There are too many examples to cite in one post, but a couple of them come to mind right off the bat.
There was the gratuitous swipe Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler took at Trump over the millions of job losses that occurred just a few weeks after states began mandating restrictive lockdowns and business closures.
“Line from Trump’s State of the Union address that did not age well: ‘Incredibly, the average unemployment rate under my administration is lower than any administration in the history of our country'”, Kessler smugly tweeted back in April. “You shouldn’t be comparing yourself to full-term presidents before your term is up. Things can happen that make such claims appear foolish in retrospect,” Kessler stated in another.
There was also Kessler’s paper proclaiming with barely restrained glee on how “the coronavirus recession” was allegedly “exposing how the economy was not strong as it seemed”, as though the sudden drop in employment numbers would have happened as dramatically under normal circumstances.
The latest media entrant into the “let’s take a dump on Trump because of how bad the economy tanked this year” is CNN’s John Harwood, who lists himself as a “White House correspondent” in his Twitter bio but who in reality more often than not comes off as a cheap imitation of his equally self-righteous colleague Jim Acosta.
Harwood, a frequent apologist for Democrats, took to the Twitter machine Sunday to post a link to his latest hit piece on Trump, which was an “analysis” on how Trump will “leave office with a historically bad economic record.” He was really proud of his work on this piece, so much so that he tweeted it out at least 10 times if not more (I lost count):
He also did a segment on CNN promoting his story:
The problem with Harwood’s hot take, of course, is that it leaves out some important particulars:
Not surprising. I mean, millions of people are out of work because of restrictions put in place by Democratic governors for supposedly “non-essential” workers under the guise of “slowing the spread.” Businesses have had to shut their doors, some of them permanently. Even with the stimulus packages, some of the ones that are still open (but barely so) will continue to struggle until restrictions are eased and more people can get back to work.
Putting that earlier in the piece would have nuked the premise, so of course he didn’t put that info where it should have been.
The facts, as inconvenient as they are to Democrats and the media, speak for themselves. The economy was humming right along and getting stronger until the pandemic hit. Then, things went south fast and stayed that way for a couple of months.
As time went on, however, the economy started defying the odds and showed strong signs of recovery – which is in large part due to how red states like Texas and Florida chose to reopen in comparison to how blue states like New York and Michigan and California were championing (and continue to champion) lockdowns.
But yeah, the “worst economic record” story had to get filed because Orange Man Bad narratives and what not.
Now is also a good time to remind people how Harwood was caught crossing the line back in 2015 from being a supposedly neutral reporter to being an arm of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. So anything he “reports” should be automatically suspect and taken with a grain or two of salt.
It’s also worth repeating for the record that CNN is not a news network. It’s turned into Democratic state-run TV on steroids. I know the network’s “The Lead” anchor Jake Tapper doesn’t like it when you say that, which is all the more reason why it should be said over and over again.