Chris Matthews Garbles It All for You

Jim Naureckas

MSNBC's Chris Matthews, once one of the most prominent pundits on cable TV, used his post-election appearance on Morning Joe (Mediaite, 11/6/24) to demonstrate just how unhelpful political commentary can be.

Asked by host Willie Geist for his "morning after assessment of what happened," Matthews fumed:

Immigration has been a terrible decision for Democrats. I don’t know who they think they were playing to when they let millions of people come cruising through the border at their own will. Because of their own decisions, they came right running to that border, and they didn’t do a thing about it.

And a lot of people are very angry about that. Working people, especially, feel betrayed. They feel that their country has been given away, and they don’t like it.

And I don’t know who liked it. The Hispanics apparently didn’t like it. They want the law enforced. And so I’m not sure they were playing to anything that was smart here, in terms of an open border. And that’s what it is, an open border. And I think it’s a bad decision. I hope they learn from it.

You could not hope for a more distorted picture of Biden administration immigration policy from Fox News or OAN. "They didn’t do a thing about it"? President Joe Biden deported, turned back or expelled more than 4 million immigrants and refugees through February 2024—more than President Donald Trump excluded during his entire first term (Migration Policy Institute, 6/27/24).

Human Rights Watch (1/5/23) criticized Biden for continuing many of Trump's brutal anti-asylum policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) called those restrictions unconstitutional. How can you have any kind of rational debate about what the nation's approach to immigration should be when the supposedly liberal 24-hour news network is pretending such measures amount to an "open border"?

'Democrats don't know how people think'

In one brief segment, MSNBC's Chris Matthews (Morning Joe, 11/6/24) was able to mangle the most important issues of 42% of the electorate.

“It’s all about immigration and the economy," Matthews told Geist. Well, he got the economics just as wrong:

I think you can talk all you want about the rates of inflation going down. What people do is they remember what the price of something was, whether it's gas or anything, or cream cheese, or anything else, and they'll say, "I remember when it was $2, and now it's $7." But they remember it in the last five years. That’s how people think. Democrats don’t know how people think anymore. They think about their country and they think about the cost of things.

The suggestion here is that success in fighting inflation would not be bringing the rate of price increases down, but returning prices to what they were before the inflationary period. That's called deflation, a phenomenon generally viewed as disastrous that policy makers make strenuous efforts to prevent.

A decade ago, the Wall Street Journal (10/16/14) described "the specter of deflation" as "a worry that top policy makers thought they had beaten back":

A general fall in consumer prices emerged as a big concern after the 2008 financial crisis because it summoned memories of deep and lingering downturns like the Great Depression and two decades of lost growth in Japan. The world’s central banks in recent years have used a variety of easy-money policies to fight its debilitating effects.

Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/2/10) noted that

in a deflationary economy, wages as well as prices often have to fall—and...in general economies don’t manage to have falling wages unless they also have mass unemployment, so that workers are desperate enough to accept those wage declines.

It's natural for ordinary consumers to think that if prices going up is bad, prices going down must be good. For someone like Matthews to think that, when he's been covering national politics for more than three decades, is incompetence.

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