The level of brain-dead sludge disguised as economic news just plastered on the CNN.com website just to slam the so-called Trump “threat” is enough to subtract ten points from your intelligence quotient.
CNN senior reporter Matt Egan — who’s made a name for himself for pushing some of the dumbest economic hot takes circulated by the network — is apparently trying to one-up himself. “The US economy has a new problem: Democracy is under siege,” cried Egan in a September 22 headline.
Egan listed off a number of actions by President Donald Trump, to effectively compare him to a third-world dictator: “These events all took place this year, and not in a third-world country, but in the world’s preeminent democracy under President Donald Trump.”
Remember that this is the same guy who simped for Bidenomics so much that he had the audacity to claim in 2023 — still in the thick of America’s rampant inflation crisis — that Americans “have never been wealthier” than under President Joe Biden. The beginning of Egan’s latest anti-Trump drivel read like a B-level novelist’s diary entry:
The nation’s top economic statistician was fired. Central bank independence is being undermined. The federal government is buying chunks of private companies and demanding cuts of revenue streams. Presidential power to lob tariffs has been wielded in unprecedented fashion. And federal regulators are threatening media companies over late-night comics....
Some political scientists see a pattern that suggests American democracy is being undermined in real time. The stakes are massive for the US economy and the business world.
Of course, Egan played loose with the facts and skimped on the context.
First, he deliberately framed his left-wing sources making wild claims about the economy being threatened by Trump’s so-called attack on “democracy” as being nonpartisan. He referred to Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow of governance, as hailing from the so-called “nonpartisan” Brookings Institution, which is one of the most explicitly lefty think tanks heavily funded by activists like George Soros in the D.C. metropolitan area. Williamson herself is also the author of a book titled, Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes. Did Egan disclose this? Nope.
The context would have blown up the neutrality of Williamson’s assertion that “we’re trending in the direction of the worst-case scenarios I’ve envisioned.”
One sub-section header, taken from Egan’s unhinged source Yale Law School Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld was about as off-the-rails as it gets: “MAGA has gone Maoist.” No, you didn’t misread that.
Also missing from Egan’s piece is the context that Sonnenfeld had co-authored a crazy TIME magazine piece in November 2024 calling the tumultuous Biden economy “the strongest economy in modern history” and “the envy of the world.”
Not exactly objective sources, eh Egan? But he sure did tee up Sonnenfeld as being the “CEO Whisperer” to readers, like his word should be taken as gospel or something.
Secondly, the former Bureau of Labor Statistics’ head Erika McEntarfer was fired by Trump for allegedly “cooking the books,” which Egan accused him of doing “without evidence.” Of course, he ignored the fact that Federal Election Commission data revealed McEntarfer, appointed by Biden, was a Democrat donor, and also glossed over the major impending downward jobs revision that saw 911,000 jobs eliminated from the economy in the 12 months ending March 2025. That was the second major downward benchmark revision in a row under McEntarfer’s watch, which led Bloomberg Chief economist Anna Wong to conclude the U.S. economy was in “recession” as early as Spring 2024 during an election year.
It's absolutely fair to criticize Trump for government cronyism taking a ten percent stake in Intel or making an arrangement for Nvidia and AMD to pay 15 percent of its revenue to the U.S. government in exchange for export licenses to sell H20 and MI308 chips respectively in China. But it’s outrageous for Egan to insinuate that this was coercion of a degree similar to that of the totalitarian underpinnings of Chinese Maoism.
In addition, prior to Nvidia’s agreement, it was effectively restricted from the China market altogether due to national security concerns since the Biden administration. Nvidia welcomed the new arrangement in a statement to The Financial Times: “We follow rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets.”
Which is worse from a free market/free trade perspective? A complete ban on a company entering a foreign adversary’s market altogether due to national security concerns, or permitting market entry on a transactional agreement that 15 percent of the cut goes to the U.S. government?
Quilter Cheviot Global technology analyst Ben Barringer even told CNBC that “it’s better that they can sell into the market rather than hand the market over entirely to Huawei.”
Government cronyism? Yes. Like genocidal Maoist China? Heck no, and it was ludicrous for Egan to let his lefty source Sonnenfeld make that leap without a challenge.
Stop slinging sludge Egan. Nobody’s eating that garbage except you.
