Dolls, pencils, backyard chickens and ‘a piece of broccoli’: The Trump team’s awkward austerity talk

 https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/15/politics/trump-rollins-austerity-affordability-inflation

Amid the European debt crisis in the early 2010s, a Fox News pundit named Donald Trump warned about a backlash against leaders asking people to tighten their belts.

“You can’t impose this kind of austerity on people when the people aren’t used to it,” Trump said in the 2012 interview, unless you’re in a depression

Fast-forward 14 years, and now-President Trump and his administration are regularly talking about how people can pinch pennies.

The remarks not only undermine Trump’s frequent all-is-well happy talk about the economy. (Why would you need to be so frugal if we’re in a “golden age?”) But they also give Trump’s opponents’ ammunition to paint him and his team as out of touch with the struggles of people who aren’t, like Trump and so many people around him, uber-wealthy.