Welcome to the weekend edition of the Editorial Board! I’m your host, John Stoehr. Before I get to what I posted recently, another few words about the greatest tax hike of our lifetimes, better known as tariffs.

We know the outcome. Trillions went poof in two days. 

But what is the president saying? What’s his reasoning? According to the AP, the tariffs are “designed to boost domestic manufacturing” and bring back “factory jobs to the United States as a result of the taxes.”

As far as I can tell, the press corps never challenges this. The focus quickly turns to the political impact of tariffs, especially how they will raise the cost of everything, from cars to toilet paper. Trump won on the promise of lowering costs. Yet here he is raising them, on purpose.

What’s really going to happen is this. Like a mafia don, Trump is going to use tariffs to force all the big corporations, like Apple and Walmart, to come to him to make a deal. They will come to terms, which is to say, the president will consider accepting their bribes, before business resumes with the consequence of normal people still paying more. 

There will be no boost to domestic manufacturing. Factory jobs will not return. There will be no golden age. It’s all an elaborate con.

But let’s go back to the reasoning and realize: what Trump is claiming to do Joe Biden has already done, and the press corps isn’t saying so, because it is complicit in the fact that most people do not know it.

I’ve already quoted him once, but it’s worth doing again. Here’s the chief economist for Moody’s. On September 30, Mark Zandi said the economy under Biden was the best he’d seen. He said “this is among the best performing economies in my 35-plus years as an economist.”

He went on: 

• “Economic growth is rip-roaring, with real GDP up 3 percent over the past year. Unemployment is low, at near 4 percent, consistent with full employment.
• “Inflation is fast closing in on the Fed’s 2 percent target. 
• “Grocery prices, rents and gas prices are flat to down over the past more than a year. Households’ financial obligations are light, and set to get lighter with the Fed cutting rates. 
• “House prices have never been higher, and most homeowners have more equity in their homes than ever. 
• “Corporate profits are robust, and the stock market is hitting a record high on a seemingly daily basis.”

In July, the Times ran a piece that went further. It said the former president’s policies, sometimes collectively known as Bidenomics, staged a “remarkable comeback” for rural counties in the southeast and midwest. Their manufacturing glory days had been restored.

America’s so-called “left behind” counties — the once-great manufacturing centers and other distressed places that struggled mightily at the start of this century — have staged a remarkable comeback. In the last three years, they added jobs and new businesses at their fastest pace since Bill Clinton was president.

The turnaround has shocked experts. “This is the kind of thing that we couldn’t have even dreamed about five or six years ago,” said John Lettieri, the president of the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank that studies economic distress in the U.S. His group is releasing a report today that details the recovery of left-behind counties.

Those counties span the nation but are largely concentrated in the Southeast and Midwest. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how they defied recent trends — including a particularly grim stretch under Donald Trump — to rebound so strongly from the pandemic recession.

The Times report said that inflation was the main thing standing in the way of voters rewarding the Democrats for all they accomplished. Biden, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris, acknowledged as much. 

But that wasn’t the main thing. Attention was.

The vast preponderance of the attention paid by the press corps did not go to the miracle, the literal miracle of Bidenomics for lifting us out of a pandemic and avoiding a crushing recession. That went to Biden’s age. (The Times piece came out in July, the same time everyone was talking about Biden’s debate performance. It made no impact.) It was so bad Harris could not run on that “remarkable comeback,” because she’d have the added work of convincing people the truth was true.

So Biden and Harris did what Trump only talks about. With their historic achievement down the memory hole, Trump can pretend that the economy before the election was like a sick patient and his tariffs are somehow going to revive him, make him better than ever before. 

That facade can only be maintained with the blessing of a complicit press corps. If reporters started challenging Trump on the idea that domestic manufacturing was terrible, they would have to do more reporting on what really happened, thus risking their credibility.

I have said before the true fault line in American politics is not left-right, liberal-conservative or even rich versus everyone else. 

The true fault line is true-false. As Hannah Arendt famously said: “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Too few people know the difference anymore.

One consequence is trillions going poof.

Before I get to recent postings, a reminder:

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HERE’S WHAT YOU MISSED LAST WEEK

March 28, 2025
How to encourage a Trump voter to give up hope on voting
Remind them the president is treating them like everyone else.

March 29, 2025
Once again, but this time with feeling: sadism is the point
The weekend edition of the Editorial Board.

March 31, 2025
Third term? Third rail? Criminals don’t obey rules
The rules are only as valuable as people willing to use them to fight.

April 2, 2025
Cory Booker’s hard liberalism
His historic speech marks a pivot from his party’s past.

April 3, 2025
Yes, Trump voters wanted tariffs
He promised. He delivered. What’s the mystery?

April 4, 2025
Resentful? Crash the economy and you’ll see what that means
Some are pretending they were duped. Don’t believe it.