Rotadom
Satan's Plaything
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2017
- Posts
- 12,068
Donald Trump Just Proved He’s an Economic Idiot. Again.
His MAGA sycophants knew all along that his central economic proposal was a sham, but they repeated his lies. And now the economy is cracking.
Remember the word “sanewashing” from the 2024 presidential campaign? It referred to the mainstream media’s coverage of Donald Trump’s rallies, and their tendency to pluck out quotes for their stories that made him sound like a normal candidate when he was in fact spouting fantastical lies and gibberish and authoritarian threats. I was apoplectic about it, as were TNR’s Greg Sargent and contributor Parker Molloy.
The media sanewashed a lot of what Trump said, from his hate-filled rhetoric about transgender people to his descriptions of Kamala Harris. But in retrospect, his sanewashing on the economy probably benefited him more than anything else. The economy was voters’ top concern, and the common narrative in the press went like this: The economy’s terrible; inflation is punishing; voters blame Joe Biden, “fairly or not” (a classic dodge of a phrase); the Trump economy was strong until Covid, which wasn’t his fault, and Trump says he’ll bring down prices on day one and protect American workers with his tariffs.
Many of these claims weren’t true, and now we’re starting to see the consequences of the casual lies Trump got away with last year. How many times did we hear him say things like, “Tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”? Everybody knew then what’s obvious today. Tariffs are taxes. They raise prices on Americans. A lot of people said it, mostly Democrats, but Trump denied it, and the right-wing media-political complex that exists to support his every lie cranked into gear to say tariffs are great.
That was then. Now we’ve moved from campaign rhetoric to policymaking, and what we’re seeing is even more obvious and embarrassing than I’d imagined. Tariffs were the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign—they were his most important proposal on the most important issue to voters. It doesn’t get more central than that.
His MAGA sycophants knew all along that his central economic proposal was a sham, but they repeated his lies. And now the economy is cracking.
Remember the word “sanewashing” from the 2024 presidential campaign? It referred to the mainstream media’s coverage of Donald Trump’s rallies, and their tendency to pluck out quotes for their stories that made him sound like a normal candidate when he was in fact spouting fantastical lies and gibberish and authoritarian threats. I was apoplectic about it, as were TNR’s Greg Sargent and contributor Parker Molloy.
The media sanewashed a lot of what Trump said, from his hate-filled rhetoric about transgender people to his descriptions of Kamala Harris. But in retrospect, his sanewashing on the economy probably benefited him more than anything else. The economy was voters’ top concern, and the common narrative in the press went like this: The economy’s terrible; inflation is punishing; voters blame Joe Biden, “fairly or not” (a classic dodge of a phrase); the Trump economy was strong until Covid, which wasn’t his fault, and Trump says he’ll bring down prices on day one and protect American workers with his tariffs.
Many of these claims weren’t true, and now we’re starting to see the consequences of the casual lies Trump got away with last year. How many times did we hear him say things like, “Tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”? Everybody knew then what’s obvious today. Tariffs are taxes. They raise prices on Americans. A lot of people said it, mostly Democrats, but Trump denied it, and the right-wing media-political complex that exists to support his every lie cranked into gear to say tariffs are great.
That was then. Now we’ve moved from campaign rhetoric to policymaking, and what we’re seeing is even more obvious and embarrassing than I’d imagined. Tariffs were the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign—they were his most important proposal on the most important issue to voters. It doesn’t get more central than that.
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