No matter what happens in President Donald Trump’s economy, you can bet your bottom dollar that The New York Times hacks will find some way to splatter it with bad news, even when it's easily demonstrated these partisans offered a very different spin under Declinin' Biden. The latest news on the banger Q2 GDP numbers was no exception.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released a report July 30 finding that GDP increased a solid three percent in the second quarter, dwarfing expectations of a 2.3 percent increase by Dow Jones economists.

CNBC summarized that the figures reflected “strength across key areas of the economy, as well as evidence that inflation is ebbing though not eradicated.” And that’s despite all the media bellyaching over how Trump’s tariffs were supposedly setting the U.S. on a collision course with a proverbial glacier.

But Bidenomics toady and Times chief economic correspondent Ben Casselman twisted the entire story into a pretzel to still make it look like a net negative for Trump. This was the absurd headline deck to describe 3 percent growth: 

U.S. Economy Slowed in First Half of 2025 as Tariffs Scrambled Data

Gross domestic product rebounded in the spring after contracting at the start of the year, but consumer spending remained weak.

His bizarre conclusion? “Taken as a whole, the data from the first six months of the year tell a more consistent story of anemic, though positive, economic growth,” he snorted. 

Oh just wait. It gets funnier. When GDP growth came in at a pathetic 1.1 percent in the first quarter of 2023 under President Joe Biden, coming in beneath forecasts of 1.9 percent — literally the definition of “anemic” growth — Casselman was singing a completely different, more upbeat tune. Gee, we wonder why (sarcasm)?

“Higher interest rates took a toll on the U.S. economy in early 2023," he acknowledged, "but free-spending consumers are keeping a recession at bay, at least for now.” In fact, Casselman didn’t even mention that the GDP numbers were significantly slower than expected.

Casselman did everything he could to smear as much lipstick on the pig as he could to help Biden, even when other liberal outlets like Bloomberg were more forthcoming about the parlous state of play.

So 1.1 percent growth in Q1 2023, good, but 3.0 percent growth in Q2 2025, bad? The math isn’t mathing.

In his latest nonsensical spin trying to throw cold water on 3 percent GDP growth, Casselman zeroed in on how “[e]conomic growth softened in the first half of the year, as tariffs and uncertainty upended business plans and scrambled consumers’ spending decisions.” He downplayed how the latest GDP numbers “appeared to represent a strong rebound from the first three months of the year, when output contracted at a 0.5 percent rate.” But, he interjected, “But both those figures were skewed — in opposite directions — by big swings in trade and inventories caused by President Trump’s ever-shifting tariff policies.” The disaster is still nigh, asserted Casselman, citing "many forecasters" expecting the worst:

Many forecasters expect a further deterioration in the months ahead, as tariffs work their way through supply chains, federal job cuts filter through the economy and stricter immigration policies take a toll on industries that rely on foreign-born workers.

Of course, all of this is just a disingenuous write-off on the major positives replete within the BEA report. As Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni pointed out in an  X post on the GDP news, “While consumer spending accelerated in Q2 from Q1, gov't purchases barely grew and in fact are now flat on the year; this is the reprivatization that Trump and Bessent have articulated - growing the productive private sector, not gov't.” 

Economist Daniel Lacalle even went as far as to assert that “Inflationary pressures are nonexistent,” when viewing the significant quarter-to-quarter PCE Index inflation slowdown  from 3.7 percent in Q1 to 2.1 percent in Q2.

Perhaps Casselman has a completely warped understanding of what the word “anemic” actually means? Or maybe he’s so infected with Trump-Derangement Syndrome that all common sense flies straight out the window.