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The right-wing narrative about Biden is collapsing

The GOP has a lot of problems right now. Biden's ongoing success may be the most electorally consequential.

from Hopium Chronicles by Simon Rosenberg



[We] are witnessing what may be a historic meltdown on the right side of the American political spectrum. Let’s review:

  • Republican leaders are choosing to once again excuse and embrace Trump’s epic malevolence and ongoing betrayal of the country

  • McCarthy has lost control of the House, and may never get it back

  • the backlash to DeSantis’ extremist agenda in Florida is growing, as it should

  • a war has broken out between Fox News and Musk/Twitter/Tucker Carlson, just weeks after Fox was essentially found guilty of lying and helping stoke a domestic insurrection in the United States

  • the leader of CPAC, one of the right’s most influential organizations, has been accused of sexual assault and financial improprieties by his own staff

  • one of the right’s most important allies in the UK, Boris Johnson, just resigned from Parliament in disgrace

  • Rs are losing in the early 2023 elections, as they did in the battlegrounds in 2022

  • The corruption of the Roberts Court is now undeniable

But of the all GOP’s challenges, and there are so, so many, the most consequential may be the clear across-the-board success of the Biden Presidency. It is making the fictional “worst President in history” narrative the right-wing noise machine has invested so much in impossible to maintain. Let’s revisit some of their attacks/memes given recent events:


The border is out of control - the system Biden inherited from Trump was a mess, and there have been lots of problems, but under the President’s new policies illegal crossings are now down 70% and the chaos many expected when Title 42 ended in early May have not materialized. What’s happening on the border now is a story of success and good governance, not open borders and failure.

The economy is terrible - in this post we go through some of the top-line rebuttals to this ridiculous argument, but to repeat the most important:

  • strongest COVID recovery of any advanced economy in the world

  • Job growth remains remarkably robust, GDP growth over 3%, 3 times Trump’s 1%. No recession on the horizon. The economy remains very strong

  • In recent months record lows in unemployment/uninsured/poverty rates

  • Deficit has come way down under Biden after rising every year of the Trump Presidency

Where a lot of “the economy is terrible” narrative comes from is the inflation we and every other advanced economy in the world has faced due to COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Saudi Arabia’s ongoing effort to raise energy prices. But as Rob Shapiro writes in a new Washington Monthly essay, inflation has come down much further than is reflected in today’s discourse:

For example, the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) shows that prices for consumer goods and services (technically, the “deflator” for personal consumption spending) increased an average of 0.2 percent per month in February and March of this year. On an annual basis, that comes to 2.6 percent inflation, or less than half the 5.6 percent rate in 2022…. inflation increased by 0.3 percent in February and 0.1 percent in March, which, looking forward, translates into yearly inflation rates of 3.8 percent and 1.4 percent. But that’s not what most people hear about because the annual inflation rates reported by the BEA and media for any month are based on how much prices increased over the year that ended that month. That translates into annual inflation rates of 5.1 percent for February and 4.2 percent for March because both rates incorporate the high inflation back from the spring and summer of 2022.
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