June 11, 2024 11:49 AM UTC

Okay, But...Republican Talking Points Falling Apart in Face of Reality

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• by: Colorado Pols

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: The good news (for Biden) and bad news (for Republicans) keeps on rolling in. The latest: Inflation in May was ZERO. Nada. Nil.

From The Washington Post:

Fresh data released from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday showed slight improvement from April, when prices rose at an annual rate of 3.4 percent. Prices were flat month over month for the first time in two years. [Pols emphasis] A narrower measure of inflation that strips out volatile categories like food and energy also came in slower than it has for months. The overall report beat analysts’ expectations and suggested that the Federal Reserve’s inflation fight may be back on track after a bumpy start of the year. Major stock indexes flashed green at Wednesday’s open.

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Republicans and former President Donald Trump have long been counting on a handful of metrics to help them outperform Democrats in 2024.

Unfortunately for the GOP, those metrics aren’t playing along.

Violent crime is everywhere and everyone has either been stabbed in a major city or about to be stabbed!

Nope.

Nobody believes that Trump is a felon and what about Hunter Biden!

Sorry.

The economy is in tatters!

Not so much.

Abortion, IVF, and contraception are old issues!

Um, no.

Let’s take a deeper look at how these narratives that Republicans were hoping to ride to victory in November aren’t playing along in the real world…

The Crimenado is Coming!

For readers who haven’t already been killed or maimed in Denver or one of the other cities across the country, you’ll be happy to learn that violent crime is (still) on the decline.

As Philip Bump reports for The Washington Post:

As he was running for reelection in 2020, Donald Trump warned voters that electing Joe Biden would lead to rampant crime and violence on American streets. His pitch was a bit odd, given that the ads centered on scenes of looting and arson that had occurred that summer — that is, under Trump. The then-president’s argument was that this unrest was a function of the Democratic leadership in those cities or states or wherever it landed so that it wasn’t any Republican’s fault.

That year, upended by the coronavirus pandemic and a new round of protests focused on racial justice, was marked by a surge in violent crime that continued into the first years of Biden’s presidency. But then the surge began to subside, something that has been clear for some time now.

New data released by the FBI on Monday measures big drops in crime across the United States. Violent crime was down nationally in the first quarter of 2024 by more than 15 percent relative to the prior year. Property crime was down 15 percent as well, and murder fell by more than 26 percent. The drop in the number of murders reported by the FBI was largest in the country’s largest cities, but these drops were uniform regardless of the size of the reporting municipality. [Pols emphasis]

Bump notes that national crime data is often incomplete or out-of-date because of the nature of how quickly or accurately local municipalities report that information to the FBI. But the overall numbers are still encouraging and have continued a downward trend since President Biden moved into the White House in 2021 — a trend that even Fox News has had trouble sidestepping:

Since this point in June 2023, Fox News has mentioned “crime” at least 20,000 times — almost as much as CNN and MSNBC have mentioned it combined. (In 2022, Fox News focused heavily on a purported rise in crime as the midterm elections approached, then moving on to other subjects once voting was over.) In every single month of the past year, Fox News has talked about crime more than CNN or MSNBC. [Pols emphasis]

Fox has backed away from talking about “migrant crime,” a term of art it began promoting in February and that quickly became a staple of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric. The channel’s focus on New York City as an epicenter of this purported surge in crime committed by immigrants was hard to sustain given the city’s declining crime rates. (Fox News viewers are nonetheless far more likely to falsely believe that immigrants commit crime at higher rates than native-born U.S. residents.)

Fox News viewers are more likely to believe a lot of dumb shit, including the idea that Donald Trump was somehow the victim in his own crime saga. The problem for Republicans is that most Americans are NOT buying what the right-wing is selling about Trump…

Donald Trump isn’t Really a Felon and What About Hunter Biden!

Here’s what State Republican Party Chair Dave Williams said on KNUS radio after Trump was convicted on all 34 charges in his porn star/hush money trial to become the first former President in American history to earn a felony conviction:

I think most Americans are going to look at this and say he’s not really a convicted felon. You gotta remember, he was convicted, quote unquote, with a Democrat D.A., a very conflicted Democrat judge and from a jury, not of his peers, but of overwhelming, you know, Democrats. I mean, I mean, they tried everything to move the venue to object and move for dismissals because of the lack of evidence or the the inability to actually make a coherent case here. But it didn’t. It didn’t matter. I think most Americans see this for what it is. Yeah, they can technically call him a convicted felon for the time being, but I don’t think any Americans actually buying this.

Sorry, Dave. As Navigator Research found last week:

Roughly two in three Americans say that Trump absolutely committed a crime, the highest number reported in Navigator’s tracking of the issue. Majorities also believe that Trump had a fair trial and is not above the law.

But…but…what about the double standard with President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden?

As The New York Times reports:

Hunter Biden was convicted on Tuesday of three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail; making a false claim on the federal firearms application used to screen applicants, with a sentence of up to five years; and possession of an illegally obtained gun from Oct. 12-23, 2018, which carries a maximum punishment of 10 years.

The crimes stem from the purchase of a handgun by Mr. Biden at one of the low points of his troubled life. He had been addicted to crack cocaine, bouncing in and out of rehab, was divorced, using prostitutes and having money problems.

Oh, so no on the double standard?

Late last month, Trump claimed (falsely) that the FBI was sent to Mar-a-Lago to assassinate him when it searched his Mar-a-Lago property in August 2022 to seize classified documents stored all over Trump’s Florida resort. The FBI was actually just following protocol in that search; that search warrant, like any other, contains standard boilerplate language defining if and when deadly force is authorized in order to protect the lives of FBI agents. That language was also included in a search warrant served on Biden’s Delaware home in January 2023. So, either President Biden also authorized the FBI to assassinate…Joe Biden, or Trump’s claims are all nonsense.

The Economy is in Tatters!

Actually, it’s the opposite of “tatters,” whatever that would be. As The Washington Post reports:

The global economy is in better shape than it was at the start of the year, thanks largely to the performance of the United States, the World Bank said in its latest forecast Tuesday…

…While Americans’ unhappiness with high prices remains a key vulnerability for President Biden’s reelection bid, the World Bank now expects the U.S. economy to grow at an annual rate of 2.5 percent, nearly a full percentage point higher than it predicted in January. The United States is the only advanced economy growing significantly faster than the bank anticipated at the start of the year. [Pols emphasis]

Major retailers are also starting to cut prices as they seek to correct increases that have kept consumers away.

And as MSNBC reports, the latest jobs report is so surprisingly strong that Republicans aren’t even sure what to say anymore:

For those rooting for the U.S. economy, there was a lot to like about the latest jobs report, which was released on Friday morning. The data showed the economy adding 272,000 jobs in May — far more than expected — as well as wage growth that continues to outpace inflation.

All of this comes on the heels of 2023, which was arguably the best year for job creation in the United States since the late 1990s.

In fact, the closer one looks, the better the figures appear. Over 1.2 million jobs have been created so far this year, and if this pace keeps up, the United States will see roughly 3 million new jobs this year, which is extraordinary. Based on the latest data, American job growth across the first five months of 2024 is better than the first five months of any year of Trump’s presidency.

At a campaign rally in Nevada yesterday, the presumptive Republican nominee insisted, with apparent sincerity, “A hundred percent of the new jobs have gone to illegal aliens.”

You know the narrative is in trouble when Trump is claiming that 100% of ALL new jobs went to “illegal aliens.” As MSNBC continues:

Reality, of course, tells a very different story, but at least Trump said something. What did we hear from GOP leaders on Capitol Hill? In keeping with the recent trend, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Mike Johnson responded to the job numbers by saying literally nothing about the good news. No press releases, no tweets, and no public comments.

It appears that the American job market is so good, Republicans have literally found themselves speechless — again.

Let’s move on…

Abortion, IVF, and Contraception Issues Aren’t as Important as in 2022

Hopefully you’re not buying stock in that narrative.

The Alabama Supreme Court decision earlier this year that put the future legality of in-vitro fertilization in question (rightly) freaked out a lot of Republicans. Democrats, meanwhile, are (rightly) pushing the issue.

Senate Republicans recently voted against legislation that would have protected the right to contraception in the United States. This was a “gotcha” vote called by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and it was a good one. As Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Denver) noted on Monday, the Senate is now moving toward a vote on “The Right to IVF Act.” Republicans are being forced to go on the record opposing contraception and potentially opposing access to IVF treatments. The average voter in the United States is not going to be amused by any of this.

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Finally, we should note that 538 unveiled its 2024 election forecast model today. Here’s the big takeaway:

The General Election is still six months away. A lot can change, yada, yada, yada…but if these Republican narrative problems are any indication of the future, things will get worse before they get better for the GOP.