The desperation of the anti-Trump media to defeat his re-election effort is leading them to sacrifice their credibility and peddle an obvious lie. In a jaw-dropping moment yesterday on CNN's ironically named Reliable Sources program, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell made a ludicrous claim: "The economy today is not substantially different from the economy before Trump took office."

Don't believe me?



Grabien screen grab.

I guess it takes a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton University to be able to disregard reality to this extent. Ms. Rampell apparently has forgotten that that before Trump took office, the "new normal" was economic growth lower than population growth (AKA stagnation), manufacturing jobs that would "never come back" and a growing gap between incomes of the well off and the lower paid.

None of those is true. In particular, the lower end of the income scale has prospered to an unprecedented degree:

It’s all but impossible to look at this chart and conclude anything other than that ⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩ ‘s tax cuts have unequivocally benefitted working class Americans. It’s the kind of benefit that wins elections. pic.twitter.com/GpNu34qxCe — Andy Puzder (@AndyPuzder) December 22, 2019

Now, it is true that journalists are not prospering, so maybe Ms. Rampell is merely navel-gazing at her own profession and is ignorant of the vast improvement in the lives of lower-income Americans — you know, the very people liberals gush about.