CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey has ramped up his efforts to blame anyone but President Trump for exploding budget deficits.
Jeffrey served up his usual monthly articles on federal spending on June 10 — the first on how “The federal government set records for both the amount of money it spent and the deficit it ran in the first eight months of fiscal 2020” and the second on how “The debt of the federal government topped $26 trillion for the first time.” As usual, the words “Trump” and “Republicans” appear nowhere in the article even though they signed off on all that debt, and the articles are illustrated by stock photos of President Trump with Nancy Pelosi — once again trying to saddle Pelosi with blame even though she controls only one-half of one branch of government.
But in his June 24 column, however, Jeffrey ridiculously placed all the blame on Pelosi:
In the 2,000 days that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has now served as the leader of a division of the federal government that the Constitution gives authority over all appropriations, the federal debt has increased by a record $9,655,515,485,628.06.
That is more than all the debt the federal government accumulated ($8,670,596,242,973.04) under all of the House speakers who served before Pelosi first took that position on Jan. 4, 2007.
The record $9,655,515,485,628.06 in federal debt amassed during Pelosi’s first 2,000 days as speaker works out to an average of $4,827,757,742.81 in added debt per day.
None of her predecessors comes close to that mark. She is, indisputably, this nation’s Queen of Debt.
It will mark her place in history.
Jeffrey is deliberately leaving out a lot of context. For instance, Pelosi’s six years as House speaker coincided with two financial crises — the 2009 recession and the coronavirus pandemic — that required large infusions of emergency federal spending to rejuvenate the economy.
Jeffrey also forgot to mention that four of Pelosi’s six years as speaker were under Republican presidents, meaning that Republicans also signed off on all that spending for which Jeffrey is solely and absurdly blaming Pelosi for.
The word “Trump” doesn’t appear, of course. The word “Republican” appears only in the final paragraph, when he huffed, “Americans should hope that when Pelosi leaves the speakership, she is not succeeded by someone who shares her ability to borrow and spend — even when serving with Republican presidents.” Jeffrey made sure to ignore the fact that Republicans are an equal or greater partner with Pelosi on the spending Jeffrey claims to abhor and could have objected to it or blocked it — but chose not to.
In addition to censoring inconvenient history, Jeffrey also got some of his numbers wrong; an editor’s note buried at the end of the column states that “The debt numbers from the tenure of former Speaker Dennis Hastert were incorrect as initially reported in this column and have been corrected.”
Getting facts straight — especially when they run counter to his narrative — is not Jeffrey’s strong suit, apparently.