The Associated Press is doing its utmost to cast President Donald Trump as the bogeyman of America’s economic woes, despite having a sordid record of carrying water for the Bidenomics policies that put us in this mess to begin with.
The AP White House reporters Josh Boak and Will Weissert came out with a ridiculous November 5 item masquerading as a news item headlined, “Trump may become the face of economic discontent, a year after such worries helped him win big.” The authors boasted that Trump “got a serious warning from voters that he’s out of touch with their fears about a deteriorating U.S. economy.” The authors continued to pompously snort: “Now, as the incumbent, fears about the economy have made Trump the face of much of the public’s discontent.”
Harsh words coming from the same hack Boak who treated voters like they were stupid for hating the Biden economy. Boak’s January 15 propaganda piece, “How Biden’s domestic policy record stacks up against public perception,” was laced with a hodgepodge of excuses and celebratory ramblings about Biden’s economic policies, which he mourned were hampered by a disgruntled voter base. Apparently, Biden couldn’t have been the true face of Americans’ “discontent” to Boak because apparently they just didn’t know any better, but he’s ready to just slap that label on Trump despite his economy defying every doom-and-gloom prediction hurled at it to date, right?
As Americans tackled the fallout from the 40-year high inflation crisis in December 2023, Boak still tried to make it seem like Americans were just too ignorant to see the brilliance of Bidenomics: “Biden goes into 2024 with the economy getting stronger, but voters feel horrible about it.”
But now, Boak and Weissert are now elevating the economic woes of American voters that they downplayed at the beginning of the year before Trump even took office:
Instead, voters now are expressing concerns that high prices for groceries, electricity bills and housing are draining their bank accounts. Trump has been defiant in insisting that he’s strengthened the economy, so — his early reactions aside — it’s not clear he’ll internalize the need to take on the same inflationary challenges that became a drag for his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.
Of course, Boak and Weissert didn’t bother mentioning anything about the degree to which Trump’s economy has repeatedly defied expectations. The Wall Street Journal reported November 2 that following Trump’s tariffs in April, “economists predicted surging inflation and raised the odds of a recession. Companies and consumers stockpiled to get ahead of price rises. Those worries now seem overblown.” In fact, The Journal wrote, “the economy continues to grow despite the steepest tariffs in almost a century.”
And that’s after the AP itself was churning out story after story forecasting economic Armageddon as a result of Trump’s reshuffling of the global trade deck, even before his second term started.
Don’t expect Boak and Weissert to admit their organization was very much off the mark on Trump — AGAIN. They’re too busy making believe that Republicans predictably losing elections or state questions in solid blue states like California, New York, New Jersey and Virginia are somehow harbingers of the American people viewing Trump as the font of all economic problems. That’s despite the fact that much - if not most - of these problems were very much active long before anyone even thought Trump would win a second term as president.
