'Nonsense': Behind the 'specific rhetorical strategy' Trump used to sell Americans on 'economic disaster'

11 September 2023

Steve Benen, producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” on Monday examined the “specific rhetorical strategy” Donald Trump used in 2016 to sell Americans on “economic disaster” — and explained how the former president is turning to that “nonsense” playbook once again.

Trump in 2016 “faced a dilemma” as he tried to convince Americans that he alone could fix the “economic disaster” that plagued the United States — even as the unemployment rate “steadily [improved] in the runup to Election Day,” Benen noted.

“The GOP nominee settled on a specific rhetorical strategy to resolve the tension,” Benen wrote. “Trump would simply peddle nonsense and tell the public to believe him, instead of reality.”

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Per Benen:

After the election, at a pre-inaugural press conference, Trump declared there are “96 million really wanting a job and they can’t get,” which was ridiculous, even for him. Around the same time, the then-president-elect declared that the unemployment rate was “totally fiction.”

Soon after, as Trump settled into the White House, and the economic conditions he inherited continued to improve, the then-president decided he believed economic data after all.

Trump, Benen noted, has returned to that same playbook seven years later as he vies once again for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Trump on Friday told supporters in South Dakota they were given “phony numbers” on employment data “because far fewer people are looking for jobs.”

“They throw around 3.5%, 3.6%, 3.7%, but it’s a different group of people.” Trump claimed. “... So it’s a fake number.”

“The fact is,” the former president later added, “we’re probably heading into a Great Depression.”

Benen, in his analysis, accused Trump of “firing imaginary bullets.”

“First, the unemployment rate is not ‘phony,’ ‘fake,’ or ‘crooked,’” Benen wrote. “Yes, it fluctuates based on people looking for work and exiting the workforce, but that was true during Trump’s term, too, and it didn’t stop him from touting the data when he saw encouraging jobs reports.”

According to Benen, it is actually Trump who espoused “fake” numbers when he told the South Dakota crowd that “during Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs have been created.”

In fact, as Benen explained, “If we start the count in February 2021, instead of January 2021, [the] economy created 13.5 million jobs over Biden’s first 30 months.”

“Trump and some of his allies apparently want the public to believe that the rapid economic recovery that began after Trump left office led to job growth that doesn’t really count, but that’s not a serious argument,” Benen wrote.

Finally, Benen’s analysis concluded, “there is literally zero evidence of the domestic economy ‘heading into a Great Depression.’”

As Bloomberg reports, Wall Street is in a “very hold-your-breath kind of moment for the economy” as it awaits “key U.S. economic data” due out this week. “Those reports loom large for an economy being propped up by a remarkably resilient labor market,” Bloomberg reports.

Meanwhile, CNN on Monday reported, “U.S. household wealth hit a record $154.3 trillion during the second quarter of this year.” And Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday told Bloomberg News she’s “feeling very good” about the prediction of a “soft landing” for the U.S. economy.

“I think you’d have to say we’re on a path that looks exactly like that,” Yellen told Bloomberg.

Read Benen’s full analysis at MSNBC.

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