As August began, Wall Street was in a sharp and unexpected downturn. As a recent New York Times report summarized, it was easy to explain: Investigators were getting nervous because of a combination of a disappointing jobs report, troubles in Japanese markets and concerns that the Federal Reserve had waited too long to cut interest rates.
For Donald Trump and his party, however, the truth clearly fell short, so they rewrote it. In the Republican version of reality, the brief Wall Street downturn was clearly Vice President Kamala Harris’s fault. From the Times article:
By lunchtime, the party’s official message was out: The Republican National Committee was promoting the “Great Kamala Crash of 2024,” and the Trump campaign had produced and circulated a video on social media linking the vice president to Monday’s market drop. By noon, Trump’s forces had turned “KamalaCrash” into a “trending” topic on X.
The rhetoric was, of course, completely ridiculous. The idea that a sitting vice president was responsible for short and entirely predictable stock market losses was absurd, but the GOP candidate and his allies expected voters to believe it anyway.
At least that was the message from Republicans four weeks ago. As August draws to a close, Americans don’t hear much about the “Kamala Crash” anymore, largely because there was no crash. All the losses from earlier in the month have been recouped, and as NBC News reported, economic growth in the United States is still looking good.
The U.S. economy grew faster in the second quarter of 2024 than first reported, suggesting there was little sign of a slowdown in the first six months of the year. The latest reading of gross domestic product (GDP) released by the Commerce Department came in at 3%, up from an initial estimate of 2.8%.
The latest data are roughly in line with the kind of quarterly GDP reports we saw during much of Trump’s presidency before the pandemic, when Republicans said Americans were experiencing the greatest economy in human history.
The results also pose a challenge for the former president and his allies that they have not even attempted to address: If voters are to believe that Harris is directly responsible for the world’s largest economy, how much credit are Trump and the Republican Party willing to give the current vice president for 3% GDP growth?
As for the Republican crystal ball: Four years ago, Trump told his supporters that Democratic policies would unleash “an economic disaster of epic proportions” and plunge the country “into a depression.” He has been making similar predictions in the run-up to Election Day in 2024.
Everything Trump said and predicted was wrong. And the former president hasn’t even attempted to explain why his predictions were so hilariously misguided, or why anyone should believe his new predictions given his terrible record.
This post is an update to our related previous reporting.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
