| Stepping out from her multimillion dollar house paid for with a $35 million net worth, Laurie Buckhout had one message for working North Carolinians struggling with skyrocketing prices: the economy is doing really well, actually.
In a wildly out-of-touch interview reported on by NOTUS this week, Buckout claimed that “the economy is actually doing better than I think the naysayers want to have it do.” Record high gas prices, she said, are “definitely worth it.”
Buckhout’s comments should come as no surprise after she praised the cost-raising tariffs and war-of-choice in Iran that are squeezing North Carolinians’ wallets dry.
DCCC Spokesperson Madison Andrus:
“Laurie Buckhout has no idea what it’s like to worry about the cost of groceries, gas, or health care, but she’s all too happy to tell North Carolinians that they should stop complaining. Take it from Buckhout’s own words: she has no idea how to represent working North Carolinians, which is why they’ll reject her once again in November.”
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NOTUS: Dana Milbank: The Republican Midterm Message on Inflation? Stop Whining!
- Prices are climbing, President Donald Trump has hit a record low in polls, and only 16 percent of Americans think the country is going in the right direction.
- So several Republican candidates and office holders are approaching the midterm elections with a most unorthodox message for voters: Quit your bellyaching.
- The toughen-up argument is part of a broader response to inflation that also includes a fair measure of denial and dismissal. In fairness, Republicans don’t have many good options to counter the rising-prices complaint, any more than Democrats did when Trump and other Republicans bashed them for high grocery and gas prices under the Biden administration.
- Trump, though, has made things worse than they had to be for Republicans. He has personally amassed some $4.2 billion since 2024 — nearly tripling his net worth — by using his office for personal gain, mostly through crypto schemes. This, while Americans have seen their purchasing power diminish for housing, groceries, energy and health care.
- The president has made occasional gestures to lower prices (his pre-midterms plan to import cheap, tariff-free ground beef met with hostility from American ranchers) but mostly he has dismissed the affordability issue as a “Democratic hoax.” “I’ve won affordability,” he proclaimed in February, before he started the war in Iran — a war that led him to say, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” Gas prices are “not very high,” he said in April, when the average price was $4.12 a gallon, about the same as today and a dollar higher than when Trump took office.
- “I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing,” he said this month about the war-induced spike in fuel costs.
- Some Republicans who are on the ballot this fall have joined Trump in denial. Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin told Fox Business in July that “the Democrats invented this term ‘affordability.’” He added air quotes for emphasis.
- On Aug. 6, Laurie Buckhout, who is trying to unseat a Democratic congressman in North Carolina, opined that “the economy is actually doing better than I think the naysayers want to have it do.” She told radio host Hugh Hewitt that the Iran war “is definitely worth it.”
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