TRUMP’S CLAIMS OF SUCCESS RESTS ON HIS RIDICULOUS LIES

…The anticipated Democratic Candidate, Joe Biden

We all know that the former, great US economy, was not due to Donald Trump

Let’s talk about how we got to where we are today and where we are going?

The latest economic report paints a picture of extraordinary economic carnage.  In April, a stunning 20 million jobs disappeared into the abyss of the Covid-19 crisis, and unemployment soared to 14.7%.  This is according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that’s the highest level since the Great Depression.  Unfortunately, it won’t stop there and it could go to 30%.

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This means the up-coming presidential race will be not only be about who can better return the country to normalcy amid the virus’s on-going rampage. It will also be about who can better rebuild the economy and protect millions of Americans from suffering through the worst economic calamity in nearly a century.  The current administration, as did the Hoover administration in the 1930's, has no idea how to fix the country's woes.  It will take moves like that of FDR to bring us back from the abyss.

President Trump’s campaign has already telegraphed its untrue argument. And at its core is one of Trump’s biggest and most insulting lies.

The false claim is that, having once created the most spectacular economy in the known universe, he has stated that he will now do so a second time.

“We built the greatest economy the world has ever seen,” Trump intones in a major new lying campaign ad, “And we’re going to do it again.” That ad heralds what Trump says will be, “the greatest comeback story,” which in truth signals an extraordinarily audacious rewriting of history.  And Trump is in the wrong position to wage that argument.

The whole foundation of Trump’s central claim on this score rests on a series of his ridiculous lies.

Trump didn’t build the pre-coronavirus economy he hails as his own. He inherited its major trends. This is true by every major metric, such as job growth and the decline in the unemployment rate, both of which had been growing steadily during the Obama years and carried over into Trump’s presidency.

Trump, of course, regularly claims he inherited a smoldering landscape of economic wreckage and turned it into a spectacular, glittering success, another of his thousands of lies.  

But it may now become even harder for him to get away with this nonsense. Presidents tend to be seen through the prism of current conditions, and it’s plausible voters could come to see Trump’s status quo as an epic horror show in comparison with the end of the Obama years.

In fact, some of Trump’s own allies hint at this possibility. The chief strategist of a leading pro-Trump super PAC recently revealed that their internal polling shows that Joe Biden’s most positive position is that he’s seen as “President Obama’s guy.”

While that Trump strategist presented was, this was evidence that Biden is a blank slate that could be re-defined by Trump’s fearsome false propaganda.  But in reality, it suggests that Biden may be able to capitalize on that positive association in the coming economic presidential debate argument.

Biden recently signaled what this might look like, in an interview.  In recounting in highly personal terms, Biden’s efforts in securing the stimulus that helped pull the country out of the 2008 Great Recession, and he will probably call for a much larger stimulus this time, if he’s elected.  As there are of course, legitimate criticisms of the size of the Obama-Biden stimulus being too small.

But here’s the bottom line: It is true that the very pre-coronavirus economic trends Trump himself holds up as a reflection of his own brilliance, are instead a carryover from the Obama presidency.  And Biden had a major role in that fact.  It’s clear that in Bidenworld, he believes that embracing the Obama economic record is a winner, as a new ad from the pro-Biden super PAC properly illustrates.

The ad says, “Today we’re launching our newest ad that highlights Joe Biden’s working-class roots, the values that define him, and his leadership during the last economic crisis. The ad kicks off a $10 million pre-convention campaign telling the story of Joe Biden’s leadership.”

Trump might be in a better position to argue that he will rebuild our economy, if he hadn’t already thrown away whatever “economic populist” credit he once enjoyed.  

Let's face it, Trump's massive corporate tax cut gave most of its benefits to the nation's wealthy, while doing little for the regular working people.  In addition, Trump and the Republicans are still trying to gut Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which would pull away health-care protections for millions.  As usual, they aren’t offering anything to replace Obamacare.  They just want to remove health coverage from millions of Americans, with no replacement program.

Trump’s clever original plan was to ride out the good US economy, that he knows deep down that he largely inherited.  He would then use his magical lying powers to falsify the Obama economy, and transform his inheritance into the result of his Trump policies, thus obscuring the truth of the situation.  This has suddenly become a lot harder for Trump to pull off.

But the current crisis is so vast, that it places new pressures on Joe Biden as well.  It calls for a much more ambitious social Democratic agenda and argument. That includes breaking the current tie between employment and health insurance and providing a new approach.. It's time for health care that doesn't go away, because a job went away.

The crisis is so unprecedented because our economy has been deliberately placed into a deep freeze due to the coronavirus, and many observers are highly skeptical.  As Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer for business and economics at The New York Times wrote: “The economy’s major stakeholders are “wandering around behaving like a chicken that hasn’t had time to process the loss of its head.”

Still, Trump’s best hope now is to exploit that very uniqueness. He recently told “Fox & Friends” that “we had the strongest economy in the history of the world,” and “we had to close it, which is artificial.”

However, Trump cannot lie away the fact that he helped make this crisis far worse than it otherwise had to be. He squandered weeks and weeks in which the new coronavirus could have been contained, ultimately leading the country to a far more stringent and deadly economic lock-down.

And we know the truth that the nation’s economy was not of his own creation to begin with.

Trump is offering a deeply insulting set of lies, and no one should ever pretend otherwise.

Copyright G. Ater 2020