'Babbling from the throne': Trump's delusions skewered by conservative

The editor-at-large at a prominent right-leaning magazine is blasting President Donald Trump’s “debased state” — in particular, thinking he can dupe the American people out of their economic woes.

“In our debased state of national politics we have become accustomed to presidents making promises they cannot possibly hope to deliver on, particularly just months before they become a lame duck,” Reason Magazine’s Matt Welch wrote on Tuesday. Pointing out that two-term presidents tend to spend their sixth-year State of the Union message boasting, Welch warned that “as the ghost of Joe Biden can attest, woe unto the POTUS who points to the cloudy economic sky and declares it blue.”

Trump is “shouting into political headwinds considerably stiffer than those faced by” the last similarly scandal-ridden president, Bill Clinton, whose approval rating averaged to 60 percent during his 1998 State of the Union. By contrast, Trump has been in the high 30s in three recent national polls.

“Like professional athletes in their mid-30s insisting they can make their bodies perform as if in their 20s, sixth-year presidents have a hard time internalizing that their spells are weakening, their days are growing short, and the electorate is kinda tired of hearing from them,” Welch wrote. “Even popular second-term presidents like Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower saw their public support slip between SOTU day and the midterms, on the way to shellackings in the Senate.”

While Trump will engage in “Tourette's-like boasts (of often dubious factual quality) about the stock market and gas prices and manufacturing growth,” Welch predicted, this will not help him politically unless he can lower prices.

“Trump, haunted by his underwater economic numbers and spurred on by the unlikely electoral success of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, will announce a bunch of ‘affordability’ measures tonight (at least when not angrily defending his across-the-board tax hikes on imports),” Welch wrote, adding that this will not help him if he undercuts the argument for passing such measures if he also insists that he has already “won” on affordability issues.

“Trump may not get his Nobel Peace Prize, but he has at least a 50–50 chance of breaking his own all-time record for minutes spent babbling from the throne,” Welch concluded.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board made a similar point in a Tuesday editorial slamming Trump’s tariffs for raising prices.

"The larger reality is that Mr. Trump is so bull-headed about tariffs that he’s going to re-impose them any way he can," the editorial board wrote, adding that Trump’s attempt to impose tariffs using the legally dubious method of invoking the 1974 Trade Act will “create more uncertainty for business, at least for a while. And with the midterm elections coming soon, this timing is fraught for Republicans. Amid an 'affordability' panic, Mr. Trump says he is going to impose more border taxes on enough imports to make up for his lost emergency tariffs. Democrats must be thrilled at their dumb luck."

In addition to raising prices, Trump’s tariffs have failed to stimulate manufacturing jobs as the president promised they would.

“Far from the manufacturing sector ‘roaring back’ as Trump promised, the United States has lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs over the past year,” wrote Allison McManus and Dawn Le of the Center for American Progress. “These actions have pushed the country’s closest trading partners to seek deals elsewhere, including with China: Canada, India, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union have all recently sought new agreements without the United States.”