MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt blames Donald Trump’s business failures on a recession that didn’t happen https://t.co/jfgabhwEpA pic.twitter.com/UZwlpwGGsW

— Media Matters (@mmfa) October 3, 2016

MSNBC contributor and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt parroted Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s false claim that he weathered “an economic depression” in the 1990s, with Hewitt blaming a so-called “Clinton-triggered recession” that did not actually happen for Trump’s disastrous business failures throughout that decade.

During an October 3 speech in Pueblo, Colorado in which the GOP nominee attempted to deflect criticism in the wake of a devastating New York Times investigation into a decades-long period where he may not have paid income taxes, Trump blamed his business struggles in the 1990s on “one of the most brutal economic downturns in our country’s history” that he claimed was “almost as bad as the Great Depression of 1929.” Immediately following Trump’s speech, frequent Trump apologist Hugh Hewitt gave cover to Trump’s dubious claim, saying that President Bill Clinton’s policies and a supposed “Clinton-triggered recession of those years” were to blame for Trump’s business collapse, where he reported losses of over $900 million in 1995.

Unfortunately for Trump and contrary to Hewitt’s claim, there was no recession during the Clinton administration, much less an economic contraction as severe as the Great Depression of 1929 or the profound economic and financial crisis of 2007 through 2009, which was inherited by President Obama.

and MM has charts.