by Frank Holmes, reporter
People who watch the news to find out what’s happening or look for insights about the future can turn off MSNBC once and for all.
Its top-rated host made a humiliating, biased, false prediction about the economy.
Last Wednesday night, Rachel Maddow promised that the June jobs report was going to be “absolutely terrible.”
She told her viewers the country’s financial health would look so bad that, when the official statistics come out, you’ll have to “brace yourself.”
“Because Friday is the federal holiday honoring the Fourth of July,” she said, “we’re actually gonna get the jobless numbers—the unemployment for the month of June—a day earlier than we would otherwise expect them.”
“It’s going to be absolutely terrible,” she said with a smirking smile at thought of millions of Americans out of work.
Oops.
It turned out she couldn’t have been further off-base.
In June 2020, the U.S. economy added a record-breaking 4.8 million jobs—1.9 million more jobs than the “experts” predicted. “Our economy is roaring back,” President Donald Trump said on Thursday.
Instead of a pure disaster, “May and June rank as the two largest monthly jobs gains in history,” the Trump administration’s Council of Economic Advisers announced.
Maddow was dead wrong, but Trump has been ahead of the curve the whole time. Back in May Trump said, “The market is up very big, and I think you’re going to have a ‘V’ — I think it’s going to be terrific.”
In May, the U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs, which was the largest one-month gain ever at the time until June came along. “This is better than a V. This is a rocket ship,” Trump said.
At the time, everyone said Trump was crazy. “It seems pretty unlikely to me that we’re going to have a really robust recovery in the next few months,” said Sen. Chris Coons, Biden’s fellow Democratic senator from Delaware, in May.
“The V-shaped recovery is off the table,” said one of the economic “experts,” Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, in May. Record-breaking unemployment would only creep down slowly, he wrongly said.
The New York Times ran a story in late May predicting the recovery won’t be V-shaped “or even a U,” written by Steve Rattner, a former counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration. The Washington Post‘s “conservative,” Never Trumper Jennifer Rubin, said the Democrats were right about a slow, protracted economic recovery. Even the supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal wrote, “Faith in the V-Shaped Recovery Takes a Hit” — just days before the smashing June jobs report.
The new jobs report has Trump officials taking a cautious victory lap. “At the moment, the story looks very good,” National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow told CNBC. “We’re set for a V-shaped recovery.”
He said instead of paying Americans an extra $600 a month in unemployment benefits to stay at home, President Trump wants to bring the economy roaring back to work.
“Our main goal, hopefully, is to get people to get re-employed,” Kudlow said. “We want them to come back to work.”
The explosion of wrong predictions and talking down the economy isn’t a prediction — it’s a wish. Politico reports that Democrats’ “worst fear” is that the economy is already recovering.
“This is my big worry,” said a former Obama official who’ still close to Barack Obama. “It’s high—high, high, high, high.”
Trying to figure out how to beat Trump on the economy “is the challenge for the Biden campaign. If they can’t figure this out they should all just go home.”
But a leftist Democratic Party insider said the polls showed that, even in the worst of the man-made recession, “Trump beats Biden on the economy.” Beating Trump is “extremely difficult,” and figuring it out is “existential.”
Rachel Maddow’s future may hang in the balance if she can’t figure out how to cover the Trump recovery, too.
The only thing doing worse than Maddow’s analysis or fortune-telling ability is her ratings. She used to tie for #1, when the “Russian collusion” hoax was in full-swing, and liberals believed she had the goods that would get Trump convicted any minute. Now, she doesn’t even rank in the top five. Tucker Carlson is #1. The highest-rated woman in cable news is pro-Trump, America-First conservative Laura Ingraham.
Maddow’s ratings have fallen so far, even Fox News Channel’s non-primetime shows beat her.
Bet you she didn’t predict that.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”