It must have taken a hefty amount of acid dropping for the detached journos at The New York Times to psych themselves into believing the abject falsehood that President Joe Biden’s economy was just a booming spectacle of awesome.
“Trump’s Policies Have Shaken a Once-Solid Economic Outlook,” gaslighted economic reporters Ben Casselman and Colby Smith.
It didn’t take but one paragraph for the authors to go into a complete pro-Bidenomics slobbering session replete with rehashed talking points: “President Trump inherited an economy that was, by most conventional measures, firing on all cylinders.” The authors continued: “Wages, consumer spending and corporate profits were rising. Unemployment was low. The inflation rate, though higher than normal, was falling.”
Spot the deception yet?
First, inflation was never “falling” and it’s egregious for reporters to continue acting like their readers are just dumb by fiddling with the semantics. The rate of increase has slowed, but it didn’t revert into negative territory. Secondly, missing from the consumer spending narrative was that the elevated levels of consumer spending is more credibly attributed to record explosions in credit card debt. In November, 2023, CNBC analyzed that the increases in consumer expenditures constituted “doom spending” as a coping mechanism to deal with the increasingly insurmountable high cost of living, and that sentiment carried over well into late 2024. In fact, ABC News reported on February 13, 2025 that total household debt (credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, student loans, etc.) hit a new all-time high of $18.04 trillion.
On wages, new data from Statista released Inauguration Day 2025 found that the “largest blemish” on Biden’s legacy was that “Wages Haven't Kept Up With Inflation.” In fact, The Washington Post conceded recently the number of Americans taking second jobs to make ends meet reached their highest level since 2019.
How about unemployment? It’s a wonder if the PR firm of Casselman & Smith read the viral Politico magazine article written by Eugene Ludwig, who noted that the “the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as ‘employed,’” blowing a hole in the rosy picture that The Times authors portrayed. The headline for the Politico piece read as follows, “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong.” In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated that workforce participation still remained below pre-pandemic levels, indicating that the U.S. is "missing 1.7 million Americans from the workforce compared to February of 2020."
Alexa, define "labor shortage."
Want to guess how many times The Times bothered to mention any of this context? Zero. But Casselman and Smith tried to make it seem like whatever negativity there was to be found in the gloomy economic outlook was entirely due to Trump. No, we’re not kidding:
Still, the sudden deterioration in the outlook is striking, especially because it is almost entirely a result of Mr. Trump’s policies and the resulting uncertainty.
And there it is: The much-expected media blame shifting from Bidenomics to Trump, and just weeks into the latter’s term.
The authors even conveniently resurrected recession and stagflation talk: “Some commentators have gone further, arguing that the economy could be headed for a recession, a sharp rebound in inflation or even the dreaded combination of the two, ‘stagflation.’”
But then again, what can we expect from Casselman, who has shown a willingness to twist bad economic reports to benefit Biden’s political image on the issue. After downplaying the two-quarter signal for a recession when GDP was initially shown to have contracted in two consecutive quarters in 2022, did the victory dance in 2024 when the BEA released its third estimate showing a minor upward revision for one of those quarters, and all of a sudden the two-quarter recession rule was relevant again because it now fit the left-wing narrative.
Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni blasted Casselman and others for their hypocrisy in comments to MRC Business:
The same people who are taking a victory dance right now also said that the two quarters of negative growth didn’t signal a recession anyway. In other words, they refuse to admit that the economy got worse, regardless of what the data say. Whether GDP went up or went down, their narrative hasn’t changed. That’s the definition of being politically driven and not data dependent.
In Casselman's latest co-written piece, the authors even audaciously blamed Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration as the reason for the economic outlook’s souring:
Many economists contend that deporting millions of immigrants — as Mr. Trump promised to do on the campaign trail last year — could be even more harmful than tariffs, given the U.S. economy’s need for workers, particularly in industries like construction and health care.
Ironically, Casselman and Smith ended up saying the quiet part out loud. Antoni noted in December 2024 that “Native-born employment has never returned to its pre-pandemic trend and is now 619k below its pre-pandemic level; conversely, foreign-born employment is at its pre-pandemic growth trend, accounting for all net job growth over the last 5 years.” In fact, the word “illegal” doesn’t appear once in Casselman and Smith’s piece, dubiously making it seem like Trump declared war on immigration writ large. Typical.
