‘Don’t Touch Me’: Donald Trump’s Broken Grocery Price Promise Sparks Fiery CNN Showdown as Republican Strategist Scott Jennings Snaps at Bakari Sellers in Heated Debate
Since Donald Trump won the 2024 election, one of his more reliable media cheerleaders, Republican political strategist turned CNN panelist Scott Jennings has seen his profile rise. Has that newfound fame gone to his head?
While discussing Trump’s recent admission that lowering grocery prices, as he promised to do in his campaign, will be difficult to do, Democratic strategist Bakari Sellers appeared to raise Jennings’ ire while disputing his claim that the president-elect’s tax cuts, along with a reduction in energy prices, will untangle the supply chain and help lower grocery prices.
“Can we level set just for a moment? All right, Donald Trump lied. That’s first. And let’s just articulate exactly that is not true,” Sellers began.
“Let me just clearly state what he lied about. Just so we are on the same page. All right. During the campaign, Donald Trump said that he was going to bring prices down. Today he simply said, ‘You know what? Those prices, particularly grocery prices, are not going to come down.’”
After belaboring the point by defining what constitutes a lie, Sellers tapped Jennings on the shoulder and continued.
“One of the things we know is Scott was actually 50 percent correct and that Democrats did not do a good job in telling our story,” he said. “We did not do a good job of addressing the pain that Americans felt. We said one of the mistakes we made throughout Biden’s campaign was saying, or, excuse me, Biden’s presidency, which kind of happens around the table sometimes. Although I know you want to be —”
“Don’t touch me,” Jennings snapped.
“I can’t touch you?” Sellers laughed, placing his hand on Jennings’ back.
Jennings’ body language indicated it was not OK. The Kentucky native, a former adviser to Mitch McConnell, was recently named to the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board following a shake-up intended to bring a greater diversity of voices to the newspaper’s opinion pages.
“All right, everybody, keep your hands to yourselves,” CNN host Abby Phillip interceded.
Sellers continued, “But one of the things Scott was not accurate about, though, was the reason why we have inflation in the first place. This is not Joe Biden’s policy.”
The segment was focused on this quote by the president-elect during an interview with Time magazine.
“It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” Trump said. “You know, it’s very hard.”
The president-elect is not entirely wrong, though he ignored the complexities of the issue while campaigning. Many of the things that drive higher prices are out of a president’s control, economists say.
First, there were the supply chain disruptions from COVID that lingered beyond the pandemic. That led to rising energy prices and higher costs for transportation and labor. Industry experts say the effects of climate change cannot be overlooked, as California, where most of the nation’s produce comes from, endured unprecedented heat and a significant drought.
And the war in Ukraine also had an impact, agricultural economist David Ortega told PBS in a recent interview.
“That region is what’s called the breadbasket of Europe, a major supplier of wheat and sunflower oil, which goes into a lot of processed food products,” Ortega said. “So that set off rising commodity prices on the global market.”