The media slept through Biden's inflation crisis but woke up screaming the minute Trump took office.

For four long years, Americans lived with an inflation crisis that most major media outlets treated like an unpleasant rumor — something to downplay, “contextualize,” or explain away as a quirky side effect of the pandemic, supply chains, Vladimir Putin, corporate greed, or “consumer expectations.” 

Anything, really, except the policy decisions of the Biden administration. Newspapers ran soothing graphs. Cable hosts told viewers things were “actually pretty good, historically speaking,” and The Washington Post even told its audience to “lower their expectations.” Inflation wasn’t a story — it was an inconvenience.

Then Donald Trump walked back into the Oval Office, and suddenly inflation is front-page news every single day.

“A new poll should be sounding the alarm for Trump on his cost of living problem,” warned Zeeshan Aleem for MSNBC on December 8.

Trump’s affordability crisis?

And while conservative media outlets jump in to defend Trump, his polling remains steady. The President has also been taking steps to confront this campaign disaster in the making.

From announcing $12 billion in aid to farmers to baby savings accounts that even MSNBC admits “aren’t bad,” Trump is trying every economic trick in the book. Media outlets are giving him scant credit, of course.

You almost have to admire the speed of the pivot. Inflation somehow transformed from “not as bad as it feels” to “a crisis threatening the American middle class” — all in the span of a few months, coinciding with a change in party control. Funny how that works. For the same journalists who insisted voters were imagining their grocery bills, the price of eggs is now a flashing red warning sign of political decline — Trump’s political decline, of course.

Make it make sense.

The new White House has been in office not even a year, and the same people who spent the Biden era insisting presidents have almost no control over inflation now treat Trump as both omnipotent and immediately responsible. The logic is breathtaking: Biden inherited a mess and was therefore blameless. Trump inherited Biden’s mess and is therefore guilty.

This isn’t analysis. It’s choreography.

Under Biden, inflation was described as “global,” “complex,” and “multifactorial” — which is media-speak for “let’s not talk about it.” When price spikes hit 40-year highs, reporters insisted it would all fade soon. When it didn’t, they shifted to “Americans are just grumpy.” When polls showed even lifelong Democrats hated Biden’s economic record, the press blamed the public’s “psychological” misunderstanding of the economy, as if the average voter is too fragile to comprehend their own rent.

Yet the moment Trump wins back Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the same inflation becomes purely domestic, infinitely simple, and — how convenient — entirely political. Articles now warn of “Trumpflation” as though the forces driving price levels politely paused for Biden but are now sprinting to the front of the stage for the encore. We’re told tariffs are to blame (even though consumers endured price shocks long before Trump added a single tariff in his second term). We’re told markets are reacting to “uncertainty” (even though markets were jittery through most of 2023). We’re told voters must hold Trump accountable… for inflation he did not create.

The real story isn’t inflation. It’s memory-holing.

The press spent years insisting that Biden’s policies — massive spending, energy restrictions, regulatory expansion — were benign. They weren’t. Voters knew it, felt it, and eventually responded at the ballot box. Now, with Trump back in office, the media is trying to rewrite the narrative in real time, hoping Americans forget who presided over the worst inflation spike in two generations.

They won’t. Because the thing about grocery bills is: you see them every week. And no amount of op-eds can explain away what people feel in their wallets.

Make it make sense? Sorry. The math isn’t the problem. The storytelling is.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)