As the battle over the debt ceiling hits a crescendo, it’s evident that the Democrats’ goal, supported by their cheerleaders in the legacy media, is to pressure Republicans into abandoning any spending cuts and agree to a “bipartisan” bill – or face being blamed for default and any resulting economic consequences (which would be more credibly tied to a looming recession than the default, anyway).

CNN unintentionally blew up that narrative – bigly – last week when they aired the Trump Town Hall, in which Donald Trump set all of the parts of that narrative on fire, and they’ve been doing cleanup ever since.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins rattled off a list of doomsday scenarios that would allegedly occur without a debt ceiling deal, then allowed an audience member to ask a question only tangentially related to the debt ceiling. In his answer, Trump gave the Republicans some great advice and then set everyone straight on what the actual effects of default would be (and not the effects Collins claims we’ll see, which is the economic disaster we’re almost guaranteed to see anyway due to Biden’s horrific policies). He said, in part:

“I say to the Republicans out there…if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re gonna have to do a default. And I don’t believe they’re going to do a default, because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave….

“It’s psychological. It’s really psychological more than anything else. And it could be very bad. it could be maybe nothing. It could be — you have a bad week or you have a bad day. Look, you have to cut your costs. We’re spending $7 trillion on — much of it on nonsense, $7 trillion on nonsense.”

Since Trump’s Town Hall brought CNN the highest ratings it’s seen in a long time, a lot more viewers saw Trump’s dismantling of the Democrat narrative than would ordinarily see one of the network’s fever dreams, so the network knew they needed to do something. As part of this cleanup attempt, CNN ran a “fact check” of Trump’s debt ceiling claims, which begins:

In CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump on Wednesday, the former president said a US default on its debt may be “psychological” and that it “could be nothing” or perhaps just “a bad week or a bad day.”

Economists disagree; many of them.

One “economist” CNN used to buttress their arguments is Consumer Finance Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra. While we know that Chopra isn’t just a partisan, but an extreme socialist partisan, he’s supposed to be non-political in his official capacity. When CNN’s Matt Egan contacted him to respond to Trump’s claims, Chopra hesitated to comment directly, because he knows he’s not supposed to make political attacks and has been called out on it in the past. Egan said:

I asked him about Trump’s comments, and he didn’t want to comment directly, but he made it clear that he’s got the opposite view.

Chopra then gave his extremely vague doomsday opinion:

“A lot of things we assume are part of our financial fabric would get ripped away. It’s a big worry. Every family should be concerned. From our own knowledge and oversight of the banking system, we know that everyone is extremely concerned. Corporate America, Main Street, all of it could be affected.”

His words have been quoted in additional CNN reporting – without referencing Trump, of course.

CNN’s cleanup isn’t working, though. As of Thursday Democrats have resorted to trotting out Sen. John Fetterman in his Carhartt hoodie to stumble through a few sentences encouraging Joe Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment to resolve the issue, a risky move RedState’s Joe Cunningham assessed as the “worst solution to this crisis” more than a week ago.

Perhaps the Democrats are going to learn the hard way that their “Chicken Little” approach to every crisis has rendered their hysterics ineffective.