We have a liar in the White House, and his name is Donald Trump.
Well, we've known this for a long time, long before he ever became President. I got frustrated with a good friend of mine once who was trying to defend him in a conversation in which I was pointing out lies and he was trying to deflect, make excuses, deny the evidence, and defend the guy. I said, "Name one thing that Donald Trump has ever said as a politician that was the truth."
There was some risk in that, because, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. To make his point, of course, he had to search and find evidence. And he couldn't.
I cannot stand to hear the man's droning, monotone, sing-songy voice with his pinched-together lips, mispronounciations, bad grammar, mis-use of words or beady eyes that say, "I'm lying through my teeth." So I did not listen to his Wednesday cascade of lies that clearly embarassed most of his conservative media and political allies with its astounding incoherence. No matter the makeup or the drugs, he looks bad. His knowledge of American civics isn't good enough to pass a citizenship test. Most Americans don't watch, are bored with politics, ignorant of their own history and government themselves, and will miss all of this, which is why they don't care.
So, for those of you who missed out, and go about your business not knowing that the President of the United States embarassed this country, himself, and you as one of its stakeholders, here's a recap of the same old same old.
Joe Biden handed off one of the most stable, prosperous economies under his presidency in over 60 years.
That's a fact.
We have not had a four year stretch of low unemployment or continuous growth in GNP since the Kennedy-Johnson era. We did have inflation, something that Biden anticipated in the COVID recovery, and did everything possible to keep it from being worse, which he succeeded in doing. Americans did not experience inflation the way Europe or Asia did, and just like Biden said, it would take time but the measures they put in place would bring it down, slowly, but in the right direction. And that's exactly what happened.
Then along came Trump, his craziness and lack of any plan, his vengeful declarations of tariffs, and we are back in the inflation business with an economy turning south, which he owns and will own.
Trump hasn't done anything to reduce prescription drug prices. If they had gone down 600%, which is what he said, our prescription medications would be free, and the pharmacy would have to issue a refund check when we pick them up.
If this is true, then the President owes me a lot of money. Since he took office, the same medications that cost me about $80 a month during the last couple of years of the Biden administration, when I first went on Medicare, now cost me $120. Insulin has gone up. Diabetic testing supplies have gone up considerably, and the pen needles used to inject insulin suddenly doubled in price in October, as a direct result of Trump's tariffs. The test strips, made in Mexico, have quadrupled since January.
And of course, any other news media source will have a list of where grocery prices now stand, compared to December of 2024. Even bananas have gone sky high.
As far as gas goes, it's down in some places, but not much from where it was when Biden left office, and it's still higher than it was at the low point in the Biden administration. Noting that during the first year of Biden's presidency, my corner market gas station had it at $2.49, which was, of course, a COVID demand decrease, and it's now $3.39 at that same station is an interesting comparison. Demand is down again. That's why.
Trump's claim that he has secured $18 trillion in investment contradicts his own administration's published figure of $9 trillion, which is still an exaggeration.
And there's not one in a hundred Americans who can tell you anything about what that means to them, anyway. Trusted economists say the figure is somewhere around $5 trillion, and at any rate, all but the $18 trillion falls below both Biden and Obama administration figures.
"I've Settled Eight Wars in 10 Months"
And the lie detector is pegged to the max.
There was no "war" between Egypt and Ethiopia, which he claims to have settled, over the placing of a dam on a Nile tributary. No shooting was involved, it was a business dispute, and Trump's role in settling it is dubious, since it would likely have been settled anyway. The war he claims to have settled between Serbia and Kosovo did not take place during his presidency, but he cited it falsely anyway. He claimed to have settled a conflict between Congo and Rwanda, but the fighting has grown worse, and the peace deal that Rubio helped negotiate was never actually signed.
The armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, which is also on Trump's list, has flared up again. So if you want to give any weight to Trump's list of settled wars, he's 0 for 5, and 8 is just a figure he pulled out of the air. Neither he nor Rubio have participated in any negotiations in eight wars. Seven tops, if you can consider their participation in the Gaza War, or in Ukraine, as an effort to make peace.
The biggest lies told are about immigration.
Look, for stupid people, let me explain something. If there's no citation of any source to back up the number, then the number is an exaggeration and an outright lie. Joe Biden did not allow 25 million people to come into the United States illegally. That's false, and he obviously knows that he has no credibility, so he will make it as bad as he wants.
The Republicans in the House, who are also liars to the 10th power, came up with an alleged investigation figure of 2.2 million who came in and did not get caught and either deported or detained by immigration authorities during the Biden administration. That's fewer than in Trump's first four years. Their figures note that 80% of those who were encountered here illegally were deported. And the clearest evidence of Trump's lack of credibility on this subject is simply found in the answer to the question, "Where are these 25 million people?"
People have to eat, they need shelter, they would have to work, and there's no evidence that any of that is happening on the kind of scale that would produce visible evidence if the numbers were that high. And if they are here, doesn't that demonstrate the total and complete incompetence of the Trump administration, in even being able to keep track of where they are?
The lie that countries have emptied their prisons and sent those people to the United States is, perhaps the most egregious falsehood he's told. Even his own administrations published figures show that the crime rate among immigrant communities and among those in the US seeking asylum is well below the population in general. If emptying prisons and sending criminals to the US were happening, then these foreign countries have found the greatest solution to prisoner recidivism rates in the history of the world because they apparently have completely reformed before arriving in the US, where they are no longer committing the crimes that got them into prison where they came from.
He's lied to the coal miners for almost a decade now.
I worked as a door-to-door book salesman in Mingo County, West Virginia, during the peak of the coal production there. It was a summer job and as a college student, it was a great way to make a lot of money in a short period of time. Business was brisk, in the downtown area of the county seat of Williamson, a town of 6,000 people that straddled the state line with Kentucky, and sat at the center of a trade area claiming 100,000 people, the sidewalks were busy and traffic lined up to cross the brige over the river, and to find places to park. People were friendly, open their doors and bought the products I offered for sale at a rate that helped me pay a year's worth of college tuition and expenses.
I was in Williamson about six years ago. Most of the storefronts downtown are empty. Wal Mart is still open, on the Kentucky side of the river, but the big grocery store at the end of the downtown area, I think it was a Piggly Wiggly, is boarded up. The hospital closed four years ago, and it was a major struggle for a local physician, with help from the Biden administration, and nothing at all from Senator Moore-Capito, to get it back to being at least partially open. The Wal Mart in neighboring McDowell county is closed, and the downtown area of the county seat there, Welch, is also empty and decaying.
The population of McDowell, Mingo and Logan counties is steeply declining as the coal business is all but drying up. McDowell, which had 100,000 people in 1950, dropped under 20,000 in 2020, and is now under 17,000. Mingo County has dropped frm 32,000 in 1980 to 23,000 in 2020, and 20,000 in 2024. And Logan County has dropped from 50,000 in 1980, to 32,000 in 2020, to under 30,000 currently. Of course, the number of Trump voters here has declined, simply because the population has dropped, though the percentage of the vote he got here in 2024 was less than he got in either 2020 or 2016.
So, Trump lied to the people of West Virginia when he said he was going to revitalize the coal industry. Unfortunately, he won't keep that promise. Technology has made coal as fuel obsolete, and there aren't enough people, or enough contributors of money, there for it to matter to him.
So how stupid will we continue to show ourselves to be?
I guess ignoring the truth and living in a fantasy world can be mentally and emotionally soothing, though at some point, it's going to come to an end. But this particular set of remarks from Trump, watched by one of the smallest audiences in recent history for a Presidential address, didn't really even look or sound "presidential." He is clearly struggling to have the mental capacity to form words and communicate ideas. He obviously goes way off script, and when he does, along with being pompous and silly, he appears to be unhealthy, struggling to form sentences, slouched, unfocused, occasionally trembling, using the same tired hand gestures and repeating the same adjectives. His left hand has a tremor.
My parents were not big on trust for politicians, out of their personal experience. "They're all liars," my mother would declare. I always thought that she was just too busy to care, and I found out, when I was a teenager, that it was much more related to the fact that she never went to school past the sixth grade, and she was, from any practical perspective, illiterate. That was something that she had hidden from me for most of my life, and lived in fear of being exposed. I tried to help her regain some interest, without seeming to be a smart-alek, and she would ask questions, but would never engage with peers in political discussions. I think a lot of Americans are like her, they don't have the kind of education it takes to be discerning when it comes to the lies politicians tell.
And we happen to be living in a time when the biggest liar is in the White House.
No comments:
Post a Comment