By Josh Moon
Alabama Political Reporter
The Trump supporters are unhappy.
I’ve found that they’re generally an unhappy, grumpy bunch anyway, but in this particular instance they’re unhappy with me.
Apparently, my last column didn’t sit well with them after I helpfully explained to the 33 percent of American voters who approve of Trump’s first six months in the White House that the rest of us think less of them.
You should see my email inbox, Facebook and Twitter messages. They’re filled with correspondence that’s a weird mix of third-grade vocabulary interspersed with a fifth-stint super-max prisoner’s cussing.
My favorite was a Facebook comment from a guy named Bobby Yerby, who started by referring to President Obama as “Omuslim” and went on to list Trump’s six-month accomplishment of “MAMING AMERICA FIRST.”
Because if there’s a theme for Trump’s first six months in office, it has to be “maming America first,” spelled exactly like that.
Anyway, I don’t bring up these messages in order to poke fun at the individual Trump supporters. Instead, I bring it up to say one thing.
Trump supporters are the biggest hypocrites on earth.
I’m serious. They’re worse than Baptists in a liquor store with all of the mental contortions they’re having to pull off to justify their support of this man. Especially after eight years of trashing probably the most decent man to hold that office in decades.
These people have spent the better part of the last six years proclaiming that Obama’s economic numbers were terrible, that he was the worst jobs president ever, that America had been ruined by him.
And now, these same people are using Trump’s supposed economic success – quite the feat for a man who has yet to see a single piece of meaningful legislation pass. That hasn’t stopped them from, as they did in their messages to me, raving about Trumps job numbers, the Dow Jones Average or Trump’s work getting jobs back to America.
Well, first, there’s no measurement anywhere showing Trump returning jobs to America. None.
As for the rest of it, let’s look at the scoreboard.
When Obama took office in January 2009, the country was in an economic nosedive brought about by poorly regulated Wall Street greed. In that first month, 600,000 jobs were lost – part of 4.4 million job losses in the previous 13 months – and the Dow Jones Industrial Average sat at 7,949.09 on Obama’s first day in office. The market would bottom out in March, at around 6,500.
Over the next eight years, the man who has been accused of “destroying America” by the right somehow tripled the stock market and added more than 16 million jobs.
When Obama walked out of the Oval Office for the final time on Jan. 20, 2017, the unemployment rate had fallen from a high of 10 percent in 2009 to 4.7 percent. The private sector had added jobs for a record 74 consecutive months.
That’s miracle working.
And yet, through it all, the same conservatives propping up Trump for taking the wheel from Obama were proclaiming just six months ago that the stock market was being propped up by Obama’s manipulations and that the jobs numbers were phony.
These people are falling all over themselves today to praise Trump’s job growth. But since he was elected, the economy has added an average of 179,000 per month. In the nine months prior to his election, it added an average of 199,000 per month.
He’s not even keeping up with Obama, which, just looking at the two of them, isn’t all that surprising.
And maybe such blatant hypocrisy from the right shouldn’t be either.
After all, these are the same people who questioned Obama’s Christianity at every turn, but seem cool with a dude on his third wife, who talked openly about sexually assaulting a married woman and who would just as soon lie as breathe.
These are the same people who accused Obama of selling out America, yet they don’t mind at all that the President’s son and most of his campaign staff were meeting with Russians so often they were probably getting a Russian translator discount rate.
These are the same people who went insane if one of the Obamas got extra cheese on their Whopper using taxpayer money, but they’re just fine with Trump spending millions to jet off to Florida every other weekend or pay millions more to protect his wife every day in the most expensive city in the country.
So, hypocrisy from Trump supporters shouldn’t be a surprise.
In the other column, I told Trump supporters that the rest of us are starting to think less of them.
This is why.
