KALISPELL, Mont. — Jennifer Piperakis says it costs her $200 to fill her truck with diesel, and she still loves President Trump.
She was standing in line on Wednesday to hear him say the opposite of what her receipt says. “We have very little inflation,” Trump told the Montana crowd, on the day the September CPI inflation report put the annual rate at 3.7 percent. Elsewhere in the speech he put it more flatly: “we don’t have inflation.”
That is the gap Republicans carry into the last three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms. NBC News reported that polling suggests voters’ unhappiness with economic conditions could cost the party its slim congressional majority.
Trump, speaking at Majestic Valley Arena in the final leg of a Western campaign swing, told supporters that poverty is down, incomes are up and more than $22 trillion is flowing into the country, NBC News reported. Its account carries no source for the $22 trillion figure.
Moneen Ahlquist, an 84-year-old homemaker from Missoula, combines errands so her car stays in the garage. “We shop at grocery stores where we can pump our gas and get a few cents off,” she said. Megan Gurhlke, 44, who works on a dairy farm, said three of her four family members work full time. “We can’t afford stuff because the prices are so bad,” she said.
The supporters NBC interviewed did not fault him. Some echoed his line that former President Joe Biden is to blame for high prices, and others said they would be patient. Prices “are getting worse,” said Gary Hanson, who runs a hardware store in Kalispell, but “it’s going to take a long time to turn everything around.”
The White House made its own case in a release timed to the visit, saying Montana ranked ninth in the nation for job growth during the first year of Trump’s second term. The rest is a catalogue of projects: an $800 million advanced manufacturing campus in Great Falls that it says will create more than 1,000 jobs within five years, coal mine expansions, and nearly $1 billion in Sentinel missile construction work at Malmstrom. It does not mention inflation, grocery prices or fuel costs.
Trump himself nodded to high fuel costs and predicted they will fall once the Iran war ends. Defending his tariffs, he said “We’re richer now.”
Piperakis called gas prices “outrageous” and then spoke about veterans. Her husband is one, she said, and Biden “didn’t do anything for him.”
