What Scared Politicians Do
In between naps, Trump is trying to buy us at a discount
When he’s not busy falling asleep on national TV or watching his poll numbers drop lower than the corporate tax rate, Trump likes to spend his time making up stories about economic successes that don’t exist and wars that he never ended. It’s getting rather pathetic, though the collaborators in the mainstream media do their best to make it all look normal. But in reality, the simple fact of the matter is that Trump really doesn’t know much, doesn’t read much, and apparently doesn’t spend much time thinking. So, when he has an idea and just blurts it out on social media in between mini strokes, we get unrefined gems like this one:
What Trump is saying here is that, if we were to defund Obamacare and give the money spent on it directly to the people, they would then be able to purchase insurance coverage on their own, and it would be better coverage. This is a lie. Pundits everywhere will twist themselves into knots trying to say it’s possible because they don’t want Trump to sue them, but it’s just a lie. Many of the things that Trump says are lies. For example, here’s another from Sunday morning:
“A dividend of at $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” the president said on his Truth Social platform.
I don’t know about you, but I won’t be waiting by the mailbox, because this check will never arrive. And even if it did, it wouldn’t offset the roughly 18% tariff rate my family pays on just about everything we buy. But these two messages, coming about 24 hours apart and just a few days after Trump took a serious beating at the polls, that certainly tells us something. I mean, he wouldn’t try to buy us if he wasn’t afraid of us, and now he’s promising to fix healthcare and send us cash directly. That, my friends, is a wannabe dictator acting out of fear.
But these promises are also reactionary, insufficient, and incredibly lazy. Each is not an attempt to solve a problem, at least not the problem they claim to address. Killing Obamacare and sending checks to Americans will not even begin to address the healthcare crisis in America, but it will certainly make the problems worse. And $2,000 per American is not nearly enough money to offset the fact that our lives just got 18% more expensive pretty much everywhere. These are not solutions. They are bribes, and dumb ones at that. It’s like me trying to buy my way into the hottest club by slipping the doorman a shiny nickel. It’s not going to work.
That said, I would expect these false promises to continue, and in fact, they must continue. Prices are spiking, employment is falling, and stagflation is now a word every American should look up. And there are no good solutions at this point, at least none that wouldn’t make Trump look weak. And there is another election just over the horizon, one that could reset the balance of power in our government. So expect the smokescreens and false promises to continue and the propaganda machine to start screaming incessantly about voter fraud.
And the president, in between on-air and off-air naps, will lie to us about healthcare plans that don’t exist and financial windfalls that will never come. He might even start a war or two, and he might just do it inside our own borders. And he will certainly try to keep us from voting.
But if Trump’s weekend of false promises tells us anything, it’s that he is weak and getting weaker. He can’t do what he’s promising, but he’s promising it anyway because he’s desperate to change what is quickly becoming a universally accepted image of a presidency in sharp decline.
I’d gladly ask Trump for a comment on this piece, but I don’t want to wake him up.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.