The Media's Urge to Be "Fair" to Trump Is Killing the Republic [View all]

[Celerity]

Seventy percent of Republicans understand that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices. Why is the press acting like they’re a huge success?

https://newrepublic.com/article/198756/media-fair-trump-killing-republic-tariffs-economy

https://archive.ph/mjBNx


Win McNamee/Getty Images

The New York Times remains, by any measure, our greatest newspaper. As much as liberals complain about the way it covers Donald Trump—which I did pretty aggressively during last year’s campaign—it still behooves us to remember that a lot of what we know about the bad stuff Trump has done, we know from the Times. So the scoops division of the paper is working more or less as it should, and we should all be glad for that.

However, it’s in the way the paper chooses to explain and interpret our nation’s politics that it so often falters. The excess of caution, the relentless urge to be “fair,” the no-doubt painstaking search for the perfect headline word that will appear objective.… Oy, those headlines. “Trump, Claiming Weak Jobs Numbers Were ‘Rigged,’ Fires Labor Official.” Really? “Claiming”? Without mentioning that Trump offered no evidence to support this “claim”? I suppose it may be too much to ask the Times’ editors to emphasize what a brazenly corrupt move this was (although it shouldn’t be!), but surely they could at least sneak in the fact that Trump’s claim was backed by no evidence whatsoever.

All of which brings me to a piece of “news analysis” that ran Sunday about tariffs. The headline was “Trump’s Tariffs Are Making Money. That May Make Them Hard to Quit.” Under it, Andrew Duehren reported that tariffs “have already started to generate a significant amount of money for the federal government, a new source of revenue for a heavily indebted nation that American policymakers may start to rely on.” Hmm. OK. Interesting, maybe. But what are the numbers? Well, it turns out that so far this year, through July, customs duties and excise taxes have brought in $152 billion, roughly double the $78 billion during the same period last year.

Double! That’s a lot! It seems to lend credence to Trump’s claims that his tariffs will generate so much revenue that we won’t know what to do with the money, and he’ll be able to eliminate the IRS, a claim he’s made many times. So gosh, maybe Trump really was right about this. Uh, no. Here are a few facts and figures, none of which appear in the article. Federal revenue from all sources in recent years has been around $4.7 trillion (it varies from year to year depending on the strength of the economy). Typically, customs fees account for about 2 percent of that revenue. Commit that to memory, please: 2 percent. So that even if tariff revenue doubles, it will account for 4 percent of all federal revenue. It could double again—which, incidentally, would mean tariffs so high as to stifle much international trade—and still account for only 8 percent of all federal revenue.

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