Axios reporter Emily Peck isn’t afraid to state the obvious out loud and pass it off as inspired. In a hit piece published Thursday, “Why Trump supporters give him a pass on record-high unemployment,” Peck made the case that the economy suffered during Trump’s last months in office due to coronavirus. Huh, who knew a global pandemic and lockdown could cause record unemployment?
“Trump’s economic record is only good if you leave off what happened from March 2020 to the end of his administration,” Peck wrote, as if that were not exactly what any reasonable person would do. Prior to the pandemic, the unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the poverty rate hit a sixty-year low, and the country saw the largest real household median income increase since 1967. Contrary to what Peck says, it’s not “a bit puzzling” that Americans would give credit to Trump’s economic growth and ignore the extraordinary circumstances the world was facing.
Despite her complaints about the economy, Cockburn presumes Peck was fully supportive of Covid-19 lockdowns at the time. She served as a senior editor at HuffPost during the pandemic, writing op-eds encouraging people to stay home like “Want to Fend Off a Coronavirus Recession? Send People Money” and “Finally, Everyone Understands Why Paid Sick Leave Is Necessary.” Cockburn can see Peck writing from the comfort of her couch while the more dispensable classes deliver takeout and Amazon boxes.
Peck, apparently a licensed armchair psychologist, has also diagnosed Americans with a dangerous case of nostalgia. She argues that Americans, in a desperate attempt to forget the trauma of the pandemic, have associated Trump with the normalcy of pre-lockdown life. We have been “memory-holed,” according to Peck — that’s why we think we think Trump handled the economy so well.
To quote President Biden, his administration has also bought into the kind of malarkey Peck is pushing. In June, the White House posted a graphic arguing that Biden had created more jobs in its first two years than any administration had created in four.
The graphic conveniently ignored that 72 percent of all jobs created since 2021 were simply ones recovered from the pandemic, not new jobs created. The post also omitted that inflation, and the cost of everyday staples like eggs and gas, were at a forty-year high under Biden. Cockburn eagerly awaits Peck’s report on those tidbits.
