NBC News stepped in it big time when it tried to notch a got em! against President Trump on the economic impact of the Iran war and ended up admitting that all the tariff scare-porn of yesteryear was crapola.
NBC News reporters Rob Wile and Joe Murphy hit Trump with five charts September 23 showing the state of the economy before and after the war in Tehran, which has caused nervous breakdowns in energy markets. However, in doing so, Wile and Murphy ended up undercutting a year’s worth of NBC doom mongering that Trump’s tariffs in isolation were going to send the economy into a brick wall.
“On Feb. 27, the day before the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the American economy was on a steady course to lower inflation and attain greater buying power. Gas was cheap and interest rates were coming down,” they wrote. Did you catch that? Apparently the economy was just dandy prior to the war, when lefty media figures were all obsessing over damage from Trump's tariffs.
So much for NBC’s August 2025 tariff griping on how “Analysts say the latest report on the costs businesses face suggests consumers won’t be left unscathed for long.” NBC kvetched then that businesses had “begun to raise the prices they charge each other for goods and services, a sign they are looking to preserve their profit margins in the face of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.” So, what happened?
Oh, there’s plenty more receipts. In May 2025, NBC Senior National Politics Reporter Jonathan Allen snorted at the president for “play[ing] down the fears of his critics” such as “the potential harms of a recession to worries about rising prices due to his tariffs.” Earlier that April, Senior Policy Reporter Shannon Pettypiece railed how “Trump's new tariffs will hit lower-income households the hardest.”
NBC News published a July 10, 2025, piece by reporters Alexandra Marquez and Steve Kopack complaining how Trump was “dismissing concerns that further tariffs could negatively affect the stock market or drive inflation.” A few days earlier, NBC News published another piece by CNBC economics editor Jeff Cox on how “Fed Governor Lisa Cook sees tariffs raising inflation and complicating rate policy.” Another Cox NBC News piece from July 22, 2025, panic-baited how “Goldman Sachs is getting worried about the economy.”
So did NBC’s latest anti-Trump drivel just commit a Freudian slip? Sure seems like it: “Today, none of those things are true anymore. When it comes to the U.S. economy, there’s before the Iran war — and since.” That’s funny, because per NBC’s own reporting, the pre-war economy was also supposedly on the verge of imploding.
But even the charts Wile and Murphy plastered on their piece were devoid of context. Of course, the first major sticking point for them was gas and diesel prices, which have vacillated all over the place as the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz remained unresolved. “Today, gas is nearly $4.50 — its highest ever for late September — and diesel prices continue to set records, most recently hitting $6.52.” While diesel did notch a new record average September 22, the highest recorded average for regular unleaded still belongs to the Biden era at $5.02 a gallon on June 14, 2022, and that was without a major international conflict. Did Wile and Murphy bother mentioning that? Nope. But there’s more to the story.
Fox News recently ran an analysis of Dow Jones market data which revealed that for all the media blabbering about the price of oil a barrel hovering at $100 under Trump, that’s peanuts compared to prices Americans had to wrestle with under his predecessors. During President Barack Obama’s administration, the price of oil was over $100 a barrel for 308 days total throughout his two terms in office. For President Joe Biden, the price of oil was over that threshold for 84 days for his singular term. How about for Trump? Twenty-four days, and that’s including his first term in office, of which oil prices never went over $100.
But you wouldn’t know any of this looking at Wile and Murphy’s half-baked charts.
SHOCKING: Democrats keep SCREAMING about high gas prices under President Trump. The record on days WTI crude closed above $100 tells a different story:
- President Obama: 308 days
- President Trump (First Term): 0 days
- President Biden: 83 days
⁃ President Trump (Second… pic.twitter.com/V7W9cBMRsW— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) September 24, 2026
Wile and Murphy even tried to make inflation the next data point against Trump, despite again undercutting themselves in the first paragraph under their subheadline on the matter. “When markets closed Feb. 27, the consumer price index sat at 2.4%, nearly matching its low of the second Trump administration. Today, the CPI, at 3.4%, is a full percentage point higher,” which was unchanged from the figure recorded for July.
Here’s the problem: MRC Business recently released a study with CNSNews using BLS data to calculate the five-month average annual consumer price inflation rate spanning the first five full months of the Iran War (March-July 2026) and juxtaposed it to the same period during 2022 (March-July), when the U.S. was not at war. Both time parameters reflect Trump and Biden’s second year in office. The numbers weren’t even close. The five-month average annual rate of consumer price increases spanning the Iran War (March-July) averaged 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.
In essence, when looking through the historical lens, war inflation has been relatively muted compared to the 40-year high crisis brought about by insane government spending and Federal Reserve policy. Talk about having egg on your face!
