Perhaps Donald Trump’s greatest talent is his ability to feed fake news to his fans without interference from the mainstream press. In his signature move, he piles on a bunch of smaller lies and then follows up with an outrageous statement. The press then covers the controversy while ignoring the other nuggets. Meanwhile, his base reads them, sees that they have not been refuted and accepts them as truth. Perhaps this is one explanation for the fact that while his approval rating sits at a historically low 42%, only 2% of his voters regret their decision.
This weekend’s events marking Trump’s first 100 days in office provides an example of the problem as the press gets lost in their coverage of his “deeply disturbing” speech in Harrisburg while ignoring Trump’s weekly address. Meanwhile, this address contains outright lies that feed Trump’s alternate reality. Since our impotent press has failed to provide any type of fact-checking, I’ll do their job for them:
If Trump is not lying with this opening statement, then he is surely delusional. The hundred-day was initiated during the FDR administration as he responded to the crisis of the Great Depression and acted accordingly. Obama faced a Great Recession that was threatening to deepen and acted quickly by ushering in a stimulus package. Even if Trump had the ability to display this type of leadership, the circumstances of a deep, overwhelming crisis do not exist that would enable him to unite the country around a solution.
Trump was handed an economy that “has gained jobs for 75 straight months – the longest streak on record.” When Obama left office the unemployment rate stood “at 4.7 percent”. To put that in historical perspective, “in all the months since 1948 the median jobless rate was 5.6 percent.” Therefore, to say that Trump is “bringing BACK jobs” is in itself a violation of the truth.
While Trump likes to take credit for everything good that has happened since the beginning of the year or even since his election, there have only been two full months of economic reports since he actually took office. The February jobs report showed that 237,000 jobs were created in the first full month of Trump’s presidency, 1,000 LESS than the amount that was created in February 2016. “Employers pulled back sharply on hiring in March”, creating only 98,000 jobs. In March 2016, 225,000 jobs were created.
The “gross domestic product increased at a meager 0.7% annual pace in the first three months of the year, down from 2.1% and 3.5% in the back half of 2016.” This was the “slowest growth in 3 years”.
Trump’s “plan” was nothing more than an outline on a single sheet of paper. When asked on ABC’s Good Morning America, Treasury Secretary, would not “guarantee that middle-class families wouldn't pay more under the proposal.”
According to TransCanada’s bid for the permit, only 50 permanent jobs will be created to maintain the Keystone pipeline. It will also increase our trade deficit as it will be built to import Canadian oil into our country. “Just 40 full-time permanent positions will remain upon the conclusion of construction on the DAPL”. Despite previous assurances, neither project will require using American made steel.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a $400 billion program. Interestingly, Trump had just bragged on Monday that he had saved $700 million from this program, making this seem like nothing more than the tall tales of weekend fishermen. Additionally, these projected savings are not contained in a contract but in the “personal assurance” of Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson. The General Accounting Office says that due to “cascading testing delays” the project “could cost the Department of Defense more than a billion dollars more than what was budgeted in 2011 when the program was restructured.”
As of today, 1,093,105 people have signed a petition at WhiteHouse.gov calling on the administration to “Immediately release Donald Trump's full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance”. The information has not been released.
One of Trump’s first acts as President was to reverse an Obama action to cut “interest premiums on FHA mortgages” that would have saved “eligible homeowners an average of $500 a year.” His budget blueprint proposed cuts that included “$3 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Community Development Block Grant program, which includes Meals on Wheels among other housing and community programs.”
This sounds like a policy developed by a second grader. While burdensome regulations that have not proven to be effective should be repealed, this policy assumes that all regulations were created equal. It is unclear how lifting a ban on the use of lead bullets on federal lands will unleash job creation, but this is an example of one of the environmental protections that Trump has taken.
The congress continues to investigate Michael Flynn and other members of the Trump administration for their relationships with the Russian government. “The White House is refusing to provide congressional investigators with some of the documents they're requesting as part of an investigation into potential Trump campaign connections to Russia, and whether former national security adviser Mike Flynn disclosed payments from Russian companies when applying for his security clearance.”
Merrick Garland is a moderate judge who should not have been nominated by a liberal President. However, like every other compromise that Obama attempted to make with the Republicans, they rebuffed the effort and refused to consider his nomination claiming that there was a “rule” that stated that “the Senate would not confirm a Supreme Court nominee in the middle of a presidential election year”. Now the administration brags that it has been 136 years since there was opening for an incoming president as he took office. The Senate was clearly following a precedent that did not exist.
While Trump continues to play chicken little, the homicide rate “has fallen continuously: for the last 25 years.” “The US homicide rate in 2014, the most recent year available, was 4.5 per 100,000.” This was the lowest rate since 1963. The fact that Trump continues with the politics of fear should not be surprising to anyone who remembers that he continued to call for the execution of the Central Park Five, even “after their sentences were vacated based on DNA evidence and the detailed and accurate confession of a serial rapist named Matias Reyes.”
“Confidence” is an abstract item that does not result in any actual data. Remember that the same polls that are measuring this hopefulness are also showing that people continue to be fearful even as the crime rates fall. If job growth continues to lose steam, Trump may very quickly find himself in a situation where he is dealing with confidence bubbles that are popping around him. In the meantime, they are a pretty good indication that his talents as a master manipulator may be unsurpassed. P. T. Barnum would be proud.