# Post ts_117288829666075555

- Post ID: `ts_117288829666075555`
- Platform: Truth Social
- Posted: 2026-09-17T22:51:51.262Z (UTC)
- Deleted: no
- Repost: no
- Canonical URL: https://trump.fm/post/ts_117288829666075555
- Analysis page: https://trump.fm/post/ts_117288829666075555/analysis

## Post text

_No text of its own. The post is its media, below._

## What the media says

**Video transcript** (4:07), transcribed automatically, so names and numbers may be wrong. Speakers aren't identified, so a voice in it may not be his:

> Here is, at this point in the presidency, for both Joe Biden and President Trump, their second year in office, the first half of that year, January to July, inflation. Overall inflation was 12% for Joe Biden, 4% for President Trump. Groceries were up 16% for President Biden, a little over 3% for President Trump. Gas was up almost 70% for Biden. That's up about 12% during that timeframe for Trump. New and used cars were up almost 24% for Joe Biden, down under President Trump. But prices aren't the only numbers that matter. It's no secret Americans are feeling about how they're feeling about the high cost of living. But there's also what you make, what you earn. And that has been moving up. Real median household income hit more than $80,000 last year. That's the highest level on record, according to the Census Bureau. On the flip side, that's median household income. There's poverty. Poverty was down another half point last year to just over 10%. That, as you can see, is a historic low. So this reality and how we feel have to be reconciled. But that's hard to do when you see how these two different stories are covered. See if you can spot the difference. Here's The Washington Post in 2022 under Joe Biden. The stunning drop in child poverty is a huge story. This month, as we hit poverty rates that are the lowest in history, here's the headline in The Washington Post. Both poverty rate dropped slightly, but experts fear worse ahead. Let's reconcile how we feel in reality with Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni, who joins me now. EJ, it's good to see you. Listen, I know how people feel. We both talk to people, and we see it showing up in polling. But how do we compare and reconcile that with these numbers, which are historically great? They are, Will, but one of the things I think is important, going back to that first chart you showed, where it was the inflation rate difference between Trump and Biden. At the end of the day, consumers don't as much care about the inflation rate, which is the pace at which prices are increasing. What they really care about are the levels of prices. And so any additional price increases that we see under this administration, it's kind of like the straw breaking the camel's back because they are on top of all of the price increases that we had from the previous administration during Biden. And so even though, again, even though things have gotten better under President Trump, in other words, not only are paychecks bigger, but they can buy you more, which is why, as you were saying, real median household income is up, for a lot of Americans, they still have not yet regained all the lost ground that they saw under Biden. So let me just put this into real numbers so that I, and perhaps the audience, understand exactly what you're saying. If your grocery bill went up 15% under Joe Biden, the fact that it's now only going up 3% doesn't inspire a lot of credit. They're still paying 18% more than what they expected to be paying from the inflation baked in during the four years under Biden. And this, even though wages are growing. Exactly. And I think the other thing that has really left a kind of a bad taste in people's mouths, as well, is the fact that during the first year, really the first 14 months of this second Trump administration, we were making tremendous progress. In fact, if you can believe this, the average American's weekly paycheck adjusted for inflation shrunk 4% under Biden from when he entered office to when he left. But during Trump's first year, it went up 2%. In other words, we clawed back half of the losses that we saw under Biden. And again, this is the Average American's weekly paycheck.

## Media

- video: https://static-assets-1.truthsocial.com/tmtg:prime-ts-assets/media_attachments/files/117/288/827/950/556/087/original/9de7f0519ad3a066.mp4

## Engagement

- Likes: 11,338
- Reposts: 3,422
- Replies: 771
- Views: unknown
- Metrics collected: 2026-09-24T22:00:56.924Z (UTC)

# Analysis

_Machine-generated by trump.fm on 2026-09-17T23:19:43.129Z (UTC): a model's reading of this post, not his words. Its psychological terms describe the language, not a clinical assessment of him._

## An economic defense argued entirely by other men

The post carries no words of his own — a Fox News segment (the host is addressed as "Will," placing it on Will Cain's late-afternoon program, roughly three hours before the 6:51 PM ET timestamp) in which a chyron-ready series of Biden-vs-Trump inflation comparisons is walked through and then handed to Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni. Everything favorable is spoken in the third person about "President Trump." He supplies only the act of putting it in front of his audience.

What the clip is built to do is answer a complaint nobody in it disputes: that people think the cost of living is bad. The host says it outright — "I know how people feel. We both talk to people, and we see it showing up in polling" — and Antoni concedes more than that: "any additional price increases that we see under this administration, it's kind of like the straw breaking the camel's back," and "for a lot of Americans, they still have not yet regained all the lost ground." The chart itself concedes gas "up about 12% during that timeframe for Trump" and groceries "a little over 3%."

That is an unusual thing to choose to amplify. The familiar move on affordability is flat denial — prices are down, groceries are down, it's the greatest economy ever. This clip instead accepts the public's unhappiness as real and relocates its cause into the previous administration's price *levels*, which no current policy can lower. The framing is a rationalization in the technical sense: it constructs a logically coherent account in which continued pain and his own success are simultaneously true, with the pain permanently owned by someone else. Antoni's "even though things have gotten better under President Trump" does the whole load-bearing work, and it is a sentence that can be repeated indefinitely regardless of what prices do.

## The second target, which is the press

The segment's rhetorical center is not the arithmetic. It is "See if you can spot the difference" — two Washington Post headlines, 2022's "The stunning drop in child poverty is a huge story" against the current "poverty rate dropped slightly, but experts fear worse ahead." The audience is invited to perform the detection themselves, which is a more durable persuasive structure than being told. Having spent the first half of the clip granting that voters feel bad, the second half supplies the reason they feel bad that costs him nothing: they were told to.

This is displacement with a practical function. Bad sentiment about his economy becomes evidence of press malfeasance rather than economic reality, and the sentiment can then rise or fall without ever counting against him. It is the same structure as his written economic posts, but sourced to a broadcaster and a credentialed economist instead of asserted in his own voice — borrowed authority doing what capital letters usually do.

Against Biden, the comparison runs on a clean split: 12% against 4%, 16% against 3%, 70% against 12%, 24% against "down." One era is entirely the cause of harm, the other entirely the source of repair, with no shared macroeconomic weather between them. The redemption arc is explicit in Antoni's "we clawed back half of the losses."

## Where he was and who pressed post

Constitution Day, a domestic day — he had already posted about the Farm Bill vote and the Smithsonian's Washington statue. 6:51 PM ET is his ordinary window for clipping cable that aired in the afternoon, and same-day television reaction is a long-standing personal habit rather than a staff one. But a media-only post leaves no spelling, no punctuation, no drift, nothing to score; the timing is the only evidence, and it does not distinguish him from an aide with a clip queue. The attribution below is a guess about whose finger chose this segment, not about who composed anything.

Nothing in the segment names a person, marks a group, or reaches past argument. The grievance is directed at a newspaper's headline writing, and its remedy is that viewers notice.

## Longitudinal note

The concession is the part worth tracking. Posts that admit voters are hurting under his own economy have been rare; this one adopts that admission as the premise of a defense. If that framing recurs — pain is real, its cause is 2021-2024, and the press manufactures the attribution — it marks a shift from denial toward a rationalization sturdy enough to survive bad numbers.

## Authorship Analysis

**Uncertain** (score: 60%)

### Indicators

- Posted 6:51 PM ET, roughly three hours after the Will Cain program's afternoon air slot — consistent with his habitual same-day clipping of cable segments
- No accompanying text, caption, or framing line, which is more typical of his own rapid reposting than of staff packaging
- Domestic day (Constitution Day, Farm Bill and Smithsonian posts earlier), so no travel or timezone complication
- Evening rather than business hours, weakly favoring personal over staff posting
- No stylometric evidence exists: no spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or syntax of his own to score

## Psychological Profile

### Traits

**Big Five:**
- Extraversion: 55%
- Agreeableness: 20%
- Conscientiousness: 45%
- Neuroticism: 50%
- Openness: 20%

Strongest facet: low modesty, expressed through proxy praise rather than first-person boast

**Motives:**
- Agency: 70%
- Communion: 15%

Primary drive: validation

### Narrative

- **Role:** Vindicated steward, argued for by others rather than by himself
- **Arc:** redemption
- **Contrasting:** Joe Biden as the origin of all remaining price pain, and the Washington Post as the reason voters do not credit the recovery

**Identity Claims:**
- The economic manager whose results are real whether or not they are felt
- The leader whose record is systematically under-reported
- The successor cleaning up an inherited price shock

### State

**Mixed State**

**Trigger:** Narcissistic Injury — Criticism (Sustained public dissatisfaction with cost of living under his administration, and press framing of poverty and inflation data)

Sentiment: +0.20

### Clinical

**Malignant Narcissism:**
- Narcissistic: 45%
- Antisocial: 15%
- Paranoid: 40%
- Sadism: 5%

**Defense Mechanisms:**
- rationalization (neurotic)
- displacement (neurotic)
- splitting (immature)
- devaluation (immature)

**Parasocial Techniques:**
- Borrowed authority: a Heritage economist and a network host deliver the flattery so it arrives as reporting rather than boasting
- Invited detection — "See if you can spot the difference" — recruits the viewer to reach the conclusion unassisted, which binds it harder than assertion
- Validation of the audience's felt experience ("I know how people feel") before redirecting its cause, so agreement precedes persuasion
- Wordless endorsement: silence lets the segment stand as neutral third-party confirmation rather than self-promotion

## Tags

- media-only-post (100%)
- cable-news-clip-amplification (90%)
- inflation-and-cost-of-living (95%)
- biden-blame-attribution (85%)
- media-bias-grievance (80%)
- rationalization (85%)
- displacement (70%)
- splitting (60%)
- appeal-to-authority (75%)
- invited-inference (70%)
- selective-comparison-window (65%)
- defensive-maintenance (80%)

## That day

_From trump.fm's machine-generated digest of the day, not his words._

**Lake Ontario becomes "Lake America" and a 12–11 committee vote becomes a passed Farm Bill**

Trump spent the day adding up wins with nobody on the other side of the ledger. He started the night before with patriotic imagery and a news link about the National Weather Service renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America," went quiet for about nine and a half hours, then came back mid-morning to announce progress on a U.S. Army base in Poland, a Senate move on college sports pay, and a farm bill he said had passed — though the vote he was describing was a committee's 12-11 tally, with another vote still to come. He closed out the evening by posting four screenshots and then the full video of a single Fox News segment comparing prices and incomes under Biden with his own. There was no anger anywhere in it and nobody was attacked, including the two Republican senators who voted against him, whom he simply predicted would come around. The strain in this day is in the bookkeeping, not the mood.

Full digest for 2026-09-17: https://trump.fm/date/2026-09-17/analysis

## Citation

- APA: Trump, D. J. (2026, September 17).  [Social media post]. Truth Social. trump.fm. https://trump.fm/post/ts_117288829666075555
- MLA: Trump, Donald J. "" Truth Social, 17 Sep. 2026. trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_117288829666075555. Accessed 9 Oct. 2026.
- Chicago: Donald J. Trump, "," Truth Social, September 17, 2026, archived at trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_117288829666075555.

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