|
Trump's
walk back on lowering prices is a media failure
He was lying all along and got away with it.
Donald Trump repeatedly promised voters during the
2024 campaign that he was going to reduce prices to pre-covid levels. This
pledge was never rooted in a real plan, but he skated by with help from a
press that has spent nearly a decade normalizing his lies.
When Trump gave a speech in August detailing his “vision”
for a second term, he declared,
“From the day I take the oath of office, we will rapidly drive prices down,
and make America affordable again"
“Prices will come down,” he said. “You just watch:
They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with
everything.”
And during a speech in October, Trump proclaimed that
he would “very quickly” make groceries more affordable.
These comments and others he made on the campaign
trail were quite definitive, but now that he’s won the election and is set to
return to the White House next month, Trump has dropped his Santa act and
gone full Grinch. During his Time Magazine “Person of the Year” interview, he
all but laughed in voters’ faces when asked about lowering prices.
“It's hard to bring things down once they're up,”
Trump said. “You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will.”
This sudden about-face is hardly shocking considering
Trump is a world historical liar. What’s damning, though, is that the
mainstream press enabled Trump’s scam by helping him create an impression
that he had an actual plan to lower prices instead of reporting the obvious
truth — that he was offering nothing but bluster and empty talking points all
along.
Double standards
Trump’s correct, of course, that it’s hard to lower
prices once they’ve gone up, but any freshman economics student could’ve told
you that before the election.
The coverage of Trump’s shameless backtracking is revealing.
A USA Today headline read,
“Trump says bringing down grocery prices is 'very hard' after vowing to cut
costs on the campaign trail.” From ABC
News: “Trump now says bringing down grocery prices, as he
promised, will be 'very hard.’” And Vanity
Fair: “Trump Promised No Wars and Lower Prices. Now He's
Walking That Back.” Absent from these headlines is the simple word “lied,”
which is what Trump did.
Compare this to the media’s reaction when Joe Biden
pardoned his son Hunter. PBS declared,
“Biden broke a promise pardoning his son Hunter, raising questions about his
legacy.” The Guardian tut-tutted,
“With his pardon of son Hunter, Joe Biden delivers a heartfelt hypocrisy.”
Trump isn’t responding to compelling new information, as
Biden did when he pardoned
Hunter after Trump nominated malevolent conspiracy
theorist Kash Patel to be his new FBI director. And economic indicators
haven’t drastically changed since Trump’s carnival barker routine was in full
swing during the campaign.
Legacy media gullibly accepted Trump’s promises to
magically lower prices even though there was no coherent economic agenda
behind his empty talk. In fact, Trump’s signature tariffs proposal would
only cause
prices to increase. But the press mostly let the
conman behind the curtain do his thing.
Trump supporters would boo at his rallies when he
asked, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” But the boos
weren’t directed at Trump, who was president in 2020 when America experienced
the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
After the pandemic, the US economy under Biden’s
leadership enjoyed a “soft landing.” Unemployment is currently 4.2 percent,
or about two points lower than it was when Trump left office. Average wages
have risen higher than the rate of inflation, and the inflation of 2021 and
2022 has steadily decreased without a recession. Trump and Republicans
obviously didn’t want to run against that record, so they focused on high
prices, frequently making misleading comparisons to a pandemic-era baseline.
When he accepted the Republican presidential
nomination for the third time last summer, Trump vowed to “make America
affordable again.” At a press conference, he claimed that prices for everyday
grocery items had surged specifically because of the Biden/Harris
administration’s policies, with no mention of the pandemic he’d mismanaged.
Reporters rarely pressed him on this omission.
"Harris has just declared that tackling
inflation will be a day one priority for her," he said. "But day
one for Kamala was three and a half years ago. Where has she been?"
Trump went even further, though, and vowed to
outright lower prices. That’s all but impossible without a recession or
deflationary period, both of which would be far worse for the average
American’s wallet than a $3 carton of eggs.
The press would have been doing the country a service
by exposing Trump’s pandering instead of nitpicking Harris to death. But even
Trump’s most ridiculous campaign proposals — such as trying to rebrand
himself as an advocate for women by floating the idea of taxpayers picking up
the tab for costly IVF treatments — received exactly the sort of credulous
coverage he was hoping for.
It’s just a fact that Trump will says anything to win
an election and more often than not is full of it. But stating that clearly
would make mainstream outlets like the New York Times seem like they were in
the tank for Harris. And so instead of being straight with their audiences
and telling them what Trump himself now admits — that he has no real plan to
bring prices down — journalists far too often took him at face value.
Trump’s vibes campaign
One persistent and frustrating criticism of Harris’s
campaign is that she ran on “vibes” and didn’t offer concrete policy details,
unlike the “windmill cancer” guy.
NBC News asked in
August, “Can Harris win on good vibes alone?” Bloomberg stated,
“Harris’ Vibes-Heavy, Policy-Lite Campaign Leaves Businesses Guessing.” Nate
Silver wrote that
“Harris has been running on ‘vibes’ and has failed to articulate a clear
vision for the country.”
In fact, just a few weeks after she became the
presumptive nominee, Harris released a four-part policy
package detailing how her administration would make
housing, groceries, health care, and raising children more affordable. In
October, Harris rolled out more new economic
proposals intended to lower grocery and prescription drug
prices and address the housing crisis.
Yet CNN said Harris
wasn’t “giving the specifics some undecided voters say they want.” CNN’s Abby
Phillips claimed Harris’s
comments to Black journalists “lacked specifics.” These critiques may have
made sense in a vacuum, but they seem ridiculous compared to Trump. It was
hard not to suspect the real beef was about Harris not being more willing to
engage with mainstream outlets on their terms.
Instead of doing the “weave” and going on tangents
about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, Harris during her speeches often spoke
about her economic policy priorities and vision for the future. Throughout
her 107-day campaign, she was held to a higher standard in practically every
way, all while Trump served up economic proposals that were the political
equivalent of magic beans.
Another big example is housing policy. Trump flipped
Nevada — the first time a Republican carried the state since 2004 — partly
because of an affordable housing crisis. A New York Times headline in
late October read, “As Harris Courts Sun Belt, Housing Costs Stand in Her
Way.”
Of course, Trump blatantly lied about the situation.
“Today the mortgage rates are at 10 percent, 11 percent,
12 percent, you can't get the money,” he said at
an Arizona rally in October. (Mortgage rates have not been above 10 percent
for decades.) “We’re going to bring it down very fast, we're going to bring
energy down. We will drive down the rates so you will be able to pay 2
percent again and we will be able to finance or refinance your homes
drastically.”
Mortgage interest rates are mostly beyond any
president’s control, but Harris proposed specific ways to alleviate the
housing crisis. This included down payment assistance for first-time home
buyers and tax incentives to build more housing. The media grilled her on how
she’d pay for these reasonable policies, but they had less interested in
pressing Trump to explain how he’d miraculously reduce interest rates to
absurdly low levels.
Harris’s proposals were often placed on the same playing
field as Trump’s gibberish. For instance, days before the election, NPR ran
the article,
“Housing is expensive. Here’s how Harris and Trump promise to bring costs
down.” Buried deep in the piece was Trump’s insane idea that mass deportation
could help free up housing.
Trump might think he can just sit back and take all
the credit as a “vibecession” becomes a “vibe-expansion.” After all, consumer
sentiment among Republicans has skyrocketed since the election, and the stock
market recently hit new highs (though it has gone down significantly this
week).
But it’s possible his cultish followers may actually
notice that the price of eggs hasn’t dropped, and breaking major campaign
promises is usually a political quagmire. George H.W. Bush never recovered
from going back on his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge. Barack Obama
eventually apologized for stating that "if you like your health care
plan, you can keep it,” which Politifact ruled 2013's
"lie of the year.”
The difference here is that Trump wasn’t simply mistaken
or proven wrong. He deliberately lied, and the question now is whether the
press will actually hold him accountable or remain his willing accomplices.
The early
returns aren’t great.
|
