You know the old adage: When you point a finger at somebody, you have three other fingers pointing right back at you — such is the case with Bidenomics simp and MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow Show producer Steve Benen.
Benen, who is also an MS NOW contributor, got his pants in a bunch over another set of comments from President Donald Trump, meaning it’s another day ending in “Y.” “Trump’s comments about the military and the bond market betray his economic illiteracy,” Benen wrote in his August 24 headline.
Benen got triggered over Trump’s argument that “Jobs are up, inflation is down” while he was on the stump with Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC), emblematic of your run-of-the-mill Trumpian embellishment. But Benen lost his marbles: “[I]t wasn’t true at all. Job growth has slowed sharply since Trump’s second term began, and inflation is higher now than when he returned to the White House. His description of the economic status quo turned reality on its head.”
“Turned reality on its head?” Oh really? So what were you doing salivating over Bidenomics’ “compelling pitch” in June 2023 when the average inflation rate for 2022 was 8.0 percent and the U.S. economy was running an “acute” labor shortage? As Staffing Industry Analysts noted in its June 2023 report on the jobs market under President Joe Biden, “Labor scarcity remains a challenge.” Yet Benen was busily trying to hoodwink readers into believing that the U.S. “improved dramatically since the Democratic president took office and began implementing his agenda.”
Oh, but it gets funnier. The linchpin of Benen’s entire argument against Trump was butchering the context behind the president’s remarks about bond-yield increases to a reporter who brought it up. After the reporter asked whether “another intervention” was in the works with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Trump replied: “The ultimate intervention is our military, and if we have to use that, we will.”
Now, anybody with basic hearing capability and reading comprehension would know that Trump was referencing scorched earth military action in Tehran to end the war quicker and settle bond markets, since their volatility has been explicitly linked to the conflict. But Benen’s brain somehow interpreted Trump’s comments to mean the military could actually invade the bond market and pick fights with traders:
[T]he idea that he could somehow deploy the U.S. military to intervene in the bond market is obviously insane. It’s not even theoretically possible, unless the Republican intends to have armed service members literally attacking bond traders. But since that’s (hopefully) an implausible scenario, we’re left with a different kind of problem: Trump’s comments betrayed his economic illiteracy.
No, Benen. The only “illiterate” here is you. This is not even arguing a strawman in the general sense of the fallacy. This is like ripping the strawman off its stand in the cornfield and virtually beating the stuffing out of it. For goodness' sake, the Fox News clip Benen himself embedded from hapless BlueSky showed that Trump gave these comments while at Joint Base Andrews before meeting up with Graham, not a financial trading floor!
Reporter on Bond Market: The yields have come back up since then. Have you talked to Bessent about another type of intervention.? Trump: The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.
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Meanwhile, for all the media bluster about a Trump inflation disaster from the ongoing Iran War, prices are in fact cooling from their May 2026 shock from energy market volatility at 4.2 percent, despite Benen’s protests to the contrary. In fact, for June 2026, consumer prices actually declined 0.4 percent on the month and eased to a 3.5 percent rate on the year. That crushed consensus estimates by Dow Jones economists for a 0.2 percent decline on the month and a slight ease to a 3.8 percent year-over-year rate from the May peak. The monthly decline was the sharpest in six years. How about the following month? Consumer prices on the year for July slowed further to a 3.4 percent increase, despite a practically moot uptick of 0.1 percent on the month.
Even the jobs market data is more complex than Benen let on. Despite nonfarm payrolls decreasing in July, much of the “headline decline came from a 53,000 reduction in government payrolls, including a sizable decline in local government education,” as U.S. Bank noted in an August 11 analysis. In fact, “Private employers added 30,000 jobs in July.” What the July data showed in isolation, was “a U.S. job market losing momentum, but not an economy in broad retreat.”
MRC Business just released a study with CNSNews using BLS data to calculate the five-month average annual consumer price inflation rate spanning the entirety of the Iran War to date (March-July 2026) and juxtaposed it to the same period during 2022 (March-July). This year, it's 3.6 percent. During the same period in 2022 under Joe Biden, with no war underway, the inflation rate averaged a whopping 8.6 percent.
The point? As MRC highlighted in its study, the media only seem to find an affordability crisis when a Republican is president.
