The Media Research Center continued to prop up President Trump’s economy, particularly his tariffs. Mark Finkelstein grumbled in a July 28 post:
When it comes to inflation, it’s been a tough road for the liberal media thus far in the Trump administration. Inflation caused by new tariffs hasn’t materialized. To the contrary, the consensus prediction is for a moderation in inflation for 2025, within a range of 2.8-3.2%.
But liberals want to keep hope alive!
On today’s Morning Joe, in the context of a discussion about Trump’s tariff deal with the EU, the panelists expressed the fond desire, cloaked in analysis, that prices would eventually rise—to Trump’s detriment.
First, John Heilemann insisted “we have heard for a long time that what will happen if we impose tariffs that are higher than existing levels, that we’re going to start to see prices rise on the products.”
[…]They’re rooting for Trump to fail — which is their usual schtick, when they’re not rooting for Trump in jail.
You mean like how the MRC rooted for President Biden to fail, even as his economy recovered from the COVID pandemic?
The MRC’s chief Trump cheerleader, Joseph Vazquez, gloated in a July 29 post:
Talk about being the butt of the joke. HBO comedian Bill Maher actually conceded that his typical smart aleck prediction that President Donald Trump’s tariffs would wreck the economy by this point was way off the mark.
Maher made his shocking concession during the July 28 edition of his Club Random podcast with guest and leftist YouTube star Bryan Tyler Cohen.
“I will always call it as I see it,” Maher proclaimed with a thin veneer of modesty. “I would have thought — and I got to own it — that these tariffs were going to f*cking sink this economy by this time and they didn’t.” Cohen agreed and answered with a rule of thumb, “I’ve learned this the hard way — not to make predictions about what’s going to happen because it’s really f*cking difficult to predict anything.”
Tell that to the egotistical media snobs and rent-an-expert braggarts still looking down their noses lecturing the plebeians about how Trump’s policies are supposedly going to send the American economy down the toilet.
Finkelstein returned for an Aug. 7 post:
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Prices on back-to-school supplies are going to spike. And it’s the fault of Trump’s tariffs!
That was the not-so-subliminal message from a CNN This Morning segment today. And who better to help Audie Cornish make the case against Trump than Julie Margetta Morgan, president of the Century Foundation, a self-described “progressive” think tank. Morgan came to Century from Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” You get the picture.
At one point, Cornish teed up Morgan, asking if parents will have to resort to buy-now-pay-later plans like Klarna to pay for “pencils and crayons.”
Morgan ran with that, warning, “We ought to be very worried.”
[…]Note: Morgan did briefly acknowledge that prices are also affected by the inflation of recent years. But the segment’s focus was entirely on the Trump tariffs.
Finkelstein made no effort to make a distinction between inflation-driven higher prices and tariff-driven higher prices.
Steven Crowder — whom the MRC constantly defends despite his rampant homophobia and spousal victimization — made his only post of 2025, and his first in 15 years, by cherry-picking statistics in a Sept. 10 post:
Fearmongering about tariffs by media and market analysts proved unfounded in August as producer prices dipped, a monthly report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released Wednesday reveals.
While analysts predicted that BLS’s Producer Price Index (PPI) would rise 0.3% (seasonally adjusted) from July, it actually fell 0.1%. August’s lower PPI represents a sharp reversal from July’s 0.7% increase.
[…]Ever since President Donald Trump instituted reciprocal tariffs in April, media have been insisting that a tariff-driven surge in inflation is imminent. On August 27, for example, a headline by Fortune magazine warned that “Investors are ignoring the coming wave of tariff-driven inflation.”
In fact, the PPI increased 3 percent in 2025.