Journalists Yawned as Biden Regulated Gas Cars to Death. Now That Trump Is Pushing Back, They’re Aghast

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the media’s framing around fuel-efficiency rules under the Biden and Trump administrations, and we cover more media misses.

Media Paint Trump as Climate Villain over Fuel Efficiency Rules
When President Biden abused his executive authority to prod Americans into embracing electric vehicles, the country’s leading media outlets treated it as business as usual, just a well-meaning president taking necessary action to combat climate change.

But when President Trump dared to roll back Biden’s onerous fuel-efficiency standards with a new rule proposed last week, he was cast as having overstepped his authority to disrupt the industry’s altogether organic movement toward electric vehicles.

As NR’s editors point out, the Trump administration’s new rule is a return to common sense that will allow carmakers to “be free to make the vehicles that consumers wish to purchase, not merely the electric ones the previous administration tried to foist upon them.” But the mainstream media surely didn’t see it that way.

Reporting on the new rule, which will now enter a period of public comment, under the headline “Trump Returns to Gasoline as Fuel of Choice for Cars, Gutting Biden’s Climate Policy,” the New York Times explained: “President Trump on Wednesday threw the weight of the federal government behind vehicles that burn gasoline rather than electric cars, gutting one of the country’s most significant efforts to address climate change and thrusting the automobile industry into greater uncertainty.”

The Associated Press, meanwhile, reported that the Trump proposal “would weaken vehicle mileage rules that limit air pollution.”

“President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced a proposal to weaken vehicle mileage rules for the auto industry, loosening regulatory pressure on automakers to control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and trucks,” the story explains, before going on to note that the move “sparked criticism from environmental groups.”

“Burning gasoline for vehicles is a major contributor to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions,” it adds.

The Washington Post, in a post on X, chose to highlight a quote in its story that reads: “With weaker rules, car companies will ‘make more gas guzzlers,’ said Dan Becker of the Center for Biological Diversity.”

And Wired took on Trump’s claims that the move will make new cars cheaper, under the headline “Trump Wants to Trade Fuel Economy for Cheaper Cars. But It Might Not Work.” The article itself acknowledges that prices will likely drop, though it may not happen for years.

Keith Naughton of Bloomberg summed up the Trump administration’s move simply as “LESS SIP, MORE GUZZLE.”

You would never know from looking at the coverage that it was in fact Biden who abused his rulemaking authority to force an unwanted change on American consumers. As NR’s editors explain:

As a famous admirer of institutions, Biden elected not to go to Congress to put his electric-vehicle mandate into law, knowing it could never pass the representative branch of government because phasing out gas-powered cars by force was never a winning proposition among the U.S. electorate. Instead, Biden exploited a little-known regulatory power enacted a full two decades before the first commercial EV was released.

And yet, in 2024, the Times framed Biden’s decision to unilaterally upend one of the country’s most important industries as a reasonable response to climate change: “U.S. Tightens Car Mileage Rules, Part of Strategy to Fight Climate Change.”

“The Biden administration on Friday tightened vehicle fuel mileage standards, part of its strategy to transform the American auto market into one that is dominated by electric vehicles that do not emit the pollution that is heating the planet.”

“The push for more E.V.s comes as the world’s leading climate experts say that retiring the internal combustion engine is critical to staving off the most deadly effects of global warming,” it added.

The AP similarly reported in 2021 that Biden was boosting fuel-economy standards “to fight climate change.”

“In a major step to fight climate change, the Biden administration is raising vehicle mileage standards to significantly reduce emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases, reversing a Trump-era rollback that loosened fuel efficiency standards,” it added.

The reporting, of course, follows a well-worn pattern in which journalists sit by quietly as progressives stretch the bounds of executive authority, only to sound the alarm when Republicans take steps to correct the overreach.

Headline Fail of the Week

“Student says she was living ‘American Dream’ before she was deported despite judge’s order,” ABC News reports.

“A 19-year old college student who was deported the week before Thanksgiving after a federal judge blocked her removal said she was handcuffed and later forced to sleep on the floor in a detention center,” a post on X from ABC News read.

Ten paragraphs into the story, however, the outlet explains that she had in fact been issued an order of removal in 2015.

“On November 20, CBP arrested Any Lopez-Belloza, an illegal alien from Honduras, as she was attempting to board a flight at Boston Logan International Airport,” a DHS spokesperson told the outlet. “This illegal alien entered the country in 2014 and an immigration judge ordered her removed from the country in 2015, over 10 years ago. She has illegally stayed in the country since.”

Media Misses

• Breaking Points host Krystal Ball claimed that Latin Americans who serve as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have no “self preservation.”

“Not only do you have no moral compass — and how many times have you seen these guys, they’ve got their masks on so you can’t see their whole face, but what you can see, it’s like a brown skin tone and a dude who looks like his last name is probably like ‘Lopez’ or ‘Hernandez’ or something,” she said on the I’ve Had It podcast. “It’s like, what is wrong with you? Not only do you not have morality, apparently you don’t have self-preservation.”

She went on to claim that Americans who are descended from the country’s founding settlers don’t see Latino ICE officers as real Americans. “These people hate you. They hate you. They hate your family. They hate your kids. They hate your future grandkids. They don’t think you belong here,” she said. “You’re not a quote unquote ‘heritage American.’ You’re never going to belong. And you’re the one implementing the violent force against your own community. I just can’t wrap my head around that.”

• MS NOW host Jackie Alemany confusingly suggested that the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, which has so far led to the arrests of more than 75 people and is just one of several fraud schemes officials have uncovered tied to the Somali community in Minnesota, was an “isolated” incident. While interviewing the attorney general of Minnesota on Saturday, she said that Trump, “in the past, has historically used isolated instances to justify this language of bigotry and paint with extremely broad brushstrokes and make these generalizations. He has honed [sic] in on this investigation into Feeding Our Future, which your office actually prosecuted. I’m wondering if you can set the record straight here, and talk a little bit about this investigation and what it entailed, and how isolated it actually was.”