This is an omen for things to come. Donald Trump lies like the proverbial rug, as we all know. It’s ingrained in him. And he can’t stop, not even when confronted with the reality of the situation, that his lies are utterly transparent and cannot be backed up with simple fact. Trump has made a complete ass of himself this past week bragging how affordable Thanksgiving is this year, when in point of fact grocery prices are up and inflation is up. And if you can find the $2 gas he claims is nationwide, would you please tell the rest of us where you found it? Down in Wonderland with Alice, maybe?
President Donald Trump launched into an angry tirade after being confronted about cost-of-living pressures, calling affordability a Democratic “con job” and insisting prices are “way down.”
Days after Democrats won a clean sweep of elections, largely over concerns about the economy, the president was confronted about the issue during a meeting at the White House with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
The event began with the 79-year-old president looking and sounding relatively subdued, but the tempo immediately picked up when he was asked about the price of a Thanksgiving dinner from Walmart.
Trump had earlier insisted that Walmart’s Thanksgiving meal would be cheaper this year, which he pointed to as “irrefutable” evidence that Republicans are the party of “affordability.”
However, a reporter noted his glaring omission—that this year’s meal contains fewer items—and asked Trump to explain the disconnect many feel between how he talks about the economy and how Americans feel about it.
After hitting out at the NBC reporter as “fake news,” Trump insisted that people “feel much better,” and that the U.S. has more jobs and more investment “than any other country in history.”
“Affordability, they call it—it was a con job by the Democrats,” he added. “The Democrats are good at two things: cheating on elections and conning people on facts that weren’t true.”
To hear Trump accuse somebody else of “conning people on facts that weren’t true” would be utterly hilarious if it wasn’t, in fact, tragic. This is Trump’s stock in trade. This is what the group of people that Steve Bannon calls the “low propensity, low information voters” — in other words, idiots — buy into all the time, is Trump’s factoids that are not true.
“We did a great job on affordability and groceries. The only problem is the fake news—you people don’t want to report it,” he lamented.
This is Trump-speak for, “You people don’t want to go along with the gag.” Trump so desires that the press simply act as stenographers reporting what he says as a press release and questioning nothing. And tragically, to a large extent that’s what he gets from right-wing controlled media. The Bezos Bugle is Exhibit “A” to this proposition.
However, according to the Bureau of Labor’s latest data, which was widely reported at the time, the consumer price index rose to 3 per cent in September, with the price of gas, food and energy all up from the following month.
“The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden and the prices are way down,” Trump added.
The president’s reaction is emblematic of how sensitive the issue is for Trump, who came to office promising to reduce cost-of-living pressures “from day one.”
It’s a very touchy issue because Trump is asking America to believe him over empirical reality. And a great many of them do. But as we saw both with last Tuesday’s election and with the #NoKings rallies, a lot of America is fed up. They’re tired of the lies and they’re fighting back.
The GOP is in the middle. How are they going to square the fact that their standard bearer is lying about things that don’t exist with the fact that they all need to stay in office (those who are up for election) next year? That’s their quandary. We’re going to see how they handle it.
He lives in his bubble. Don’t anyone dare try to pop it!
What is tragic is that so many of the “low propensity low information” voters turned out to reelect him.They’re not the only ones going down, though, as brutal reality rears its ugly head. We’re all on this ship together.
At least during Trump 1.0 he had some adults in the room, John Kelly, Mike Mattis, J.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, John Bolton, others. Now he’s untrammeled and flying blind. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. But this next year should pass quickly.