Last year, when the U.S. economy looked like it couldn’t get any better in the wake of President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, the mainstream media found every economic expert they could to throw cold water on the numbers.
Whether you turned to the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any other leftist rag, you would find them reluctantly reporting the figures (often without a single mention of Trump’s policies) before turning to the pessimistic economists (the part of the story that would ALWAYS mention Trump’s policies).
And time after time, we heard that the economy was on a sugar high. That the figures were only skyrocketing because businesses were frontloading their purchasing habits in preparation for the tariffs. That we were only months away from a debilitating crash, at which time it would be obvious to everyone that Barack Obama deserved every scrap of credit for the boom and Trump only deserved blame for wrecking a good thing.
But where are those economists today, now that the first-quarter GDP growth rate has been reported at a stunning, expectations-shattering 3.2%?
At least the Washington Post had the decency to admit that the so-called experts had it all wrong.
“Many economists initially predicted anemic growth at the start of the year as the partial government shutdown and a rash of extremely cold weather caused many businesses and consumers to hit the pause button on big purchases, but forecasters raised their estimates to 2.3 percent as it became clear companies were re-stocking their shelves,” they reported. “Growth ended up coming in almost a full percentage point higher than expected, the best start to the year since 2015.”
Two paragraphs later, they have this quote from Ben Herzon of Macroeconomic Advisers: “Businesses were building inventories like crazy. That is not going to last. The first quarter number is overstating the strength of the economy.”
How many economists do you think the Washington Post had to interview before they got to one who would give them the old “Trump’s economy can’t last” storyline their readers expect? Five? Ten? More?
We’re accustomed to the media rooting for Trump to fail, but it boggles the mind how blatantly they get out there and root for the country to fail under his leadership. It seems to physically cause them pain to admit that Trump is doing a good job on any issue. Perhaps that’s why there’s been less reporting on the economy for the last two years than at any time in modern American history. They simply cannot stand that, after it’s all said and done, the American people might have actually made the right choice in 2016. And they’ll never, ever admit it.
