When Joe Biden announced he was running for president on April 25, 2019, he said he was motivated by the gathering of “white supremacists and neo-Nazis” in Charlottesville, Virginia — “their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, and bearing the fangs of racism.”

Biden said then, and he’s said it many time since — he was running for president “to restore the soul of the nation.”

But on Thursday in Los Angeles, Biden said the cost of living “is a key reason why I ran for president.”

Oh, really?

In April 2019, year-to-year inflation was running at a low 2.0 percent. When Biden took office in January 2021, it was running at an even lower 1.4 percent.

But shortly before Biden spoke on Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that year-over-year inflation was 8.2 percent. This past June, under Biden’s watch, inflation reached 9.1 percent, the highest rate since 1981.