As Kryptonite is to Superman, Truth is to Trump

  

As Kryptonite is to Superman, Truth is to Trump

“If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just did it because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.” 

Retiring Senator Thom Tillis (R/NC) at Trump’s firing of the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for simply reporting job numbers Trump did not like.

Lying with statistics is just a start. It’s why I tell people looking at financial statements that are filed on their favorite companies, even those filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, read the footnotes first! It’s bad enough when Chief Financial Officers of publicly traded companies move income and expenses back and forth from various tax years to make the numbers look good, but when they intentionally ignore a serious financial reality, you often can see that distortion admitted in writing in the footnotes. Trust me, it can take a rosy picture and turn it into a red alert horror show.

We seem to have a proclivity to disguise deception under the concept of transparency. And no one has done it better than Donald John Trump. Maybe that’s just the way real estate developers in NYC have to be. Trump’s voluminous litigation and bankruptcy history suggests, however, that he relies way more than others on denial, blame, deflection and deception – the legacy of being Fred’s son and Roy Cohn’s protégé. Until the Epstein debacle, he was the Teflon MAGA messiah. But today, with Epstein questions raging, he seems to be wrapped in molasses and rolling in dirt.

There’s nothing new in Trump’s approach to facts. He’s addicted to braggadocio and self-aggrandizement and frequently labels as “fake news,” ready to shoot the messenger, any fact that contradicts him or casts him in a negative light. His ultimate prerequisite for someone to be allowed inside his inner circle (I don’t think he has any actual friends), his measure of loyalty is absolute adherence to “whatever I say, even if I contradict myself.” His most cherished inner circle are those able to spin, deflect and disguise facts to create overwhelming proof of his undying correctness. That he has been wrong most of the time of late did not, until recently, matter.

Remember when he was scheduling tariff “Liberation Day,” he pulled out this huge chart (pictured above) of what tariffs should be? Unless you understood the crass manipulation, you could not make heads or tails of the numbers. They certainly did not reflect the tariffs other nations charged on importing US goods; they had this mysterious cast about them. Turns out his lackies figured out how to add a trade imbalance variable into the tariff equation, intending to punish countries where we bought more than we exported to the designated country. Well not always, as Trump actually levied a punitive tariff on Brazil (a country with which we actually had a trade surplus) because Brazil’s Trump-equivalent ex-president (Jair Bolsonaro) was being prosecuted in Brazil for his Trump-like policies.

Well, if you think about a trade deficit in common sense terms, how could any nation that sold us goods at a good lower price, where we actually received those goods, be cheating us? Huh? Like a department store having a sale is cheating its customers by not charging them a higher price? But Trump loves it when his lackies figure out how to spin a huge benefit to Americans as a really bad thing. It’s OK to tariff iron and aluminum big time, even though for every one US iron or aluminum worker benefitted by such tariff, five US workers in industries that used such metal in their manufacturing work lost their jobs. The whole notion that the tariffed nations paid the tariff was also a boldface lie that sounded good. In fact, tariffs are de facto sales taxes.

But what happens when the most basic standards of performance are so distorted that they become meaningless, except for hapless civilians who tend to believe anything if it is in writing. Nothing has bolstered truly fake news and misdirected conspiracy theories like the Internet. And with AI fake imagery and sound, the truth is increasingly difficult to find. And no one has focused on rewriting history and factual occurrences more than Donald Trump. He’s actually convinced a very large part of his base that historical accuracy is “woke.” For example, as reported in the August 1st People Magazine, “After Donald Trump's administration seized control of the Smithsonian Institution's messaging in March, the iconic museum network has been accused of rewriting history.

“On July 31, The Washington Post reported on the recent change to an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History titled ‘The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden.’ A section of the display is dedicated to the U.S. presidents who have faced impeachment, and includes information about Andrew Jackson, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. (While Jackson and Clinton were successfully impeached, Nixon resigned the presidency before getting to that point.).” Embarrassed, the Smithsonian suggested that there might be an update soon.

Trump’s most consistent weak spot is “numbers.” Numbers of people attending rallies. Analyzing Jerome Powell and the Fed’s interest rate decisions. And, most recently, the stock market plunged twice in one day (August 1st): one dip because corporate America believes Trump’s tariff and trade war is a disaster for business planning, prices and jobs in this country, and another dip because by simply reporting what hundreds of Bureau of Labor Statistics staffers based on thousand of data points had generated, showing adjusted job losses to be much worse than expected, Trump fired the director of that bureau calling such solid statistics “phony” without a shred of evidence. Faith in transparency in government statistics and the consistent application of the rule of law is precisely why the US economy is (was?) so highly regarded by the international marketplace. But purging anything that looks bad has become the obsession of a man beginning to show some disturbing signs of dementia. Still, his lackies seek to placate him.

For example, even though Gross Domestic Product – the monetary measure of the total market value [1] of all the final goods and services produced and rendered in a specific time period by a country [2] or countries – is used to analyze relative economic success, sometimes politicians may have so distorted an economy that reporting GDP would make Trump look bad. For example, government spending is a huge part of our GDP, but when DOGE shut down government agencies, fired tens of thousands of federal employees and slashed federal spending on non-military costs (often supported by a Congressional affirmation of such cuts), the Trump administration contemplated substituting GDP numbers in a way that would hide the impact of those costs.

Last March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that government spending should be “separated from gross domestic product reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn… ‘You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,’ Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s ‘Sunday Morning Futures.’ ‘They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.’

“Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the U.S. economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because changes in taxes, spending, deficits and regulations by the government can impact the path of overall growth. GDP reports already include extensive details on government spending, offering a level of transparency for economists.” Associated Press, March 2nd. Donald Trump is the least truthful US president in our recorded history, and the chickens, ducks and geese are coming home to roost.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what happens when virtually an entire political party knowingly embraces the falsehoods of their party leader, who is increasingly evidencing mental symptoms far more severe than the psychological issues Trump hurled at his predecessor?