Fox News anchor Chris Wallace ceased trying to hide his downright hatred for the Trump administration a long time ago. White House officials who are brave (or foolish) enough to appear with Wallace on Fox News Sunday shouldn’t expect a friendly interview — or even a spirited debate.
Wallace is known for treating members of the Trump administration to hostile interrogations, and his Sunday interview with President Donald Trump’s senior economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, was no exception. The 16-year Fox News veteran mocked Kudlow’s assessment of the current economy under Trump, snapping at the financial expert: “Let me interrupt your campaign speech.”
Anti-Trump interview
Wallace first asked his guest to respond to Democrats’ claims that the Trump economy has favored the wealthy over the middle class.
“As you know, the Democrats held two debates this past week, and they said for all the president’s bragging about a strong U.S. economy, that it isn’t working for all Americans,” Wallace said, playing a clip of 2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) criticizing Trump’s economic policies. “How do you respond to that?”
Kudlow answered by saying that he didn’t understand “what planet they’re describing” when Democrats talk about a struggling middle and lower class. He explained: “The United States economy is booming. It’s been running a roughly 3% [GDP growth] average since President Trump took office two and a half years ago.”
Just the facts
Kudlow continued, presenting facts that even the president’s most outspoken critics would have trouble disputing.
“The blue-collar workers, the non-supervisory workers have done the best. They’re the ones running wages at 3.5%. Their growth in income and wages is exceeding the growth of their supervisors,” Kudlow said. He went on:
The unemployment rate is low. We just had the best June stock market the DOW Jones in over 80 years. That’s going to fill up the 401K of middle-class folks everywhere.
These are factual issues, okay? I understand that there’s a political spin. But these are factual measurable areas, and I was just saying I do not understand [Democrats] narrative. We are in a strong prosperity cycle, I’m sorry, and a lot of the policies that I hear, Chris–
But Wallace wasn’t having it. “Let me interrupt your campaign speech,” he started.
“It’s not a campaign speech,” Kudlow answered. “I’m citing facts and figures, am I not?”
“There is clearly a stark income inequality in this country,” Wallace asserted. He played a clip of Bernie Sanders from the Democratic primary debate to drive home his point, when the said that “three people” make more money than the bottom half of all Americans combined.
The elephant in the room
But what Sanders didn’t say last week was that the leftist policies promoted by the Obama administration actually shrank the middle class and exacerbated income inequality. In 2009, 53% of Americans counted themselves as part of the middle class, but that number declined to 44% in 2014, according to a Pew Research study.
Meanwhile, the Trump economy has improved prosperity for all Americans, and income inequality is actually shrinking under the conservative administration. While women and minorities suffered during the liberal Obama years, those same demographics have seen the largest gains in wages and employment during the Trump years.
Kudlow said as much in his defense of Trump, reiterating the same facts that point to a shrinking wage gap in the U.S. Higher wages, especially among the working class, along with low unemployment and stock market gains have produced a booming economy that is beneficial to all Americans.
“Economic growth, a strong and durable prosperity cycle,” Kudlow promised under Trump in the coming years. “And I will make this warning: some of these policies we’ve heard in some of these early debates, in my judgment, do great, great damage to this prosperity and jobs and income and wage cycle that we are experiencing.
“So somebody’s got to do a little fact-checking here on what these candidates are saying,” Kudlow concluded. Unfortunately, he can’t rely on Wallace to take on that responsibility.
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