War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Grocery Prices Are Way Down.

Lying has worked for Trump in the past. Is this a lie too far?

Well, whaddya know:

Donald Trump continues to say that polls showing that Americans are unhappy about the economy are “fake.” But the blowout Democratic victories in last week’s elections may have given him a wakeup call. As the New York Times reported, Trump “has mentioned affordability as much in the last week as he has in the past nine months.”

But the Times went on to engage in some serious false equivalence:

Mr. Trump risks being in a similar position as his predecessor, defending his record by pointing to statistics that don’t capture a troubling reality that many Americans are feeling.

Sorry, but that’s a false comparison. You might even call it fake news — because Trump is not, in fact, pointing to any statistics. He’s just lying.

It is true that Biden officials liked to cite statistics that presented a favorable picture of the economy, but they were genuine statistics and did indeed seem to show an economy in pretty good shape.

Trump, by contrast, is engaged in what CNN calls a “lying spree” about inflation. We all know that many media organizations have long had a habit of “sanewashing” Trump, downplaying the craziness of his remarks. What we’re seeing now is “truthwashing,” pretending that there is some factual justification for bald-faced lies.

Let’s talk for a minute about what happened under Biden, then turn to Trump’s pants-on-fire claims about prices.

Biden officials never denied that there was a surge in inflation during 2021 and 2022. They did, however, claim that the surge was transitory. “Transitory” turned out to be much longer than they (and the Federal Reserve) initially predicted, but the surge was nonetheless temporary: Inflation peaked in mid-2022, then fell rapidly over the next 2 years. And this disinflation, defying the predictions of many economists, took place without a recession.

Biden’s people also never denied that prices were higher than they had been before the pandemic. But they said, correctly, that wages had risen even more, so that most workers’ purchasing power was higher despite the rise in prices. In 2024, Biden declared that “we’re proving that we can bring down inflation while safeguarding hard-won gains in jobs and real wages in American workers.” This was a completely truthful claim.

The chart below shows hourly wages for typical workers and consumer prices, both as indexes with January 2020, the eve of the pandemic, set to 100:

By 2024, prices were about 20 percent higher than pre-pandemic — but wages were 25 percent higher. Real wages were indeed up.

In case you’re wondering, that temporary wage bump in 2020 was a statistical illusion created by pandemic distortions, which is why you want to use pre-pandemic wages to evaluate wages under Biden.

Unfortunately for the Biden team, it’s a well-established observation that when wages and prices both rise, people tend to feel victimized, believing that they earned their wage gains only to have the benefits snatched away by inflation — even if wages rose more than prices. I’ll talk more about that in this weekend’s primer. And when there’s a global inflation shock, as there was in 2021-2023, incumbent governments take much of the blame no matter what they do — which is why, as John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has noted, 2024 was a “graveyard of incumbents” around the world.

Biden should have been out there much more. He should have said, “I feel your pain,” acknowledging voter distress. But he didn’t. And as G. Elliott Morris notes, in 2024 voters who said that the economy was their most important issue favored Trump by 63 points over Kamala Harris.

This worm has, however, turned with astonishing speed. In last week’s gubernatorial elections, economy-focused voters favored Democrats by almost 30 points — a 90-point swing. Voters appear to have decided that Trump’s campaign promises to bring prices down were fraudulent, and punished his party accordingly.

Trump could respond to voters’ harsh verdict on his economic policies by citing real economic numbers, which aren’t all bad. He could acknowledge that there are problems but promise that prosperity is just around the corner. He could even change course, trying to address real concerns about affordability.

That is, he could do these things if he were a completely different person. What he’s doing instead, being who he is, is trying to gaslight America, claiming that everything is wonderful.

I won’t try to go through the full list of Trump’s economic lies. Daniel Dale has a fairly comprehensive run-through at CNN. Let me just take one example, gas prices, which Trump says are at their lowest level in two decades and close to $2 a gallon. That’s not what official data say, but Trump has a habit of insisting that government numbers he doesn’t like are fake and politically motivated — he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over a weak jobs report. As it happens, however, several private organizations independently track gasoline prices to help drivers find the best deals. And they show gas above $3 a gallon and nowhere near a record low. Here, for example, is Gasbuddy.com:

Source

Still, Trump has lied a lot over time, and in general it has worked for him. Will this time be different?

Yes. Voters do sometimes believe lies, but not the kind of lies Trump is telling.

Voters can sometimes be convinced, falsely, that bad things are happening to other people, even when they themselves are doing OK. Many Americans who don’t live in Chicago probably believe administration claims that the city, which just had its safest summer since the 1960s, is a war zone.

But telling people that things are great when their personal experience says otherwise is different. Are violent mobs overrunning Portland? If you watch Fox News, you might believe that. Are groceries “way down,” as Trump keeps insisting? Anyone who does their own food shopping — even Republicans — knows that this isn’t true. Reupping a chart from yesterday’s post:

Source

So, why have voters turned so negative, so quickly, on Trump’s management of the economy? Objectively, the economy is worse in some important respects than it was last year. We haven’t seen mass layoffs (yet?), but finding jobs has gotten much harder. Here’s the “labor market differential,” the difference between the percentage of people saying jobs are plentiful and those saying they’re hard to get:

Source: Conference Board via Haver Analytics

Furthermore, we’re experiencing “K-shaped” economic growth, with those at the top doing well but those further down losing ground. Many people on both the left and the right claimed that this was happening under Biden, but the truth was the opposite: Under Biden, wages at the bottom consistently rose faster than wages at the top. This year, however, that pattern has been reversed:

Source: Atlanta Fed

As that left-wing rag the Wall Street Journal points out, the only people who seem to be feeling good about the economy right now are those who own a lot of stock.

But I believe that the turn against Trump is also in large part a backlash against his attempts to gaslight the public about the true state of the economy. Once again, these attempts aren’t about putting a positive spin on the data. They’re just flat-out lies.

And Democrats should hammer those lies as proof not just that Trump is utterly dishonest, but that he’s completely out of touch with the reality of American life.

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