During a Thursday event intended to promote the Republican tax agenda, President Donald Trump seemed to veer off script, riffing about how he had never heard the term “corner store” and calling the inflation that resulted from the Iran war “fake.”
”What is a corner store?” the president said to the crowd gathered for his roundtable. “I’ve never heard that term. I know what a corner store is, but I’ve never heard it described [as] a ‘corner store.’ Who the hell wrote that?”
Elsewhere, as he touted the suite of new deductions in last year’s GOP-led One Big Beautiful Bill legislation, the billionaire president seemed to suggest middle class and poor people don’t think about tax deductions.
“So when rich people do something, they always look for deductions, right? It’s always deductions. They have deductions and everything,” Trump said. “And middle class and middle-income people, poorer people, they don’t get — they don’t think in terms of deductions.”
Later in the event, the president seemed to acknowledge how his global agenda, which has included mass tariffs and a war in the vital oil lane of the Middle East, has impacted financial markets, even as he claimed the economy has never been better.
The president said the current economy is even better than that of his first term “despite our little diversion to the lovely country of Iran.”
The war has all but stopped traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil shipping lane, and in the U.S., the national average price of gas is up more than a dollar since the war began, according to AAA. The IMF has warned the war could trigger a global recession.
The national average cost for a gallon of gasoline stands at $4.09, up from $2.92 before the Iran war broke out, according to AAA. In Nevada, prices are pushing $5 a gallon.
Earlier in the day at the White House, Trump took a similar tack on gas prices, telling reporters, “They’re not very high,” while pointing to the soaring stock market, which has been buoyed by hopes the war could end soon.
In Vegas, the president continued along these lines, calling war-related inflation “fake inflation.”
Despite these denials, the president seemed to admit he sometimes rattles the market.
“When he speaks, the whole market gets soothed,” Trump said as he introduced Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
“When I speak,” Trump continued, “the whole market goes a little jittery. I say Scott, go out there, clean it for me.”
During the Vegas roundtable, the president said roughly half of American tax-filers took advantage of new Trump-era policies and about five million people have opened “Trump account” savings pools for their newborn children.
