Trump rips Biden-Harris drug price controls: 'She's running on the Maduro plan'

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday directly responded to a proposed effort from the Biden administration to lower prescription drug prices that the president announced alongside Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, likening her proposals to the policies of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Biden on Thursday announced the move during an event in Prince George's County.

"Now, Kamala is reportedly proposing communist price controls. She wants price controls," Trump said at a press conference at his Bedminster, N.J., estate. "If they worked, I'd go along with it too. But they don't work. They actually have the exact opposite impact and effect, but it leads to food shortages, rationing, hunger, dramatically more inflation."

"She's running on the Maduro plan," he said. "[L]ike something straight out of Venezuela or the Soviet Union. This announcement is an admission that her economic policies have totally failed and caused really a catastrophe for our country and beyond that, a catastrophe in the world a little bit unrelated, but not totally unrelated."

He further blamed the administration's spending packages for rising prices, contending that landmark legislation ostensibly designed to curb price increases actually had the opposite effect.

"Their inflation Reduction Act, by the way, was a disaster. It's what caused the inflation. Their inflation Reduction Act was a con job," he said. "They actually admitted that it wasn't really for inflation that they did it. They don't know why they did it, but they named it the inflation Reduction Act, which was a very nice name, got approved based on that. Unfortunately, people didn't understand it. I understood it. I said that's going to cause tremendous inflation."