A Democratic lawmaker reacted to President Donald Trump's Sunday night news conference from a helicopter tarmac.
The president spoke to reporters as a Marine One chopper stood by, and he was asked to comment on a variety of topics, including his firing of Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief who oversaw a July jobs report that suggested a slowdown in the economy, and Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) told CNN that Trump risked making the economy even worse.
"China, Argentina, Greece, these are countries that in the last 30 to 40 years did two things," Auchincloss said. "They undermined the soundness of their currency by bullying their central bankers, and, two, they lied about government statistics to the degree that other countries and the international monetary system stopped believing their statistics. This is exactly what Donald Trump is doing."
"He's picking a fight with an independent central bank in Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve," Auchincloss added, "and he has politicized federal labor and economic statistics, and it puts us on the same road as these other countries at a time when our economy is weakening because of his chaotic stewardship and at a time when his corruption has distracted his focus and his administration's focus from what his Americans number-one priority, which is cost of living, particularly in housing and health care."
The congressman said it didn't matter who Trump put in place to replace McEntarfer.
"It's immaterial, because whoever he puts into this job, any number they put out next quarter is immediately going to be presumed to have been vetted by the political actors around the president, and so even if the statistic is purely sound, even if he appoints some Nobel laureate economist, it doesn't matter because you, me, anybody who thinks independently is going to look at those numbers and say, well, this was okayed by Donald Trump, thereby, it's almost certainly a lie," Auchincloss said.
"I just listened to his remarks in front of Marine One and just casually while I was standing here," he added. "I counted more than 15 lies, including, by the way, that those remarks about pharmaceutical prices. You are right, by the way, you cannot drop prices by more than 100 percent – mathematically impossible, and also, his executive order has none, no force of law whatsoever. So everything he's saying is just pure nonsense."