David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former political consultant, curbed President Joe Biden’s constant claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin is somehow the only person responsible for soaring inflation numbers and skyrocketing gas prices — which started before the unprovoked attack on Ukraine.
“Why not just be blunt with people … now they’ve overcorrected, and for a few days he [President Joe Biden] was saying, you know, everything was Putin’s price hikes, inflation was Putin’s fault,” Axelrod said during a recent episode on the Hacks on Tap podcast he helped start.
“People don’t believe that either. They know that we had inflation before this,” Axelrod continued. “They know that guy prices were high before this. They haven’t dialed this in quite right yet. You can’t blame everything in the economy on Putin.”
Over the last month, as the inflation rates are still going up and the price of gas has significantly gone up, Biden, along with a hand full of Democrats, has tried to blame everything on Putin instead of blaming themselves.
On March 10, Biden reacted to the February report showing soaring inflation numbers and blamed Putin. While the prices rose 7.9 percent from the previous year, a statement from Biden said, “[T] oday’s inflation report is a reminder that Americans’ budgets are being stretched by price increases and families are starting to feel the impacts of Putin’s price hike.”
On March 11, the president complained during a speech that he was “sick” of Americans blaming him for inflation instead of the coronavirus pandemic or Russian President Vladimir Putin. He said, “I’m sick of this stuff… The American people think the reason for inflation is the government spending more money… Simply. Not. True.”
On March 14, Biden said he’s not joking, but to “…make no mistake the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin,” falsely blaming Putin for the $1.05 rise in gas for an average gallon at the time. He also claimed that his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan had “nothing to do” with inflation.
Gas prices and inflation were already rising on Biden’s watch before Putin began building up troops in Ukraine.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter.