After nearly 100 days into President Donald Trump's second term, New Republic editor Michael Tomasky is wondering who were the "gullible" people buying the lies before November.
“How many times did Trump say he’d end [the Ukraine] war on the first day of his presidency?" Tomasky asks. "It had to have been hundreds. I saw a lot of those clips on cable news over the weekend …. He did not mean it figuratively. You know, in the way people will say, ‘I’ll change that from day one,’ and you know they don’t literally mean day one, but they do mean fast. But that isn’t what Trump said. He meant it literally. He used the phrase“ in 24 hours” many, many times. So, I ask you: Who really believed that?”
Tomasky said the same question can be made of Trump’s “truly unbelievable” claims with tariffs. Tariff is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” Trump said, boasting that they would "fix everything."
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“Well … it’s not as if there weren’t hundreds of economists and others pointing out how much smoke he was blowing,” Tomasky writes. “Experts predicted exactly what has unfolded: that he’d start a trade war, which would roil the markets and result in higher prices, and that the rest of the world would stop trusting us. Who’s looking more right today, Trump or the experts?”
“Again: Who on earth believed his nonsense?” writes Tomasky, adding that Trump is the "biggest liar in the history of American politics," who “will say anything to anyone at any time with utterly no thought of consequences or ever being held accountable. When the moment of accountability comes, he just tells another lie. … When he was just a sleazy real estate grifter, this was merely annoying. But now that he’s the president, and he has an army of propagandists behind him insisting that he is American history’s great truth-teller, it’s sick and it’s dangerous.”
The New Republic writer had no hard answer to explain the motivation of voters who bought the “ridiculous and obvious lies …" that he’d bring peace to Ukraine in one day, [or] that his tariffs would produce economic nirvana.
“Anyone who couldn’t see that was either brainwashed by right-wing media and social media or—well, or what? It’s hard to say. Maybe those people’s instinct is to hate liberals. Maybe they believed all that ‘he’s a businessman’ crap. Maybe they just didn’t want a woman in the White House,” Tomasky said. “Whatever the case, they’re poor judges of character, and we—and this is a ‘we’ that includes them—are about to pay a high price for their bamboozlement.
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Read the full post at The New Republic at this link.