WARNING: The media fact checkers can’t get their facts straight.

The near-universal media spin on the debate Thursday was “Biden was incoherent and Trump repeatedly lied.” Well, at least half of that statement is true.

Yes, Trump has a penchant for exaggerating, but on economics, it was mostly Biden (not Trump) who got the facts all wrong. And so did the media’s so-called “fact checkers.”

Here are prominent examples from the “news” division of this weekend’s Wall Street Journal:

And from former CNN host Brian Stelter:

Trump was called out for stating that Biden had “the largest deficit in the history of the country.” The largest single year was, of course, 2020 during COVID when the economy was shut down for months.

What Trump was referring to is that Joe Biden has amassed the largest “debt” in history. In his first term, Biden has borrowed some $7.9 trillion, after adjusting for the Treasury’s cash balance. Trump borrowed $6.5 trillion. And as we point out in today’s New York Post, Biden has added $7 trillion MORE debt over 10 years than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates it would have been under Trump’s policies.

On inflation, the Journal challenges Trump’s statement that inflation was “under control” at the end of his term. “In reality,” the WSJ alleges, “inflation was starting to pick up toward the end of Trump’s presidency.”

HUH? The annualized inflation rate in Trump’s four years in office was 1.9% compared to 5.4% under Biden. Here are the numbers in Trump’s last four months in office:

Jan. 2021 1.4%
Dec.2020 1.4%
Nov. 2020 1.2%
Oct. 2020 1.2%

How is this a “pick up” in inflation, when these rates were all comfortably BELOW the Federal Reserve’s target?

The truth matters here. Inflation arrived AFTER Biden passed two multi-trillion-dollar spending bills, all paid for with debt and AFTER all his economists promised there would be no inflation.

By the Summer of 2022, inflation was 9.1%. And that’s Trump’s fault?