Vice President J.D. Vance wants you to believe that Donald Trump will lower grocery prices, even if he can’t explain how it’s going to be accomplished.
Speaking to CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Sunday, the vice president insisted that food prices will come down — but he couldn’t provide any details about how or when that will happen.
“You campaigned on lowering prices for consumers,” Brennan asked. We’ve seen all these executive orders. Which one of these orders lowers prices?”
“We’ve done a lot,” Vance said. “And there are a number of executive orders that have already started to bring jobs back to our country, which is a key part of bringing prices down. More capital investment in our economy, more job creation, is one of the things that is going to drive prices down for all consumers, but also raise wages so people can afford to buy the things they need.”
“So grocery prices aren’t going to come down?” Brennan interjected.
“No, no, Margaret, prices are going to come down, but it’s going to take a while,” Vance added, claiming Trump has so far done more in five days using the power of his office than President Joe Biden has done during his entire term.
“The way you lower prices is you encourage more capital investment in our country,” Vance said.
But despite having just one week in the bank, prices of some common grocery items are rising, not falling, thanks to one of Trump’s most controversial economic policies: aggressive international tariffs.
Most recently, coffee prices have jumped following Trump’s weekend tariff dispute with Colombia, in which the president threatened a 25 percent tariff hike against one of America’s strongest allies in Latin America to force the country to accept the use of military planes to receive deportees from the US.
About 20 percent of the US coffee supply comes from Colombia. That’s second only to Brazil, which has failed to produce its usual harvest due to record temperatures and suffering from the worst drought in more than seven decades.
Meanwhile, Trump’s favorite TV network celebrated the price hike on Monday, saying on live air that rising consumer prices would be worth the cost if it successfully drove immigrants out of the country.
“After all, would you pay an extra quarter on a cup of coffee to send those people back?” Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy asked, to which Brian Kilmeade replied: “Yes!”
The co-hosts’ solution? Buy cheaper coffee options at the grocery store.
“You just go to Taster’s Choice. It’s instant. You put it in, and shake it,” Kilmeade said.
Trump — who claimed he won in November based on his promise to lower grocery costs — abruptly changed his tune in December, telling TIME that “once things go up, it’s hard to bring them down.”
