WASHINGTON—The White House announced Tuesday that the cost of living is not a crisis. It is a public relations problem. The solution, officials said, is not to lower prices. It is to correct what one memo called "a defect in consumer perception."
The new program is called the National Price Perception Correction Initiative. It will send trained communicators to grocery stores in swing states. They will explain to shoppers that eggs are a choice. Gasoline is a lifestyle expense. Receipts are not facts.
The announcement came one day after Dementia Don told a rally crowd that the economy was the best in the world. He said the only thing missing was good public relations. "We have the best job numbers ever recorded," he said. "We just don't get the word across."
That reasoning now has a federal office. The initiative will run out of the Department of Commerce. Its first act is a $48 million ad campaign. The tagline is "Your Grocery Bill Is a Misunderstanding." A companion website will let voters enter what they paid for milk. The site will then tell them what they should have felt.
"The numbers are excellent," said Mark Ellerson, the program's new director. "The problem is that consumers are reading their own receipts. Raw data cannot be allowed to compete with official data."
The program has already begun hiring regional perception monitors. Their job is to stand near the dairy case and nod approvingly at prices. They do not carry calculators.
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told Fox News this week that the president was repeating a familiar error. "Every five minutes he's talking about AI or what kind of aspirin he takes is five minutes he's not talking about things that matter," Mulvaney said. "They care about the price of gas." He said this as if it were a new discovery.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week put the president's approval rating at 32 percent. Only 17 percent approve of his handling of the cost of living. The poll also found Democrats leading Republicans by seven points among registered voters. The initiative's first internal memo described those numbers as "a marketing challenge."
