If there’s one thing Donald Trump is good at, it’s shouting the same outrageous lies over and over again. As a former reality show host whose most discernible skill was fake-firing people who weren’t actually employees, Trump understood the value of a catchphrase. “You’re fired!” may have been the “What you talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” of the 2000s, but it was memorable, repeatable, and above all, simple enough that even he could understand it.
Is it any surprise, then, that he’s used the same tactic as a candidate and as a president?
His loopy logorrhea may be grating to us (I’m thinking of hiring a caddy to hand me different-sized barf bags—like one would dole out 7-woods and sand wedges on a golf course—in response to each feculent Trump bon mot), but, sadly, it works like a charm on millions of voters.
Perfect call! Witch hunt! No collusion! No obstruction!
They may be lacking in nuance and any semblance of truth, but they stick in low-info voters’ heads at least as securely as they stick in our craw.
If there’s one phrase that may actually pay off for Trump in November, however, it’s this: “We have the greatest economy in the history of our country!”
It’s not remotely true, of course. It’s not true with respect to GDP growth, the unemployment rate, stock market performance, wage growth, business investment, or really any important measure. But, hey, who’s counting? “Greatest economy in the history of our country” sounds, well, great! Of course, Trump has had very little to do with the current state of the economy, other than burying landmines (like his trade wars, tariffs, and spiraling deficits) that are bound to blow our faces off somewhere down the road. And that’s not even counting the stupid shit he wanted to do that his advisers talked him out of. Remember when he wanted to shut down the entire U.S.-Mexico border?
Not to mention that the one measure he arguably highlighted most as a candidate—the trade deficit—has actually swelled.
So we all know this, right? Donald Trump came into office claiming he’d been left an economic mess, and even though “his” economy has followed roughly the same trajectory as Barack Obama’s—despite being goosed by the kind of fiscal stimulus Republicans denied Obama when we actually still needed a fiscal stimulus—Trump has tried to claim what he pulls out of nowhere every day is really a magic rabbit.
So what do we do with this fusillade of misinformation? Unfortunately, here’s the kind of thing intelligent liberals too often say in response to the Trumps of the world:
“Friends, let me disabuse you of the pernicious canard that Donald Trump inherited a reeling economy when, in fact, by most measures, the Trump economy is merely following the trajectory set in motion by the stimulative policies of the Obama admini … zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”
No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no! Also, no.
We need to do the same thing Republicans did to John Kerry in 2004 with their swiftboat campaign (i.e., turn a perceived strength into a fatal weakness). Except—and this part is key—we can and should do it with honest arguments, because we happen to have the truth on our side. Assuming the economy is still in decent shape in November—and that’s a big “if” considering some of the Trump-created weakness we’ve seen in manufacturing and elsewhere—we’ll need to strip some of the bark off this fraud and expose him for the puny, beetle-ridden sapling he really is.
Former President Obama already got the ball rolling with this tweet, which got trapped in Trump’s skull like a methane bubble.
Of course, the collapse soon came.
Trump, of course, has no basis for any of these claims. Obama, not Trump, rescued the economy following the incompetent economic stewardship of George W. Bush, whose economic policies, for what it’s worth, look remarkably like Trump’s. The military was not “depleted”—not even close. Interest rates are still artificially low, despite Trump’s claim that we’re experiencing the greatest economy ever; and they had to be low coming out of the Great Recession because, well, Dubya.
Meanwhile, we got a huge fiscal stimulus from Trump’s plutocrat-pleasing tax cuts—a stimulus that could, and should, have taken the form of infrastructure spending during the Obama years when we actually needed a fiscal stimulus in order to put Americans back to work as quickly as possible. But Republicans continually blocked such spending, citing deficit concerns that magically evaporated once a Republican took over the White House.
Despite the advantage of a compliant Congress willing to take the country headlong into higher deficits for no reason other than to make their man look good, Trump’s economy is not measurably better than Obama’s, and in some ways, it’s far worse. And—whoa, Nelly!—judging by the stock market’s colossal swoon in the past week, it now could be heading into a George W. Bush-like gulch.
Here’s where we need to hone our talking points and slogans, because Trump and the Republicans simply can’t be allowed to get away with this shit. Below are a few pithy quick hits that might actually have a chance of penetrating the skulls of low-information voters who somehow think Trump rescued our economy from the vile clutches of Obama:
1. Where are the missing 1.5 million jobs?
How many people know that job creation has actually slowed considerably since Trump’s inauguration? Trump often cites the number of jobs “his” economy has created during his three years in office because it sounds impressive. But that number—6.6 million—is actually 1.5 million fewer than the 8.1 million jobs Obama added in his last three years. That’s a substantial drop-off of 23%.
People need to know this, and they need to hear it over and over again.
2. The Trump jobs slump.
For people who don’t like their catchphrases to run more than six words, this is another way to say it … and it even rhymes! Job creation has slowed, ergo we’re in a “Trump jobs slump.” To be fair, job creation was bound to slow as our economy approached full employment, but since when has Trump’s braying and bragging ever included badly needed context? Trump continually ragged on Obama for job numbers that were consistently better than Trump’s own numbers, and if Trump’s numbers are lower than Obama’s, Trump’s favored narrative about “saving” the economy can be easily exposed as a silly and stupid lie.
3. Trump is an economic Milli Vanilli.
People remember Milli Vanilli, right? It’s the duo that fell into infamy after it was revealed that they lip-synced all their hits, which were actually sung by studio musicians. That’s Trump. He took credit for Obama’s recovery and is just mouthing along to the words.
4. Deficit Don!
Remember how much flak Obama got for actually lowering our annual deficits? Our deficits coming out of the Bush Great Recession were high because emergency social spending automatically kicked in and, more importantly, tax receipts plummeted. When Obama took the oath of office and before he’d made a single executive decision, the CBO projected a $1.2 trillion annual deficit as a result of the Bush II recession. High deficits followed year after year as Obama cleaned up Bush’s mess, and by 2015, as the recovery continued apace, the deficit was just $439 billion, or nearly a third of the 2009 CBO projection. (The actual 2009 deficit was $1.4 trillion.) In 2016, Obama’s last full year in office, the deficit stood at $585 billion—still only half as large as what he’d inherited.
Enter Trump and his tax cuts. The deficit has skyrocketed and is expected to top $1 trillion again—in the middle of a recovery. Any economist worth anything will tell you that deficit spending is necessary during economic downturns, and that the time for the government to get its fiscal house in order is when the recovery has found solid footing. But Trump, who risibly claimed he’d eliminate the entire $19 trillion-plus national debt in eight years, has somehow ballooned our deficit in the midst of the supposed “greatest economy in the history of our country.”
Honestly, that’s kind of hard to do. Then again, Republicans have always been head-swimmingly hypocritical when it comes to deficits. What they really want is less money in working- and middle-class people’s pockets, and more cash siphoned upward to the already wealthy.
As acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney recently said, when he thought no one important was listening, “My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House. The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we’re a lot less interested as a party.”
No shit.
5. Democratic presidents are the real economic miracle workers!
Despite what is too often perceived as conventional wisdom, Republican presidents are not better stewards of the economy than Democrats. In fact, their performance has traditionally been far worse.
Donald Trump loves to pretend that we’d be in a recession or depression if Hillary Clinton had been elected, but there’s no reason to believe that. In fact, on every important measure (GDP growth, job creation, deficit spending, business investment growth) Democratic presidents nearly always outperform Republicans, and they have for decades.
What wouldn’t a Democrat have done? Attempted to trade taxpayer money for foreign election interference, obstructed justice numerous times during a special counsel investigation, undermined our most important alliances, coddled and sucked up to the world’s worst dictators, made the world safe for bullying again, betrayed our Kurdish allies, endorsed a candidate accused of sexual misconduct, separated families as a matter of policy, suggested we stop hurricanes with nuclear weapons, and so much more.
6. Republican = recession
The economy was in pretty good shape at the end of George W. Bush’s first term, too, but we all know what happened next. Like Trump, George W. Bush was all about deregulation and lower taxes for the 1%, and eventually, reality caught up with him—and us.
Is it catching up with us again? It’s unlikely Hillary Clinton’s economy would have been in a recession right now, as Trump predicted, but one thing is almost certain—she would have been far more ready for a looming epidemic that threatens the domestic and global economy. For one thing, she likely wouldn’t have kneecapped a CDC program meant to prevent minor overseas outbreaks from becoming epidemics, and she definitely wouldn’t have fired her entire pandemic response chain of command, as Trump did in 2018.
Dubya got a second term because, somehow, he convinced voters that keeping the economy going on the same trajectory was more important than rejecting a president who had taken us to war based on false pretenses. In other words, a narrow majority of Americans decided that fleeting economic metrics were more important than the soul and conscience of our country.
Hmm, how did that work out?
Donald Trump thinks today’s “greatest” economy gives him a solid advantage going into November. We need to show him—and decent Americans who’d prefer not to vote for the ocher abomination if they can possibly help it—otherwise.
Can you think of any (truthful) economic slogans we can use to drive Trump bonkers, and maybe even help people wake up to our dire reality? Share them in the comments below, and let us know what you think about the ones above.
