As August got underway, there was a sharp and unexpected downturn on Wall Street. As a recent New York Times report summarized, it was easy to explain: Investigators grew skittish due to a combination of a disappointing jobs report, trouble in Japanese markets, and concerns that the Federal Reserve had waited too long to lower interest rates.
For Donald Trump and his party, however, the truth was clearly inadequate, so they rewrote it. In the Republicans’ version of reality, the brief Wall Street slide was obviously Vice President Kamala Harris’ fault. From the Times’ article:
By lunchtime, it was official party messaging: The Republican National Committee hyped the “Great Kamala Crash of 2024,” and the Trump campaign had produced and circulated on social media a video tying the vice president to Monday’s dip in the markets. By the afternoon, the Trump forces had turned “KamalaCrash” into a “trending” subject on X.
The rhetorical push was, of course, utterly ridiculous. The idea that a sitting vice president is responsible for brief and entirely predictable stock-market losses was absurd, but the GOP candidate and his allies expected voters to believe it anyway.
At least, that is, that was the Republicans’ message four weeks ago. As August comes to end, Americans are no longer hearing much about the “Kamala Crash,” in large part because there’s been no crash. All of the losses from earlier in the month have been regained, and as NBC News reported, economic growth in the United States continues to look good.
The U.S. economy grew faster in the second quarter of 2024 than first reported, suggesting there was little sign of a slowdown through the first six months of the year. The latest reading of the gross domestic product (GDP) published by the Commerce Department came in at 3%, up from an initial estimate of 2.8%.
The latest data is roughly in line with the kind of quarterly GDP reports we saw across much of Trump’s pre-pandemic presidency — when Republicans said Americans saw the greatest economy in the history of humanity.
The results also poses a challenge for the former president and his allies, which they haven’t even tried to address: If voters are supposed to believe that Harris is directly responsible for the world’s largest economy, how much credit are Trump and the GOP prepared to give the incumbent vice president for 3% GDP growth? As for the Republicans’ crystal ball, four years ago, Trump told supporters that Democratic policies would “unleash an economic disaster of epic proportions” and force the country “into depression.” He’s begun making similar predictions ahead of Election Day 2024. Everything Trump said and predicted was wrong — and the former president hasn’t even tried to explain why his predictions were so hilariously misplaced, or why anyone should believe his new predictions in light of his awful track record. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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