what trump s innermost circle thought of his election fraud lies. detached from reality was the polite way of putting. president biden wrapping up a speech in philadelphia to the aflcio convention. the president s argument, times are tough, but he should be trusted to get us through the economic pain. and the president got political saying a republican wave in november would bring a renewed attack on two sources of security. the president says republicans would put programs like medicare and social security at risk. our cnn white house correspondent is traveling with the president in philadelphia. john, the president was relaxed because he was among friends. talked about the economics, but he also talked politics. he did. look, this was a president, john, who was reveling in the applause of his friends in the union movement. he s always said from the beginning of his presidential campaign that he s a union guy. so he talked about the positive aspects of his economic record.
The president is that upcoming trip to the middle east, and he has decided that it s worth swallowing those statements he made about saudi arabia as a pariah on the international stage for the possibility of getting an increase in oil production that would help bring gas prices down. the presidency often is a place where you get only bad choices, and he s decided the least bad choice in this case is to meet with mbs and other saudi leaders and try to get gas prices down. that s why he says inflation is his top priority. the choices range from bad to awful. probably why he was so happy to be among friends today. john har wood with us live today. thank you. let s talk with this further with gina. grateful for your time. the president laying out his plan, trust me. a lot of this is out of his control and the fed will meet tomorrow and has a big decision on its plate. i want to show you the markets. this is just the financial markets in the past year.
Unattractive that mitch mcconnell has walked away from it. said it s not going to happen. but nevertheless, we re going to hear a lot more of this for the six months until the election unless inflation starts coming down. we ve got a big inflation report that the government s going to put out tomorrow. some economists think that inflation is peaking and about to go down. we will see tomorrow what the next sign is. we ll be watching, but i think we should all buckle up for the politics no matter what heading into the next several months. joining us now is stacy van exsmith, a business and economics correspondent, great to have you with us this morning. picking up where our colleague john harwood just left off. we know what things look like, right? we know who is going to be held responsible and who is being held responsible for the state of the economy, inflation, prices at this point, realistically what can be done at this point by the president or lawmakers to really bring prices
Cnn white house correspondent john har wood joins us now. they know they have a problem on the economic issues, particularly inflation. they know they can t fix this with a magic wand. so what s the plan in effect? well, what we re going to hear, jim, is the president play his part in a political game that involves all of us. let me explain. when you re the president, you acquire ownership of all the country s problems, whether or not you have the ability to solve them or not, so inflation is the number one problem americans are feeling right now, so republicans say you re not stopping inflation. those of us in the press say what are you going to do about inflation. voters say what are you going to do about inflation. the reality is that s the federal reserve s job principally at this point. president biden s policies are likely one of multiple factors that have contributed to the level of inflation that we have, but he can t simply say nothing, so as you indicated, he s going to tal
What in the world happened? according to a reporting from kate lynn collins and john har wood, the white house was totally surprised. they knew that manchin was headed in this direction, right? but didn t expect that he would already make this final decision. how do you explain this disconnect? i m surprised that they re confused at all. when this is what mr. manchin has been saying the entire time. earlier this week, the vice president was interviewed and asked who is the president. she answered the question. the president is joe biden. there is a difference between being the president and having the power. and what we do know is that although mr. biden is the president of the united states of america, it is very clear that mr. manchin has the power. when you have the overwhelming majority of the democratic caucus in both chambers of the congress in support of build back better, we ve got to begin