Former Obama administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers stated during an interview with CNN this week that “Republicans who are saying that what happened on January 6 was nothing or OK” are the root cause of inflation under the Biden administration.
Summers also suggested that people who are distrustful of the government were to blame.
“I think the optimists were wrong a year ago in saying we have no inflation and I think they are wrong now if anyone is highly confident that we are going to avoid recession,” Summers said. “I think there is certainly a risk of recession in the next year and I think given where we have gotten to, it is more likely than not that we will have a recession in the next two years.”
“I think the banana Republicans who are saying that what happened on January 6 was nothing or OK are undermining the basic credibility of our country’s institutions,” Summers declared, without citing evidence.
He continued, “And that, in turn, feeds through for inflation. Because if you can’t trust the country’s government, why should you trust its money?”
Fmr. Treasury Sec. @LHSummers: "I think the banana Republicans who are saying that what happened on Jan. 6 was nothing or OK are undermining the basic credibility of our country's institutions… if you can't trust the country's govt, why should you trust its money?" #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/MeRvbb2nvn
— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) June 12, 2022
The idea that Republicans are responsible for inflation does not appear to have caught on with the general public.
In fact, an aggregation of national pools compiled by the website FiveThirtyEight shows that Democrat president Joe Biden’s approval rating has slipped below 40%.
As of June 13, FiveThirtyEight’s graph shows that a staggering 53.6% of poll respondents disapprove of Biden’s job performance, with 39.7% approving.
Biden was the most popular presidential candidate in US history, receiving a staggering vote count totaling over 81 million in the 2020 election. His supporter base dwarfed that of the most recent Democrat president, Barack Obama.
However, Biden’s massive voter coalition appears to have shrunken significantly since his inauguration, becoming wildly unpopular by even the most nonpartisan metrics.
On Sunday, progressive US House rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) refused to commit to supporting Biden in the 2024 presidential election, laughing at the prospect during an interview with CNN.
