GDP’s Small Drop Brings Out The Media’s Anti-Trump Jeers
I & I Editorial Board
May 1, 2025
Let’s get the big news out of the way: The economy shrank by 0.3% during the first quarter of 2025, a mild but not wholly unexpected drop blamed by nearly everyone on President Donald Trump’s tariff hikes. Is that the first step toward a recession, or, as Trump put it, just a result of the “Biden overhang”?
First, let’s just note one big thing: The media can’t help but show its glaring bias against Trump even when it reports boring data, such as the barely negative GDP number.
“Honey, Trump shrunk the economy! And the lying coward is still blaming Biden,” as a particularly crass opinion on USA Today said.
“Everything is fine: Trump’s cabinet shrugs off shrinking economy,” smirked the AFP news service’s sarcastic headline. The story asked: “Contraction? What contraction?”
In case you didn’t get that quote, it was a play on the clueless remark (“Crisis? What Crisis”) supposedly uttered by British Prime Minister James Callaghan, after being asked about his collapsing economy during the disastrous “Winter of Discontent” in 1979.
Then there was Newsweek’s effort: “Trump Loses First Round of Trade War as U.S. Economy Shrinks, China’s Grows.” As any competent economist will tell you, China’s economic data are not reliable. So comparing U.S. data to China’s numbers, is misleading at best.
So let’s repeat. This is a 0.3% drop in GDP, not a collapse. And Trump is no bungling leftist British leader like Callaghan, whose tenure in office was so disastrous it led to Conservative Margaret Thatcher’s record run of nearly 11 years as prime minister.
But more to the point, let’s look at why GDP fell, which is interesting.
Did tariffs play a role? They did, even though they weren’t in effect during the first quarter.
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https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/01/gdps-small-drop-brings-out-the-medias-anti-trump-jeers/
