It’s been proven that CNN will never give President Donald Trump an inch on a “strong” economy without taking logic and twisting it into such an amorphous pretzel to take nonsensical jabs at his record anyway.
CNN Business Executive Editor David Goldman, who’s become the poster child for harebrained contradictory hot takes on CNN.com, published another gem February 25 following Trump’s State of the Union speech that would make readers scratch their heads: “Trump is right: The economy is strong. But he’s missing the big problem.”
Reading Goldman actually doubling down on that like it made sense in the opening paragraphs was a sight to behold: “President Donald Trump made a passionate defense of the US economy during his State of the Union address Tuesday night … Hyperbole aside, he’s right: America’s economy is strong. But Trump is missing the point.” Uh, what!
Goldman chose to strain at gnats and swallow a camel, by editorializing that “Affordability, not economic strength, drives voters to the polls. Most Americans don’t care a lick about GDP, CPI, PCE or any of the other acronyms or data points that show the economy is on the right track.”
Talk about being “hyperbolic,” since GDP, CPI and PCE are direct indicators of the segments of the economy affecting consumer wallets and, er, "affordability." Not helping Goldman’s case any is that CNN itself reported around 12:22 a.m. on Wednesday morning that 64 percent of SOTU speech watchers believed “Trump’s policies will move the U.S. in the right direction,” a whopping ten percent jump from where the figure was pre-speech. Clearly, Americans do care about the economic “acronyms” Trump alluded to that Goldman says most Americans don’t care about.
CNN: 64% of speech watchers say President Trump's polices will move the country in the right direction 🔥 pic.twitter.com/eaYoPeYBnG
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 25, 2026
But Goldman continued, bleating over how Americans “care about their job security and those financial fears that keep folks up at night: figuring out how to to [sic] pay for groceries, housing, health care, car payments, college and child care – all of which keep getting more expensive.”
Two points: Firstly: Goldman conveniently ignored that The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index spiked to 91.2 in February against economists’ expectations of a muted increase to 87 as “American households' expectations for the labor market improved,” according to Fox Business February 24. That directly undercuts Goldman’s initial thesis. Secondly: Goldman also just gave scant mention to the fact that wage growth has significantly increased faster than inflation from January 2025-January 2026 by 1.9 percentage points, according to USAFacts. Specifically, “Nominal wages — the literal dollars earned regardless of cost of living — increased by 4.3% while inflation stood at 2.4%.” Goldman simply alluded to this trend … in the thirteenth paragraph!
And none of this even touches on the naked double standard Goldman employs against Trump vs. how he salivated over the economic agenda of the president’s predecessor Joe Biden. Apparently downplaying Americans’s struggles with affordability, Goldman had the audacity to falsely celebrate how America supposedly “won the war on inflation” under Biden in October 2024, just before the presidential election.
In that blatant piece of pro bono advertising for then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, Goldman obfuscated the economic hardships of Americans that he’s pretending to be an advocate for now that Trump is in office: “Inflation has been tamed. Consumers are spending like crazy. Companies have more jobs available than job seekers to fill them. What more could you want, America?”
They voted for Donald Trump...and now Goldman insists they don't care about any of the measurables.
