On December 17, Donald Trump delivered a bizarre, prime time address to American voters.

The idea was to defend his economic policies which, so far anyway, haven’t delivered the new American “golden age” he promised in his second inaugural.

The speech was short, unreservedly irritable and too riddled with exaggerations, impossible math and outright lies to be worth mentioning, but here I am mentioning it anyway. If you missed it, here’s all you need to know, as summarized by The New York Times:

Mr. Trump argued he cut drug prices by 400%, 500% or 600%, all mathematical impossibilities. He claimed that inflation had dropped significantly since he became president, without mentioning that in September, it had returned to 3%, exactly where it was on Mr. Biden’s last weeks in office. He argued that gasoline was now under $2.50 a gallon in much of the country; his own department of energy reports it was $2.90. And he claimed there were states where gas was $1.99; in fact, no state average gas price was that low, AAA reports. He failed to mention that the latest unemployment numbers — which were boosted by government layoffs executed by his administration — showed the unemployment rate at 4.6%, the highest in four years.

There was more, a lot more, but you get the point. As a GOP insider who participated in the first Trump regime put it, in remarks to Politico, “It’s the right idea to talk about the economy more, but the execution was abysmal.” (All of Politico‘s sources for the linked article were granted anonymity because they “fear retribution.”)

I said I wasn’t going to traffic in conspiracy theories about the suspect inflation report the BLS published this week, and I won’t. But I will note that the numbers — which were widely panned — were released just hours after Trump’s speech.

The biggest takeaway from Trump’s 18-minute rage-a-thon was this: He’s worried about inflation and the extent to which high prices are translating into voter disaffection.

Apropos, the University of Michigan released the final version of December’s consumer sentiment report on Friday and it was just as bad as the preliminary release. Worse on some counts.

52.9 on the headline was down from the first read and the current conditions index, which hit a record low in the preliminary figures, was even lower in the final estimate.

What stood out most, though, was the share of respondents who blamed high prices for their own poor personal finances.

There’s the chart. 47% was tied for the second-highest since the financial crisis and counts as the third-highest since 1980.

The survey noted that the persistence of household frustration with high prices comes even as expectations for price growth moderate. That’s the thing about inflation: Once prices reset higher, particularly for services, they’re going to stay high barring a recession deep enough to usher in the kind of across-the-board demand destruction necessary for outright deflation.

This is going to be a continual source of consternation for Trump, and given the impossibility of engineering deflation outside of a devastating economic downturn (or resorting to price controls), you do have to wonder if he’ll eventually encroach on the statistics process. Failing that, Trump may well start handing out free money, as all populists are inclined to do in an emergency.

Indeed, Trump teased a hodgepodge of handouts, gimmicks and distractions this week alone, with ideas ranging from “warrior dividends” to US servicemembers, new holidays and something called “Patriot Games,” which social media promptly lampooned as so cartoonishly similar to the plot of Suzanne Collins’s best-selling teen novels, that he couldn’t possibly be serious. (Narrator: He was serious.)

Although I doubt the MAGA faithful will ever truly concede they were duped from the outset — i.e., from the time Trump descended the golden escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015 — Trump’s on the verge of making the same mistake Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made: Arguing with voters about their lived experience.

As the source quoted above went on to tell Politico, Trump’s “a very effective salesman when his heart is in it but the ‘I feel your pain’ speech — he just doesn’t have that club in his bag.”