The president of the United States went on national TV Wednesday night and lied to you.
Over and over and over again, Donald J. Trump all but screamed that everything is the Democrats’ fault, or in the alternative, that what you’re experiencing isn’t really real. Oh, and also, “affordability” is a made up word.
At this point, you probably don’t need me to tell you what a load of trump that is.
You know the reality. You know what your bank account looks like. You know what your bills look like. You know what the grocery prices look like. You know that there were, right up until January 2025, a whole bunch of promises about the American utopia that Trump was going to create if you’d just let the coup leader back into the White House.
And then, there he stood Wednesday night, some 11 months later, whining like a toddler because you have the audacity to remember those promises and remember that everyone warned him what would happen if he tried his self-serving tariffs again. Sad.
Trump still had his patented audacity, though. Only a true narcissist could stand before you just a few months after taking pride in gutting Obamacare and killing subsidies in order to shower his billionaire pals with tax breaks and scream that it was “the Democrats who did it.”
(Quick aside: If you wrote Wednesday’s address to the nation into a dramadey about a fictional president and wrote Trump’s words line for line, no one would ever believe it. No one would believe a real human could have that much gall and that little self-awareness. No one would believe that an American president—one twice elected, no less—could stoop to such ridiculously shallow insults and grade school excuses. And yet, there he was.)
This show of immaturity and petulance came just days after this same man cruelly ridiculed Rob Reiner, a beloved actor and director who was brutally murdered, because Reiner had the nerve to suggest that the guy who inspired an insurrection, was convicted of 34 felonies, colluded with a hostile foreign power and stole and refused to return classified documents was a danger to the country.
It also came a day after we learned that Trump had replaced the plaques below photos hanging at the White House of previous presidents. In the new plaques, Trump had written descriptions of the previous presidents, including “Sleepy” and “Crooked” with Joe Biden’s portrait and insulting Barack Obama. Because that’s something a well adjusted, sane elected official would do.
So, immaturity is what we’ve come to expect from America’s top con man, and Wednesday’s presentation certainly lived up to expectations. Particularly from a lying standpoint.
Trump, like a bad TV pitch man trying to push a flawed product you don’t need or want, repeated over and over that it wasn’t his fault. That he inherited a bad economy. That the Democrats were to blame. That Joe Biden was terrible. And most importantly, don’t believe the liars, because he’s actually making things better, not worse.
At any moment, I thought he was going to explain to me how his new product would cut my kitchen and bathroom cleaning in half and remove soap scum without a scent. All for five easy payments of $19.95.
But in the Trump economy, we’d have to add a sixth payment for the tariffs.
The facts are actually rather simple and they don’t take an address to the nation to figure out. Everything is exponentially worse since Trump took over, including many, many things that were improving rapidly near the end of Biden’s term.
Inflation has gone up over the last 10 months, with the consumer price index jumping from 2.3 percent to over 3 percent. Grocery prices are up, having risen more than a percentage point since Trump took office. Unemployment has suddenly spiked as well, ending a long, long string of strong job growth in Biden’s final two years and rising from 4 percent to 4.6 percent.
But most importantly, and most problematic for Trump and Republicans, is the fact that Americans are feeling the pain. It is a constant national conversation and the worsening economic pain is only serving to highlight the other ugliness of the Trump regime.
All of a sudden, Americans are taking a critical view of Trump’s immigration approach, with American citizens turning on ICE officers who are routinely breaking laws and violating constitutional rights. The percentage of Americans who now view immigration as a positive for the country has never polled higher. Ever.
Trump’s insults and never-ending victimhood has also worn thin. Many of his Republican cult members this week specifically criticized him for his comments about Reiner. Others called him out recently for his insult of a female reporter. (Although House Speaker Mike Johnson still hasn’t seen that and isn’t aware of it and hasn’t had time to review it and doesn’t know what you’re talking about and has just been too doggone busy to hear about that.)
Perhaps most importantly, though, four House Republicans broke ranks on the issue of Affordable Care Act subsidies and have forced an early January vote that would seek to revive the subsidies for at least three years. Because those Republicans, and many others, know what you know.
They know what we all know.
They know the economy is in shambles. They know the American public is angry. They know there’s about to be retribution at the ballot box. They know that if super high health care costs are piled on top of an already struggling American family, that midterm could turn into a bloodbath.
And they know what everyone should know by now: The president was lying about all of it.
