Just a few months ago, the left-wing legacy media was decidedly Chicken Little on President Donald Trump’s tariff talk. Jobs would be lost, inflation would explode, the markets would tank, businesses would be crushed, and, yes, the sky would probably fall. Fast forward to the present, and some of those doomsaying news organizations are quietly – and even not so quietly – admitting that, at least for now, Trump is winning the trade war, and the US economy is feeling relatively few adverse effects.
Of course, it may be too early to tell, but six months into Trump’s second White House term, things aren’t looking bad. Some on the left are grudgingly admitting it. The CNN website is loaded with tariff and trade war reports. As one might expect, there’s always a caveat when the left media gives the president his due. “The economy was supposed to crumble. The trade war was expected to escalate out of control. Markets were forecast to plunge,” one article reads. “None of that happened – at least, not yet.”
Written by CNN Business Executive Editor David Goldman, the piece continues: “President Donald Trump has pulled off what few outside the White House predicted: A trade war victory of sorts that sets America’s taxes on imported goods higher than the infamous Smoot-Hawley era, without any of the damaging fallout so far.”
DC’s most well-known paper ran an opinion piece by columnist Marc Thiessen: “Trump has been on an amazing run. Let’s review.” Theissen proclaims, “I can’t remember any president in my lifetime having a better month than Donald Trump has had.” This article doesn’t speak to the so-called trade war, but it shows even the anti-Trump media is conceding that, as things stand today, and taking in the broad sweep of the last six months, it’s just not becoming to ignore the fact that things are going pretty well.
In another article, the newspaper acknowledges that Trump got the better of the European Union with his massive new trade deal. But, naturally, the slant of the article is less “good job, President Trump,” and more “let’s take pity on the poor Europeans who got fleeced.”
Then there’s longtime Trump critic Bill Maher. The talk-show host has, of late, been more willing to call out Democrats and “woke” progressives for some of their more extreme ideas. He’s even been known to defend Trump on occasion from a couple of particularly dishonest or unhinged attacks. Maher was highly critical of the president’s trade and tariff strategy, but recently, on his Club Random podcast, the liberal host of Real Time had this to say: “I remember I, along with probably most people, were saying at the beginning, by the Fourth of July … the economy was going to be tanked by then.”
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Acknowledging that he was wrong, Maher said, “Now, it could happen tomorrow. I’m just saying — that’s reality. So let’s work first from the reality of that, not from, ‘I just hate Donald Trump,’ because that’s boring and doesn’t get us anywhere, and leads you to dishonesty.” He expanded:
“The truth is, I don’t know what [Trump’s] strategy is, but look, the stock market is at record highs. I know not everybody lives by the stock market, but I also drive around. I don’t see a country in a depression at all. I see people out there just living their lives. And I would have thought – and I gotta own it – that the cut, that these tariffs were going to f‑‑‑ing sink this economy by this time, and they didn’t.”
It seems the anti-Trumpers are not making much headway, at least on the trade war issue, in portraying the 47th president as a failure or a destroyer. Still – and this doesn’t apply to Maher, who has never come across as that spiteful – Trump’s critics do seem as though they are rooting for failure. The news articles giving a reluctant nod to the president’s successes in trade negotiations are nevertheless coming up with negatives. How long will the deals hold? Is it only a matter of time before the tariffs light a match under inflation? Will the promised foreign investments materialize?
None of those questions is irrational. One cannot help but suspect, however, that those who are asking them are praying for the wrong answers, just so they will be able to bask in Trump’s failure – even if it means America, too, fails.