Insist it’s already bent
Donald “91 Counts” Trump famously learned to attack, attack, attack from skeevy attorney Roy Cohn, and to worship himself from Norman Vincent Peale, the positive-thinking guru. Trump has navigated 77 years of his life and scammed his way to celebrity by demanding, whatever the truth of the fine mess he’s created, whatever the dirty deals he was involved in (look, here’s another), that reality bend to his will. He’s always the innocent, always the victim, always the victor.
It’s not as if the Republican Party with the aid of its right-wing media allies wasn’t already far along the path to up-is-downism. It’s just that Trump’s natural flair for the scam fit so well with the party’s proclivities that he was able to wholly coopt the conservative movement.
Now, with the U.S. economy firing on nearly all cylinders under Joe Biden in 2024, Trump will have to find another gear to sell his marks that it’s all going to shit. Have no doubt. He will.
The U.S. economy just keeps getting better. And it’s forcing Donald Trump and his allies to contort the talking points they thought would guide them back to the White House.
A remarkable run of good economic news has tripped up the Trump campaign’s initial plans to paint President Joe Biden as a disaster on the economy. Now, the GOP frontrunner is grasping for new ways to attack the administration’s increasingly robust record.
You can read about that here and here. Even Fox Business is buckling to to reality. Even hacks and shills like Stephen Moore recognize it (emphasis mine).
“I think that is the question of the day,” said Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an economist with FreedomWorks who is close to the Trump campaign. “You can’t blame the president when policies go wrong, and then say he’s not responsible if things are going right.”
Moore, who said he met with Trump in December and discussed the economic outlook, added: “If this continues, where you see strong job growth and also if you see wages outpacing inflation, as has been for the last nine months or so, that certainly makes the argument less persuasive.”
But Trump’s skill is not in crafting persuasive arguments. It’s in relentless repetition. He’ll “power of positive thinking” his way to convincing followers his fabulous new clothes fit his naked, rock-hard body like his head fits Sylvester Stallone’s torso.
See?
Trump has responded by throwing out a series of counterarguments downplaying Biden’s role in the economic upswing, including suggesting that the stock markets’ gains are actually his doing.
On Monday, he claimed on Truth Social that voters were already enjoying a “TRUMP STOCK MARKET” because the economy was anticipating his eventual victory. For now, Trump said, “EVERYTHING ELSE IS TERRIBLE (WATCH THE MIDDLE EAST!)”
Such claims have proved too much for economists and “for many Republicans as well.” But those are people who live in the real world and only vacation in Trump’s, not residents of MAGAstan.
“Biden officials say they recognize that the president faces an uphill battle selling his own agenda, even with the recent economic tailwinds,” Politico continues. So long as grocery prices remain 25 percent higher than where they were before the Covid pandemic, Trump will have an easier time selling “EVERYTHING ELSE IS TERRIBLE.”
Democrats need not to sit back and let him. People can’t eat statistics.
Truth:
“Trump won’t be honest about the economy for the same reason he’s been rooting for the market to crash before the next election,” Democratic National Committee rapid response director Andrew Floyd said in a Friday statement. “He only cares about himself, and he’ll leave working families out to dry if he thinks it’ll help him and his ultra-rich friends.”