The Associated Press chose to be one of the first to wave the white flag and admit what anybody with a pair of eyes and two functioning brain cells could deduce: The media hurly-burly about how President Trump was supposedly going to destroy the U.S. economy has so far looked like Fake News. Reporters have consulted "experts" predicting doom over Trump's trade and tariff tactics. They sound disappointed when the numbers are good. 

AP economics writer Christopher Rugaber published a story that contradicts the doom-saying coverage of the Trump economy. “The US economy is in a good place,” he wrote in his June 17 headline, conceding that “most economic data looks solid: Inflation has been steadily fading, while the unemployment rate is still a historically low 4.2%.”

But of course, Rugaber himself tried to pooh-pooh his own admission by bemoaning the purgatorial position of Federal Reserve Chairman and inflation crisis-instigator Jerome Powell for supposedly still grappling with “a spell of angst” over Trump’s tariffs.

This kind of back-and-forthism was replete throughout Rugaber’s analysis. After noting that “It’s possible that tariffs may not push up inflation as much as economists have feared,” he then shoe-horned a speculative theory to actually make the state of low inflation seem like bad news: “But one reason for that could be that the economy may slow, lifting unemployment and making consumers unwilling to pay higher prices, which would reduce inflation.”

So in other words, it doesn't matter which direction inflation goes because the media will find some way to make it seem like disaster for Trump.

Liberal journos like Rugaber just can’t bring themselves to give Trump an inch without doing the semantics rope-a-dope to protect their anti-Trump street cred. Of course, Rugaber didn’t bother mentioning the recent University of Michigan survey which found that consumer sentiment rebounded to a “much higher level than expected” with a whopping 15.9 percent increase to 60.5 against an estimate of 54, as CNBC reported. This also represented the first increase in consumer sentiment on the economy for the year 2025, as Americans’ “views of the economy have improved as inflation has stayed tame and the Trump administration has reached a truce in its trade fight with China,” PBS noted. 

And for all Rugaber’s sympathizing for the Fed, he also ignored the crucial New York Federal Reserve report released June 9, which noted that “households’ inflation expectations declined at the short-, medium-, and longer-term horizons.” In addition, wrote the Fed, “Consumers’ recent pessimism about the labor market eased somewhat, while consumer debt delinquency expectations and expectations about one’s household financial situation improved slightly.”

And why should Rugaber be expected to include all that pesky context? This is the same writer who tried to throw cold water on a good April inflation report for Trump. When consumer prices came in at 2.3 percent, which was slower-than-expected and the lowest increase since February 2021, Rugaber tried to arbitrarily inject negative spin in his coverage for AP May 13: “Inflation cooled again even as some tariffs took effect. But economists don’t expect that to last.” 

It’s been a month, and Rugaber’s May 13 item is already proving to not be aging well.

But regardless of his reporting antics, Rugaber’s admission is a significant one in the face of media buffoons still clinging to the notion that the Trump inflation crisis is supposedly just around the corner as if they’re hoping for that outcome. The New York Times, for example, put out a story June 13 on the economy that managed to be both comical and pathetic at the same time: “Where’s the Inflation From Tariffs? Just Wait, Economists Say.” In essence, Trump is killing the economy, er, someday!