White House press briefings are often tedious affairs, but sometimes a reporter will ask a question so inane that it provides comic relief. On Jan. 29, for example, the Washington Examiner’s Christian Datoc put this howler to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “Egg prices have skyrocketed since President Trump took office. So, what specifically is he doing to lower those costs for Americans?” The average price of a dozen eggs escalated from $1.47 to $4.95 during former President Biden’s term, yet this crack reporter was laser focused on how “egg prices have skyrocketed” during the first nine days of the second Trump administration.
This is the narrative the corporate media have settled on and they are likely to stick with it. But the public probably won’t fall for it.
This is the journalistic equivalent of a toddler yelling, before Mom gets the minivan out of the driveway, “Are we there yet?” But this preoccupation with egg prices is not limited to Datoc. As Paul Kengor, our Executive Editor here at the American Spectator, noted last week, alleged “news” outlets like CNN are using egg prices as an analog for inflation in general and demanding to know why Trump hasn’t yet fixed it. Paul Krugman — who spent four years lying about Biden’s inflationary policies — has a photo of broken eggs beneath the title of his latest column, “Lies, Damned Lies and Trumpflation.” He affects concern that President Trump will attempt to control inflation by coercing the Fed to manipulate interest rates:
Right now the Fed is a quasi-independent institution run by technocrats, who set interest rates based on their assessment of what the economy needs rather than taking instructions from the executive branch. But Fed independence rests on political norms rather than any legal foundation. Given the fact that Trump has already shut down USAID, a blatantly illegal move, and effectively shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which also looks illegal, it’s surely possible that he can find a way to force the Fed to cut interest rates even in the face of rising inflation.
This amounts to little more than a conspiracy theory concocted to comfort the TDS victims who make up the majority of Krugman’s readers. It is hopelessly hypocritical — even by his standards. Last year, as the presidential campaign heated up, he routinely urged the Fed to cut rates and bemoaned Jerome Powell’s reluctance to acknowledge that the war on inflation had been won. In reality, of course, he wanted the Fed to cut rates to ameliorate the political damage caused by the economic blunders of the Biden-Harris regime. Thus, in September, Krugman praised a rate cut that seemed propitious for the Harris presidential campaign yet risibly claimed in the New York Times that it wasn’t politically motivated.
In the end, neither that September rate cut nor the subsequent cuts in October and November had any real effect on inflation or the political fortunes of Kamala Harris. Her campaign spent the final weeks of the cycle yammering about “greedflation.” The corporate media ran story after story about the perplexing “disconnect” between rosy government statistics and the unfavorable public “perception” of the economy. In October Politico ran a story titled, “Harris is riding a dream economy into the election. It may be too late for voters to notice.” Last week the same publication ran a story titled, “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong.” Its author, Eugene Ludwig, blames the Consumer Price Index (CPI):
Those with modest incomes purchase only a fraction of the 80,000 goods the CPI tracks, spending a much greater share of their earnings on basics like groceries, health care, and rent. And that, of course, affects the overall figure: If prices for eggs, insurance premiums ,and studio apartment leases rise at a faster clip than those of luxury goods and second homes, the CPI underestimates the impact of inflation … whatever anyone may have claimed from the prevailing statistics during the run-up to the 2024 election, reality was drastically more dire for the majority of Americans.
It will come as no surprise that “Trump’s inflation problem,” as the Washington Post styled it in a recent column, is based on the same faulty CPI data that Ludwig describes above. Even if we ignore Ludwig’s analysis and forget that the January statistics couldn’t possibly have been affected by anything Trump did between Jan. 20 and Jan. 31, it’s still his problem. This is the narrative the corporate media have settled on and they are likely to stick with it. But the public probably won’t fall for it. A focus group conducted on behalf of Axios, whose participants voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but switched to Donald Trump in the November election, suggests that the voters are prepared to be patient if prices don’t come down immediately.
This kind of common sense is not limited to a single focus group or issue. Sunday morning, on ABC’s “This Week,” Jonathan Karl confronted House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) with the results of a Marquette University poll showing President Trump’s favorability rating higher than ever. Significant majorities of Americans support him on virtually all of his major policies. Jeffries’ rote response included, “The price of eggs is skyrocketing out of control.” If this is all the Democrats and the corporate media have, the next four years will be good for President Trump as well as the 77 million voters who returned him to office.
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