The Biden White House’s ‘Please Clap’ Moment

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we explore Democrats’ alternate economic reality, recap mainstream-media madness over the Jussie Smollett verdict, and recount more media misses.

Biden’s ‘Please Clap’ Moment

The White House is “exasperated,” the Washington Post writes. Officials are frustrated with what they see as unfair coverage that is fueling public frustration with President Biden’s economic stewardship.

Washington Monthly argues, “It’s a Biden Boom — and No One Has Noticed Yet.” Joy Reid accused Republicans of “rooting for bad economic news” despite “most signs” showing the Biden economy is “booming.”

Democrats have coalesced to sell Americans an alternate reality in which the economy is flourishing. Pay no attention to the Republicans shouting about inflation hitting a 39-year high behind the curtain, citizens.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer bragged that the U.S. has “added nearly six million jobs this year.”

“That’s the most jobs of any president’s first year in history,” he added, ignoring the fact that those so-called historic job numbers are only possible in light of the historic pandemic-sized fall that came first.

As Grabien founder Tom Elliott put it: “All you had to do was destroy them first.”

Worry not, Biden said in a tweet last week, “The United States pays its debts when they are due.”

Though he immediately adds a direct contradiction: “That’s why today, I signed a bill to fast-track the process to raise our debt limit.”

National Economic Council director Brian Deese last week declined to “get into the prediction business” when asked whether he believes that inflation will continue into the new year.

As it becomes more and more clear that inflation is here to stay, officials have worked to dodge blame and twist words to justify their previous assurances that inflation would be “transitory.” The White House even went so far as to dispatch officials to have “productive” conversations with major newsrooms about improving the tone of their economics coverage.

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell similarly declined to predict whether inflation will recede in 2022. He acknowledged that inflation was “more persistent and higher than we’ve expected.”

During testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, Powell argued that economists should “retire” the word “transitory” because it lacks clarity. He noted that economists use the word “transitory” to mean that inflation “won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation.”

But Americans aren’t buying the administration’s spin: a new ABC News-Ipsos released Sunday shows 69 percent of Americans disapprove of how Biden has handled inflation, compared with just 28 percent who said they approve. Fifty-seven percent said they disapprove of how the president has handled the nation’s economic recovery.

Headline Fail of the Week

“Jussie Smollett guilty on some charges,” CNN headlined its article after a jury found the disgraced former actor guilty on five of six counts of felony disorderly conduct on Thursday after he staged a hoax hate crime against himself and then falsely reported it to police nearly three years ago. MSNBC published a piece dedicated to “what conservatives should realize before they relish the Jussie Smollett verdict.”

CNN media reporter Brian Stelter took the outlet’s wishy-washy reporting one step further, criticizing conservative media in his newsletter Reliable Sources for noticing that many liberal news organizations initially reported Smollett’s hoax as truth.

Media Misses

-Writer and producer Noel Scovell suggested Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul are in part to blame for the toll of a series of tornadoes that ripped through Kentucky last week, killing at least 64 people.

-Tucker Carlson suggested during a monologue that “everyone in Washington knows” that Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, “is an instrument of the left.” Carlson is describing an opinion of Mitch that is marginal (at best) in Washington.

-Yamiche Alcindor, formerly a White House correspondent for PBS, has failed upward into a new gig at NBC News.