Meanwhile, in the Real World

Last week we saw the six-month anniversary of Joe Biden's inauguration as president. Leading up to that event in January, I saw some MAGA folks on Facebook predicting that Biden would not "last six months". They were very confident. They had no doubt about this. They didn’t specify, however, why they thought Biden would not make it this far in his presidency (I asked one – they chose not to explain).

So, I was left to speculate. I think there were 3 possible scenarios those folks on FB were implying:

1) The Plausible. Biden was so old and feeble that the pressure of being president would kill him. In other words, these MAGA folks had bought into the “Geriatric Joe” narrative peddled by Trump and his supporters. Strangely, Biden has not dropped dead.

2) The Sinister. By this point, Biden would have been killed by some righteous Trump-lover unable to abide the abomination of Biden illegitimately occupying the White House. Maybe some of those MAGA fortunetellers secretly (or not secretly) half-hoped this would happen.

3) The Even More Sinister, Plus Insane. Biden would be “bumped” off by forces aligned with Kamala Harris as part of a Democratic ploy to install the extremely radical Harris in the White House by first winning the election with a more-acceptable candidate (Biden). You have to be deep in the Qanon rabbit hole to believe this, but many Trump supporters are really that deep in that hole.

Needlessly to say, none of these Trump-cult fever dreams have played out. Maybe MAGA folks have conveniently forgotten that they ever predicted Biden would NOT be president by this time. Or maybe they have just moved on to now pinning all their hopes of the expected “reinstatement” of Trump on August 13th. That’s only a couple of weeks from now.

Luckily, we won’t have to wait a whole six months to see those high MAGA hopes dashed on the rocks of reality, you know, here in the real world.

Trump Care BS Overdrive

So, after almost four years as president (and decades of hard work by Republicans before Trump), Trump finally announced the big GOP healthcare overhaul to replace Obamacare. It seems basically to consist of:

1) a promise to cover pre-existing conditions (after first ensuring the SCOTUS takes that coverage away). No details of how that promise would be fulfilled, what laws would be enacted to force insurance companies to take all comers. But no worries. As we all know, you can take a "promise" from Donald Trump to the bank!

2) a one-time redistribution of $200 to everyone on Medicare to help pay for prescription drugs (because Trump couldn't manage to force drug companies to reduce their bottom line and lower the price they charge for drugs). The fact that this payout will happen just before election day is only a coincidence, surely. I mean he could have done it Jan. 21, 2017, but I guess it wasn't a priority then.

3) a promise to stop doctors from charging for services not covered by a patient's insurance policy, in other words "surprise billing". It's about time the government stepped in and controlled what doctors bill for services or insurance will cover. Can we hope to have complete price controls on all medical services eventually? Anyway, it’s a good first step, though it does seem that all Trump is doing now is “investigating” how this might work. I guess we need to give him for time to figure it out.

Maybe that's why he needs another four years. It took four years to come up with an outline of plan. With another four years he and the GOP can come up with the actual plan. Maybe just before election day 2024.

April Foolishness

A couple of things I picked up from the news from yesterday. 

-- Trump is threatening to "adjourn" Congress because it's not confirming his nominees for various offices. First of all, I didn't know a president could do that (if it's even true). Secondly, why didn't Obama think of that? It would have simplified things for him. Thirdly, that will come in handy for President Biden. 

 -- A key part of the Trump brain trust, Kellyanne Conway, thinks that COVID-19 is named that way because it's the 19th strain of the virus. Doesn't her husband, George, explain to her things like how the "19" comes from the year it was discovered? 

 -- Trump said that the US is past the peak in number of new cases of COVID-19. Mark that date, because yesterday there were 40,000 new confirmed cases. If that number doesn't go down today or tomorrow, then the US is not past the peak, and it's all just part of Trump's world of wishful thinking. 

Meanwhile, it snowed in Helsinki today. April 16th.

The Art of Retail Gaslighting

Trump boasts that this year’s 3.4% increase in holiday retail sales is the highest in US history, somehow ignoring the fact that only last year those sales increased 5.1%. You would think a very stable genius would understand that 5.1 is a bigger number than 3.4. You would think a president would have advisors who could explain this to him. Apparently not.

The 3.4% number comes from a report on holiday shopping published by Mastercard, which also revealed that online sales make up a record high share (almost 15%) of overall sales.  Trump likely latched onto the word “record” in media reports, like the one from Reuters whose headline read “Record online sales give U.S. holiday shopping season a boost.” Maybe Trump fixated on the word “record” and completely missed “online”. You can’t expect him to read every word, after all.  (A very plausible alternative theory is that Trump knows exactly what he's doing and willfully ignored the finer points of the report to suit his purposes.) 

So, perhaps without knowing it, Trump touts a record holiday season for e-commerce -- which, let's face it, ain’t nothing, and is obviously the undisputed and unstoppable trend in the retail business. Good for the likes of Amazon (which pays no sales tax, and incidentally is run by Jeff Bezos, whom Trump hates). Good for those communities where e-commerce firms operate (for example, just seven locations in Georgia, in the case of Amazon).  

Meanwhile, sales in brick-and-mortar stores, located in every community in America, didn’t look nearly as rosy, rising only 1.2%. But Trump doesn’t brag about that. Actually, it’s nothing to brag about.

This is a Cult

Okay, the level of crazy during the Trump presidency has always been high, but boy in the last week or so, it’s been upped a couple of notches. Some of the highlights:

Lindsey Graham claimed that the witches of Salem were treated better than Donald Trump has been during the impeachment investigation. He’s talking about women accused, imprisoned and sometimes hung because some of their neighbors acted hysterically. Until I see Donald Trump on a scaffold with a noose around his neck (which for the record I do NOT for a moment wish to see happen), I’m going to say it’s Lindsay Graham who’s acting hysterically. And ahistorical. Graham belongs to a cult.

Tucker Carlson admitted that Trump did indeed lie about how many people attended his inauguration. The president lied to the American people on Day One. But, Carlson basically says, this is okay because Trump is a “salesman” and, as we all know, salesmen lie all the time. My take-away from this is that we should never trust anything Trump says. Of course, this has been my conclusion for years already, but now Carlson has given his Fox News audience permission not to believe anything Trump says. In fact, they would be foolish to do so. Carlson belongs to a cult. Or else Carlson is just cynically playing to his most devoted fans, who do belong to a cult.

A recent poll shows that 53% of Republicans think that Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln, the man who led America through a civil war. This is mind blowing. This is mass delusion. Next, they’ll want to put Trump on Mount Rushmore. These people belong to a cult.

Donald Trump retweeted a picture of his head photoshopped onto the muscular body of a boxer (Sylvester Stallone from the movie “Rocky”). Juvenile and not exactly presidential, if you ask me. What’s worse, when the Washington Post -- stating the obvious -- mentions that the photo was “doctored”, the Trump reelection campaign hits back, accusing the Post of having no “evidence” the photo was doctored. As if, without some proof to the contrary, we are expected to believe the body of a 73-year-old obese man looks just like that of a 30-year-old champion boxer. This is a cult.

Man the air, ram the ramparts, take the airports!

This is the most memorable thing I've heard about Trump's "Salute to America" show on Independence Day (other than the fact that Melania was wearing a white dress without a bra, which became see-through in the rain -- well, at least it had sleeves, unlike that slut Michelle, am I right? 

The rain caused the teleprompter to malfunction and the text of Trump's speech momentarily to disappeared. Apparently, it was at this point that Trump was talking about the tenacious nature of George Washington's Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. During those troubling times, the Army -- Trump told his drenched audience, eager to learn from their president -- "manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do." Rammed the ramparts? Rammed them with what? 

So, because he couldn't see his prepared text, Trump just had to dip into his knowledge of military history and speak off the cuff. About airports. In the 1770s. Except they didn't exist. Surely, he was confusing this war with a different one (most American high schooler no doubt do the same thing, mix up Iwo Jima with Valley Forge, etc). 

Without the teleprompter, Trump went off script. Except. Except, he didn't. Probably remembering how he has blasted Obama in the past as a sissy for relying on teleprompters, Trump quickly assured his people, his AMERICAN people, that HE didn't really need the teleprompter anyway and that HE knew the speech "very well".and was able to do it without a teleprompter. 

Which must mean that Trump --- with his flawless memory -- correctly recited the speech from heart, including the line about the airfields that the colonials defended against the Redcoats. Which means that WAS part of his prepared remarks. Which means it must be true. Because he said it. 

Could there possibly be any other explanation? Any?

Hannity Dishonesty

One thing that I suppose helps Trump supporters sleep at night is the notion that, despite his rotten, ill-tempered, chaotic, ignorant, conniving, and dishonest nature, Trump has one saving grace – he is giving a tremendous boost to the economy. Or, at least, that’s what he never hesitates to claim he is doing. 

And, in some ways that Democrats may be reluctant to acknowledge, there might be something to some of these claims. Some economic indicators are looking better under Trump. But not necessarily all. 

One such indicator is GDP. During the campaign, Trump loved to blast Obama for the sluggish economy and highlighted the fact that annual GDP growth never rose above 3% in Obama’s eight years. Trump promised that, with him in charge of the economy, growth would go up to 4%, maybe even to 6%. This pie-in-the-sky promise was also touted by Trump’s number one bootlicker, Sean Hannity. Naturally.

So, it’s no wonder that when, back in November, the Atlanta Fed made an eye-watering prediction of 4.5% growth for the final quarter of last year, Hannity latched onto this bit of optimistic news like a dog on a bone, repeating it often on his radio show. (Hannity generally repeats the same talking points a lot, ad nauseum, in fact.) 

This prediction was just what Hannity wanted to hear. He effused:

“Yesterday, the Atlanta Fed projected that GDP growth for the fourth quarter will be 4.5%. Obama never once in his presidency for a year had 3% GDP growth. Not once. The only president in history.”

You can see how Hannity was parroting Trump’s line about Obama’s shoddy GDP track record. 

Now, the preliminary results for 2017 are in. The Atlanta Fed’s 4.5% growth rate for Q4 didn’t materialize. Instead, it came in at only a more down-to-earth 2.6%, forcing Hannity to create some positive spin by misleading his listeners. He does this all the time. Here’s what he said this week: 

“When you look at these economic statistics, they’re mind-blowing. Lowest unemployment rate we have had now in decades. The best economic growth. It could have been better for the final quarter of the year. The fourth quarter it was 2.6%. But the previous two quarters were better than Obama had in any two given years.” 

The last sentence is where Hannity’s supreme dishonesty is on full display. He’s trying to deflect from the disappointment of 2.6% growth by pointing to the Q2 and Q3 rates of 3.1% and 3.2%, respectively. 

As I’ve written before, he’s comparing apples to oranges. It’s true that Obama never had a year of 3.1% or 3.2% growth.  But neither has Trump. Not yet. Hannity is implying that Obama never saw the kind of quarterly growth that we've seen so far under Trump. That’s a lie. 

In fact, under Obama there was a quarter of 3.1% (Q3 2013), and a quarter of 3.2% (Q1 2015). Plus, two quarters of 3.9%, one quarter of 4.0%, two quarters of 4.6%, and one quarter of 5.2%. That’s eight quarters as good, or much better, than Trump as achieved thus far. 

Of course, Hannity also failed to mention the annual rate for 2017, which is preliminarily estimated to be 2.3%. That’s not quite the 3%, 4% or 6% Americans were promised. And he would be even less eager to mention that Obama had annual rates higher than 2.3% during three years of his presidency (2010, 2014, 2015). 

Now, 2.6% growth perhaps isn’t too bad. And perhaps this will turn out to be the nadir of the Trump economy. Perhaps 2018 will turn out much better, maybe even be tremendous. 

Maybe. But, still it always pisses me off when someone like Hannity so obviously twists the truth in order to gloss over unwelcome news that runs counter to his narrative – and most of his audience no doubt swallow it all without blinking.  And that is sad.  

Trump at Sea

I admit this is me being nit-picky, but...here we go.   

To explain why emergency aid has been seen as arriving more slowly to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria than it did to the similarly affected areas of Texas and Florida, Trump said this: 

“It’s an island, sitting in the middle of the ocean. And it’s a big ocean. It’s a very big ocean.” 

Now it must be said, Trump is correct, at least in his first three words. Being an island means Puerto Rico is much harder to reach. The logistics are completely different from sending aid to Houston. 

But rather than just stating this simple fact, Trump couldn’t resist adding a rhetorical flourish that is so characteristic of him: unnecessary exaggeration, hyperbole that puts Trump in the best possible light, or explains away his shortcomings. It’s something I find so infuriating about him. 

Puerto Rico is not in the middle of the ocean. It’s not Bora Bora. It’s about 1000 miles from Mar-a-Lago, about the same distance as between Mar-a-Lago and Manhattan, a distance I’m sure Trump can easily grasp. Trump probably really does understand Puerto Rico is in America’s backyard, but it suits him to downplay that fact. 

By informing the American public how incredibly remote Puerto Rico supposedly is (“I can tell you, it’s remote, so remote. You won’t believe how remote it is. Nobody knows how the hell to even get there. Believe me. It’s so far away that everyone speaks Spanish!”), Trump hopes to get a pass for making Puerto Ricans wait so long for some presidential attention. 

Of course, this is Trump's go-to tactic of distorting facts (or making them up out of whole cloth) to fit a narrative in some way positive to himself. Some may call it "being disingenuous". Others may call it lying. He does it all the time. 

If Trump thinks exaggerating the “remoteness” of Puerto Rico lets him off the hook (somewhat) for a slow relief effort, God help the folks in Hawaii (2300 miles from the US mainland) if they ever need help. Or consider poor Guam, now in the nuclear crosshairs of Kim Jong-un. That tiny US territory really does sit in the middle of a very big ocean, 5500 miles from the West Coast (though a bit closer to Alaska). 

In the world according to Trump, those places might as well be on Mars.