What to Know
At what point will the Trump administration stop blaming Former President Joe Biden for the current state of the country? Apparently, it’s still too soon, even though President Donald Trump has been president for more than a year at this point. This tendency Trump has to compare himself to Biden and blame Biden for just about anything is already embarrassing, but people can’t get over a comment White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made ahead of his State of the Union address.
Leavitt said Trump would be “making a few new policy announcements to continue tackling the affordability crisis that Joe Biden created one year ago.” But immediately, people noticed a significant problem with this statement.
Because how was Biden creating an affordability crisis a year ago, exactly?
In February 2025, Trump was already president. Yikes. A clip that shows Leavitt making this comment has gone viral on social media, and people did not hesitate to call Leavitt out. One critic on X wrote, “Blaming someone who hasn’t been president for a year is wild. At some point you gotta own the economy you’re running.” And someone else joked, “I wonder if it’ll still be Biden’s economy when the next President gets sworn in.”
Given that Biden is no longer president, we still hear an awful lot about him during Trump’s speeches for some reason. So, before Trump’s State of the Union address, tons of people were already anticipating that Biden would somehow be blamed for something and mentioned several times. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man leave office and still headline this many conversations,” another X user commented.
Karoline Leavitt: "The president will be making a few new policy announcements to continue tackling the affordability crisis that Joe Biden created one year ago." (Joe Biden was no longer president one year ago.) pic.twitter.com/gRkRetYZ08
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 24, 2026
And without fail, Trump did mention Biden.
Trump often talks about how he “inherited a mess” and somehow transformed the country into “the hottest country anywhere in the world.” Unsurprisingly, he reiterated these claims during his speech. “What a difference a president makes,” Trump said. “A short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
He also claimed, “The Biden administration and its allies in Congress gave us the worst inflation in the history of our country, but in 12 months, my administration has driven core inflation down to the lowest level in more than five years, and in the last three months of 2025 it was down to 1.7%.” But as NPR pointed out, the cost of living is still very high, and people are still struggling to afford essentials like housing and groceries.
Trump previously said concerns about the economy were actually fake.
Back in November 2025, Trump tried to say that Americans’ concerns about the economy were just “a con job by the Democrats.” He claimed that “costs are way down” and “the economy is as strong as it’s ever been,” but Fox News’ Laura Ingraham questioned why people are still worried about the economy if that’s really the case. Trump said, “I don’t know that they are saying that; I think polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”
So, when Leavitt said Trump would talk about the “affordability crisis,” people had questions, like, is he suddenly admitting that’s a thing? “….WAIT….i thought AFFORDABILITY was a democrat HOAX,” one person wrote on X. “NOW he’s going to say it’s NOT a HOAX??” Someone else said, “Does she mean the ‘affordability crisis’ that Trump says is a hoax?” Hmm.
