Axios Chastises Trump Voters for Rejecting Preposterous Logical Fallacy

Isaac SchorrJan 18th, 2024, 10:45 am
 

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

If even the most righteous of pedantic rebukes can be vexing, spurious ones are intolerable.

At Axios, Emily Peck purports to have discovered a flaw in Trump voters’ justification of their support for the former president.

“Supporters of former President Donald Trump cite his economic record as a reason to vote for him, but that’s a bit puzzling,” writes Peck. “Trump’s economic record is only good if you leave off what happened from March 2020 to the end of his administration.”

While she concedes that this phenomena is “understandable” because “countries around the world faced similar struggles to the U.S. at the time,” Peck still submits defenders of Trump’s economic record are suffering from some sort of mental malfunction.

Why?

“Inflation is the main economic issue Trump supporters have now,” and, here’s the kicker, “inflation was also the result of the pandemic’s economic disruption.”

It’s a wonder that no one noticed that this represents a logical error on the part of Peck, not the voters she’s chastising, prior to publication.

In her formulation, the proximate cause of inflation was the pandemic, the pandemic began under Trump’s administration, therefore Trump voters should blame the former president for the higher cost of goods and services.

But there’s a missing link here. Peck’s unstated assumption is that because Trump was president at the outset of the pandemic, he is responsible for its outbreak. This is an assumption in the most literal meaning of the term. Peck provides no evidence because there is no evidence for her argument.

Regardless of their motivations — and they may well be largely motivated by partisanship — Trump voters are largely correct not to chalk the economic woes of the pandemic up to the former president’s policies.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

Tags: