How the Press Memory-Holed Trump's Pandemic Train Wreck

https://newrepublic.com/article/187295/media-trump-covid-revision-economy?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social

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https://archive.li/bTH99

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My beef, not only with the mainstream press but also to some extent with Kamala Harris’s campaign, is a little different. It’s that these organizations—along with just about everybody else—have, in assessing Trump’s economic record, largely accepted Trump’s ridiculous insistence that we all agree to forget about the Covid pandemic.

“I had the country going,” Trump said earlier this month, “just prior to Covid coming in, at a level that nobody had ever seen.” Trump has been saying some version of that since his 2020 presidential campaign. It isn’t true, and plenty of news accounts have explained that it isn’t true. Even discounting for Trump’s habitual hyperbole (“a level that nobody had ever seen”), the economic expansion over which Trump presided was one that he inherited from President Barack Obama, and in some respects Trump’s expansion was inferior.

For example, as MSNBC’s Steve Benen, among others, pointed out, during Trump’s first three years he created 6.5 million jobs, which is good. But President Barack Obama, during the first three years of his second term, created more than 8 million jobs, which is better, and President Joe Biden, during his first three years, created nearly twice that. Gross domestic product, under Biden, grew consistently faster during Biden’s first three years than under Trump’s (and continues to do so in his fourth).

When Trump boasts that his economy was better than Biden’s, he’s mostly talking about inflation, which was 2.3 percent in February 2020, the eve of the Covid outbreak, compared to 3.2 percent at the same point in Biden’s term. Under Trump, inflation peaked at 2.5 percent in June and July 2018; under Biden, inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022. Inflation headed downward after that, and today it stands at a very respectable 2.4 percent. But that 9.1 spike was the highest in forty years, and two years later people are still freaked out about it.

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