s all energy,” he said, noting that businesses rely on trucks, rail, ships, and planes to deliver goods, all of which require fossil fuels to transport.
And as those costs go up, so will the price of goods.
“The energy costs have gone up so high, it’s staggering, that everything else is affected,” Trump continued.
Fox Business notes further:
Consumer prices surged at the fastest pace in nearly four decades in November as Americans paid more for practically everything from groceries to cars to gasoline.
The consumer price index rose 6.8% in November from a year ago, according to a Labor Department report, marking the fastest increase since June 1982, when inflation hit 7.1%. The CPI – which measures a bevy of goods ranging from gasoline and health care to groceries and rents – jumped 0.8% in the one-month period from October.
Price increases were widespread with energy prices jumping 3.5% in November, up 33.3% year over year. Gasoline is a stunning 58.1% higher than it was a year ago.
After Bartiromo asked Trump what to do to stop energy price hikes, he laid out a simple solution that he followed: “The first thing you have you to do is produce energy and not rely on OPEC.”
The country became energy independent for the first time in more than a half-century under Trump’s energy policies.
The former president also took Biden to task for releasing 50 million barrels of oil from the country’s strategic reserve.
“This is a big deal,” Trump said, noting that the reserves are “meant for war” and not “meant to get the prices down a little bit.”
The former president went on to say that when prices for oil were low “I said, ‘Let’s fill up the strategic reserves’ and we did 75 million barrels. That’s a lot for almost nothing.”
“We bought it for a steal when we had the low,” he stressed.
Trump then slammed Biden’s decision, saying, “This guy comes along, and he says, ‘Oh good, now it’s filled up, we’ll just do it in order to get prices down,’ which is just artificial, and they can’t do it that long because it’s not going to last that long.”