Earlier this week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that China had refused to purchase American soybeans during Joe Biden’s presidency because Chinese leaders “had no respect for our president, Biden, or for the country at the time.” Thankfully, she added, Donald Trump has turned things around.
As White House lies go, this one was odd — and rather lazy. It didn’t take a lot of Googling to learn that Chinese purchases of American soybeans during the Biden era were quite robust. Beijing stopped buying the products, however, earlier this year in response to Trump’s trade tariffs.
It was a timely reminder that, in service of the president’s political agenda, Leavitt isn’t just willing to spin and exaggerate, she’s also willing to turn reality on its head.
This was apparent again during a briefing on Thursday when Donald Trump’s chief spokesperson declared, in apparent seriousness, “Every data point and every economic metric does, in fact, show that the economy is improving.”
That was demonstrably ridiculous. Americans are confronting rising consumer costs, rising energy costs, a contracting manufacturing sector and the worst job growth since the Great Recession. That’s not a matter of opinion; it’s just what’s happening.
But Leavitt kept going anyway.
When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins dared to remind the White House press secretary that grocery prices have climbed, Leavitt accused her of deliberately pushing “untrue narratives,” despite the fact that grocery prices really have climbed.
As the briefing continued, another reporter noted that the consumer price index was 3% at the start of the year, and it was still at 3% in September, which is the most recent month for which data is available.








