Earlier this year, we detailed how the Media Research Center was in full Trump Regime Media mode in defending President Trump’s tariff schemes. That strain of Trump-fluffing unsurprisingly continued. P.J. Gladnick wrote in an April 27 post:
Pollster Frank Luntz came in for a shock on Wednesday when every member of his panel of Trump voters expressed support for President Donald Trump on tariffs. Perhaps Luntz was surprised because he believed media reports about how Trump is supposedly losing his base due to his policy on tariffs such as this report from Brookings, “Trump’s tariffs are not going over well with his base.”
High comedy was provided when Luntz’s own panel reminded him that not only do they continue to support Trump’s tariff policy but that they don’t think the stock market has “crashed” as Luntz dramatically framed it.
[…]After similar comments from other panelists who wanted the USA to “stay the course,” Luntz went into silent mode as he seemed to realize that the premises he started with about hostility to Trump’s tariff policies were no longer operative.
Joseph Vazquez, the MRC’s chief apple-polisher on economic stuff, gloated in an April 29 post:
A CBS News reporter regurgitated communist China’s talking points on the trade war with the U.S. as if Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was supposed to take them seriously. Surprise: He didn’t take the bait.
CBS News Senior White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang tried to corner Bessent by acting like a PR person for Beijing during an April 29 White House press briefing. “The Chinese continue to say that the U.S. and China are not engaged in any consultation on tariffs.” She then pressed, “Is the administration talking to Beijing specifically about tariffs or not,” as if Bessent would be stupid enough to blurt out the Trump administration’s current position in the negotiations to the world press.
After refusing to fall for Jiang’s absurd trap, Bessent gave her a lesson in trade economics: “Over time we will see that Chinese tariffs are unsustainable for China.” Remember, said Bessent, “We are the deficit country. They sell almost five times more goods to us than we sell to them, so the onus will be on them to take off these tariffs.”
Vazquez didn’t mention that he’s acting like a PR person for Trump. He further proved that sneering at the end of his post: “Sheesh, get a clue Weijia.”
Curtis Houck crawled into bed with Trump for a May 1 post:
Monday’s NBC Nightly News leapt into bed with the Chinese Communist Party in its trade war versus President Trump, openly griping about the price increases at Chinese-owned shopping apps Temu and Shein that have spent years dumping wildly cheap clothes and goods into the U.S. economy. Senior business correspondent Christine Romans even went to an actual communist China app — TikTok — to find users melting down over it.
[…]When it comes to Trump bashing, never put it past the liberal media to put America last under the guise of cheap goods, no matter how lackluster they might be.
When it comes to Trump-fluffing, never put it past Houck and the MRC to smear any critic of him as an agent of a foreign government.
Craig Bannister checked from the propaganda ghetto that was once the MRC’s “news” division CNSNews.com for more rah-rah in a May 7 post:
While the legacy media continue to sow fear that President Trump increasing tariffs on foreign goods will devastate the economy, the nation’s farmers overwhelmingly think the tariffs’ long-term effect will be a stronger agricultural industry, results of April’s Purdue University/CME Group Ag Economy Barometer survey reveal.
“Farmer Sentiment Improves as Long-Term Optimism Outweighs Tariff Concerns,” Purdue University/CME Group headlined results of its latest monthly agricultural barometer survey of 400 U.S. agricultural producers.
Farmer sentiment improved in April as producers’ appraisal of both current conditions and their expectations for the future improved compared to March. While producers expressed concerns about the short-term effects, they voiced strong confidence in their long-term benefits, the study finds:
Nicholas Fondacaro labored to spin a Trump tariff failure as a Trump win in a May 12 post:
Over the weekend, the United States and China took a step back from their economic brinkmanship and reached a 90-day trade deal that rolled back much of the tariffs both sides were planning to levy on each other. But instead of portraying it as a victory for America as the Trump administration negotiated better trade deals, ABC’s Good Morning America treated it as though the pain of tariffs was the point, suggested Trump was just routed by China in a “dramatic retreat.”
“And this is a breakthrough in talks between the world’s two largest economies, but it’s also a dramatic retreat from President Trump’s 145 percent tariffs that he imposed on Chinese imports,” proclaimed ABC senior political correspondent Rachel Scott. “After all of the tough talk and hard lines, both sides agreeing to dramatically roll back their tariffs, at least for now.”
Vazquez polished another apple for Trump in a May 16 post:
The typical suspects in the leftist media ether have been spitting out Armageddon-level economic scareporn about President Donald Trump’s trade war like clockwork. But Axios is now admitting that may have all been just pathetic attempts to get people to jump at shadows that aren’t attached to anything.
“Hard data suggests tariff-driven inflation and recession fears may be overblown,” read the eye-opening May 15 headline by Axios economics reporter Courtney Brown. “With major indicators from April — the month of peak tariff uncertainty — now in, none show the kinds of recessionary or inflationary conditions implied by business and consumer surveys,” Brown reported.
Go figure.
[…]To be clear, no one knows what the end result of Trump’s trade war will be. But recent data — as Axios concluded — is at the least an indictment on a media sphere that was clearly hellbent on jump-starting nervous breakdowns in the economy before Trump even had a chance to sit down in the Oval Office in January.
Vazquez won’t remind you that he was one of the leaders at the MRC in talking down the economy of President Biden and serving up scareporn for partisan purposes.
Intern Ashley Taylor dutifully complained in a May 21 post:
On Tuesday night’s episode of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Jim Scuitto spoke with Laura Barron-Lopez of PBS NewsHour and Reuter’s Jim Mason, who called President Trump “authoritarian” and blamed the MAGA movement for fundamentally changing the Republican Party for the worst, simply over the Trump administration’s tariff policies.
After a five minute conversation with Kevin O’Leary where the entrepreneur explained why Trump’s economic policy will actually bolster the economy and attract investors, Scuitto brought on his so-called “White House insiders” to discuss what these tariffs actually mean, undermining O’Leary’s entire interview and explanation as an investor of four decades.
The three keep referencing a sentence from a Truth Social post by the President, cutting up the lengthy post and reducing it only to one line, obviously taken out of context. The post warns large companies like Walmart to not attempt to cover VAT tax by charging consumers more for their products. The line “Walmart, eat the tax.” was continually taken out of context by both Barron-Lopez and Mason to imply that Trump is essentially telling the American people that they’re just going to have to suffer higher prices and to just get over it.
[…]The original Truth Social post actually was discouraging big companies who took advantage of Chinese manufacturing from raising prices on goods to earn a larger profit, and was telling Walmart and China to “eat the tariffs”, not American consumers, in fact quite the opposite:
Given that corporations typically adjust their prices to cover expenses — of which new, onerous tariffs are indisuptably one — it’s inevitable that consumers will bear the brunt of tariffs, Trump’s dictatorial demand aside. Taylor apparently hadn’t studied that in college yet.