Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour
President Donald J. Trump, joined by First Lady Melania Trump, at Sunday's Daytona 500 in Daytona Beach, Fla.
As the campaign begins to end what many Americans consider the most corrupt, divisive, demagogic presidency of their lifetimes, there’s a nagging fear about the difficulty of ridding the nation of Donald Trump despite a widespread public awareness of what a terrible president he is. A stroke of historic luck could benefit the most unfit president in modern history.
Since World War II, no U.S. president has ever lost reelection when the unemployment rate was below 7.4%. It’s now 3.6%.
Billionaire Tom Steyer is unlikely to win the Democratic nomination, but in the last debate, he stated the challenge clearly: “We’re going to have to take Mr. Trump down on the economy, because if you listen to him, he’s crowing about it every single day. And he’s going to beat us unless we take him down on the economy, stupid.”
“It’s the economy, stupid,” is remembered as the guiding principle posted by election strategist James Carville on the wall of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s Little Rock presidential campaign office credited with limiting the first Republican President George Bush to one term.
It’s often been said, though, that Trump doesn’t follow any of the conventional rules of politics, so why should a favorable rule regarding the economy be any different? Trump’s State of the Union speech was a dramatic reminder that no matter how good the U.S. economy may be for many people right now (especially those at the very top), voters would be absolute fools to believe anything Trump ever says about it.
Pack of Lies
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accurately described Trump’s speech as a “pack of lies” after calmly tearing the pages in half. Presidents always exaggerate accomplishments to put themselves in the best possible light, but Trump keeps setting new world records for the astronomical number of provable lies any president has ever packed into a single speech, constantly praising himself for completely non-existent accomplishments. The Washington Post documented 16,241 false or misleading statements in his first three years in office.
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Trump’s biggest and most brazenly racist lie is that the U.S. economy was a smoldering ruin of American carnage under the nation’s first African American President Barack Obama until Trump instantly transformed that economy into “the best it has ever been.” The truth is Trump is still riding the wave of Obama’s economic success. The longest economic expansion in U.S. history began in June 2009 under Obama. That means our current boom is the result of seven-and-a-half years of economic growth under Obama and three years under Trump. In fact, job creation in the last three years of Obama’s presidency averaged 227,000 a month, far exceeding the monthly average of 191,000 in the first three years under Trump.
Obama’s economic success was even more impressive because he took office when 800,000 jobs a month were disappearing during the worst national economic crisis since the Great Depression. Republicans irresponsibly opposed Obama’s economic stimulus program in a cynical political attempt to delay the nation’s economic recovery and inflict more pain upon American workers and their families in hopes of limiting Obama to one term.
Reckless Policies
Instead of thanking Obama every single day for the rising economy his Democratic predecessor handed him, Trump did his best to destroy it by waging a reckless trade war with China, throwing manufacturing into a recession and bankrupting more than 1,000 family farms throughout the Midwest over the last two years.
One of Trump’s most outrageous State of the Union lies was that his administration added 12,000 new factories. That’s news to laid-off factory workers. It turns out that 80% of those “manufacturing establishments” employed five or fewer people. Trump was using a government definition of manufacturing that includes bakeries, candy stores, tailor shops and anyone making a product at home to sell.
Trump’s lies are vicious and cruel. Trump brags about getting Americans off food stamps by sending children and the elderly to bed hungry. He claimed he’d never cut Medicare or Social Security days before releasing a budget removing half-a-trillion dollars in funding from Medicare over 10 years, including $135 billion from Medicare prescription drugs and tens of billions from Social Security. With the world panicking over a possible coronavirus pandemic, Trump proposed cutting $1.27 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trump promises to protect health coverage for pre-existing conditions while his administration is in federal court trying to destroy those protections along with subsidies to reduce health care costs.
Polls in early voting states this year indicate the top voter concern remains protecting health care, just as it was when it fueled the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in 2018.
Truth will be the most powerful weapon Democrats have this year to defeat a pathologically lying president who can’t be trusted to protect the American economy or the health and well-being of the ordinary Americans.
