As his administration wrestles with inflation near record highs, President Joe Biden once again took time to berate the Make America Great Again Movement, former President Donald Trump and Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who this week offered an 11-point inflation-fighting plan and challenged Biden's mental and intellectual fitness to lead.
In remarks on Wednesday, Biden denounced Trump as the ''great MAGA king'' and Scott, R-Fla., as ''ultra-MAGA.'
Biden and his surrogates have routinely taken issue with the MAGA movement, which they say fosters division and prejudice.
Meanwhile, though, he repeated a claim in his remarks that even fact-checkers at CNN have assailed.
''Under my predecessor — the great MAGA king — the deficit increased every single year he was president,'' Biden told reporters at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers conference Wednesday in Chicago. ''The first year of my presidency, the first year, I reduced the deficit, literally reduced the deficit by $350 billion, first year.''
CNN has noted that Biden increased the deficit by $2.8 trillion. And even if that increase is less than the deficit increase in Trump's final year, it was still even higher than projected had Trump stayed in office, according to nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis.
Biden also returned fire on a war of wars with Scott, who had called Biden ''incoherent, incapacitated, and confused'' on inflation and suggested he ought to resign. He also challenged Biden to a debate on his own 11-point plan to reduce inflation.
''I call it the ultra-MAGA plan, Make America Great Again plan,'' Biden said Wednesday.
''If I didn't see the actual document, I'd think I was making it up,'' Biden continued. ''The ultra-MAGA Republican's proposal puts, here's what it does, it puts Social Security, Medicare — this is the Republican plan now, the only one out there — and Medicaid on the chopping block every five years.''
''My Republican colleagues say these programs to help the working class and middle-class people, that they say, that's why we have inflation. They're dead wrong.''
Scott told Newsmax on Tuesday night his plan gives ''able-bodied'' workers incentive to get back into the workforce and to contribute to the economy through income, spending and paying taxes.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.