After Democrats and the corporate media ignored and excused four years of runaway inflation and economic malaise under Joe Biden, they’re now suddenly noticing that Americans are hurting financially. But while liberals are attempting to pin responsibility for the country’s economic woes on Donald Trump just over one month after his swearing in, their attacks only unintentionally expose just how bad Biden’s economy was.
“Americans are getting fed up with the economy,” CNN reported on Wednesday. “Trump’s approval rating slips as Americans worry about economy,” was the headline from Reuters earlier this week, while New York Magazine declared that Trump’s approval rating “could collapse over inflation.”
Elected Democrats have also suddenly discovered that inflation and the state of the economy are a problem and are predictably blaming Trump. As AMAC Newsline has previously reported, Democrats have latched on to rising egg prices (largely a result of the Biden administration’s mass culling of chickens amid an outbreak of bird flu) as supposed evidence that Trump is failing on the economy. They have also gloated over January’s inflation report showing a higher-than-expected increase in the Consumer Price Index.
The president’s approval rating has indeed dipped slightly in the RealClearPolitics average in recent days. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between February 12-18 also found that 53 percent of Americans believe the economy is on the wrong track, up from 43 percent in January.
Democrats and the corporate media have been all too eager to seize on this data as evidence that Trump’s economic agenda isn’t working. But in doing so, they have confirmed an inconvenient truth that they’ve spent four years trying to hide.
Throughout Biden’s administration and Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign, they asserted time and time again that the economy was actually very strong. Biden referred to his economy as the “envy of the world.” Pundits and experts flooded legacy media with proclamations that the economy was doing great.
When it became impossible to ignore Americans’ anger over the skyrocketing cost of living and stagnant wages, Democrats and the corporate media then trotted out an endless list of excuses.
First it was COVID-19. The administration – with an assist from compliant journalists and partisan economic “experts” – told us that price increases were merely a result of “supply chain” issues that would soon be resolved. The world was just coming out of a pandemic, they said, and things would quickly be back to normal, even if the administration was running the deficit up to $2 trillion.
When that narrative became untenable, the left’s messaging machine turned to a new scapegoat: the Ukraine War. Never mind the fact that the Biden administration was waging a regulatory war on the American energy sector and canceling oil and gas leases. The real reason for inflation, we were told, was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Biden famously said in 2022 when asked about high gas prices, “I can’t do much right now. Russia’s responsible.”
This excuse even came with its own tagline which liberal news outlets blasted over the airwaves for months: “Putin’s price hike.”
As the 2024 campaign entered the home stretch, Democrats turned back to the original line – claiming that the economy was actually doing quite well. Poll after poll revealed that the majority of Americans were dissatisfied with the economy. Yet Democrats insisted this was disinformation and “bad vibes.” They even coined the phrase “vibecession.” All this was a circuitous way of saying voters were too stupid to realize how good the economy was.
On Election Day, however, CNN’s exit poll revealed that 68 percent of voters saw the economy in a “negative state.” Among that group, 31 percent said they felt severe hardship from inflation. Further, 80 percent of voters who “felt financially worse off than four years prior” voted for Trump.
With Trump back in office and Republicans in control of Congress, the narrative has shifted again.
Politico Magazine, for instance, ran a recent headline stating, “Voters were right about the economy.” That article asserts that unemployment is higher, wages are lower, and growth is not as robust as government experts previously reported. The article notes that the “record-low” unemployment figures over the past four years were distorted.
In other words, conservatives and honest journalistic outlets – including AMAC Newsline – were right all along about the Biden administration cooking the books to sell their economic failures as successes. But now it’s all suddenly Trump’s fault.
Trump has been in office for just over one month. In that time, he has already done more to lower inflation and resurrect the economy than Joe Biden did in four years. He has opened up vast new tracts of federal lands and waters to energy exploration, slashed regulations across the board, signed dozens of other executive orders to reduce the cost of doing business in the United States, and worked with Republicans on a budget that reins in Biden’s out-of-control spending.
Despite all these actions, because Trump hasn’t completely slayed Biden’s inflation monster in just a few weeks, Democrats and the corporate media are ready to declare Trump’s entire second-term economic agenda a failure. But every criticism they lob at Trump is only another blow to Biden’s dismal legacy.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
