Michael Tomasky New Republic - The media sanewashed a lot of what Trump said, from his hate-filled rhetoric about transgender people to his descriptions of Kamala Harris. But in retrospect, his sanewashing on the economy probably benefited him more than anything else. The economy was voters’ top concern, and the common narrative in the press went like this: The economy’s terrible; inflation is punishing; voters blame Joe Biden, “fairly or not” (a classic dodge of a phrase); the Trump economy was strong until Covid, which wasn’t his fault, and Trump says he’ll bring down prices on day one and protect American workers with his tariffs.
Many of these claims weren’t true, and now we’re starting to see the consequences of the casual lies Trump got away with last year. How many times did we hear him say things like, “Tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”? Everybody knew then what’s obvious today. Tariffs are taxes. They raise prices on Americans. A lot of people said it, mostly Democrats, but Trump denied it, and the right-wing media-political complex that exists to support his every lie cranked into gear to say tariffs are great.
That was then. Now we’ve moved from campaign rhetoric to policymaking, and what we’re seeing is even more obvious and embarrassing than I’d imagined. Tariffs were the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign—they were his most important proposal on the most important issue to voters. It doesn’t get more central than that.
And now we’re seeing that it’s a joke. Trump has twice now imposed sweeping tariffs and twice now withdrawn or delayed them almost immediately in the face of criticism and the plunging stock market.
Can you imagine if Harris had done that? If any Democrat had done that? If any other Republican had done that? Imagine that John McCain or Mitt Romney had run on some core economic promise and had won, and then once in office had put forward that core proposal but been hammered by the reaction and reversed course within 24 hours?
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