Photo by Andres Oropeza

The New York Times looks to be joining the fascist apologist set, just as incompetence, corruption, and dementia look to be bringing down the Trump administration. This column, by former Biden press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is a crime against reality.

The title says it all: “This Mistake Doomed Biden. Trump Is Falling Into the Same Trap.”

The short answer is no, no, FUCK no. The gist of the piece is that Biden made a mistake by telling people the economy was good when they were hurting. It says Trump is doing the same thing.

This is 180 degrees wrong. I knew several people on Biden’s economic team. They tried to spin the best possible case for the president’s performance. That’s what people in a normal administration do. They never lied about the data. It never would have even occurred to them to lie about the data; they were economists, not professional liars. The theater-critic pundits at the NYT and elsewhere rated the performance tone-deaf, but they could not say it wasn’t true, because it was.

After a burst of post-pandemic inflation that hit the whole world, and Republicans and the media blamed it on Biden, his team pointed out that inflation was coming down rapidly, which it was. In fact, by the fall of 2024 it was projected to hit the Fed’s 2.0% target the next year.

They pointed out that real wages were growing, especially for workers at the bottom end of the wage distribution. They pointed out record rates of job creation, the longest stretch of low unemployment since the 1950s. There also was a record low level of unemployment for Black workers. They also pointed to record levels of workplace satisfaction after tens of millions of workers switched jobs in 2021-2023. And there was an unprecedented surge of factory construction.

All of these claims were 100% true. The pundit theater critics didn’t like them because they didn’t fit the bad economy story they wanted to tell, even if they had to make up facts to push their case. To take an excerpt from a piece I wrote a couple of years back in The New Republic (TNR).

“For example, CNN decided to highlight the retirement crisis at a time when the wealth of near-retirees was more than 45 percent higher than before the pandemic. And we keep hearing about young people never being able to own a home, even though ownership rates for the young are still above pre-pandemic levels. And The New York Times just told us recent college grads can’t find jobs, when in fact their unemployment rate is near a two-decade low.”

I could make a much longer indictment, but people should get the point. The media decided the economy was bad under Biden, and they were not going to let the data get in the way. Even the idea that everyone thought they were suffering is dubious.

Again, stealing from my TNR piece:

“For the most part, people actually think that they themselves are doing reasonably well, as this editorial notes. It’s just that for some reason, they think that everyone else is doing awful.

“This becomes even clearer when we look at their assessments of their state economy as opposed to the national economy. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that people in the seven swing states overwhelmingly thought the economies in their states were improving. Yet, by a margin of more than 30 points, they said the national economy was getting worse.

“People do not have direct knowledge of the national economy apart from their own experience and what they see around them in their local economy. If they think the national economy is doing much worse than their state economy, it must be because of things they have heard, not what they directly experience and see. And we can see how that might work, even for people who don’t watch Fox News.”

By contrast, Trump routinely makes up things that are totally crazy. He keeps insisting prices are falling. He says he inherited inflation from Biden. It was coming down under Biden; it rose under Trump. He claims record rates of job creation (sorry, beyond absurd). He claims $21 trillion in foreign investment, a totally invented number which is about 100 times higher than anything that could be called an exaggeration.

I could go on, but the point should be obvious to anyone who follows the news at all. Trump makes absurd claims that have nothing to do with reality. Equating them to the positive spin the Biden team tried to put on economic data is an offense to anyone who isn’t part of the Trump cult. The NYT should take down this nonsense immediately if it has pretensions of being a serious newspaper.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.