At Karoline Leavitt’s press briefing today she got fairly uncommon push back from a reporter. More striking, it was from White House correspondent from CBS News, which has recently come under Trump friendly ownership. CBS News’ Nancy Cordes following up on interaction between Leavitt and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said, “just first very quickly clarifying uh Kaitlan’s question. You acknowledged that CPI in January when you took office was 3% and in September, the last month for which we have data, it was also 3%. So inflation” At that point Leavitt interjected “No, it’s 2.5%. Not in September it was 3%. 2.5%. The average CPI right now, I have it in front of me. In President Trump’s first eight months in office, inflation, as measured by the overall consumer price index, has slowed to a 2.5 average pace. This is down from the 2.9% inherited in January.”
To clarify those number, the CPI in December of last year was 2.9%, in January it was 3.0%, and in the latest month available, September, it was 3.0%. Karoline Leavitt’s 2.5% is a average across Trump’s term, which wouldn’t be the relevant comparison to one month under Biden. The reason to cite that figure is that it hides that inflation is basically unchanged in this Trump term so far to what it was at the tail end of the Biden administration.
This comes as CBS News’ parent Paramount is trying to buy CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery after Paramount was recently acquired by the Ellison family. They are supposed to Trump friendly, but apparently not enough, as it was just on Monday that Trump was criticizing them on Truth Social over 60 Minutes interview with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. He wrote in part, “it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air.”
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