“I Am the Law!”
And I only represent my “winners” and ultra-loyalists, no one else.
“Merry Christmas to all, including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country, but are failing badly.”
Donald Trump on Truth Social.
“We want to make sure that Santa is being good. Santa’s a very good person… We want to make sure that he’s not infiltrated, that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa.” Trump, on Christmas Eve, while speaking to kids ages 4 and 10 in Oklahoma. As he also touted, “Clean coal.”
Today’s blog won’t address immigration cruelty, failure to focus on the “worst of the worst” or the harsh disruption to small businesses whose dependence on lower-wage workers has pushed so many out of business. That topic is just too vast to be buried in a blog about the fact that over 80% of Americans have been relegated to second class status, as the Trump administration has focused on just two priorities: 1. eliminating those who oppose him and 2. his policies fostering the wealth of the elite members of his billionaire/centimillionaire approved, inner circle of oligarchs… the latter being the kind of people that the rarely enforced antitrust laws were intended to contain. The Republican majority in Congress has abdicated its legislative role to Trump, bolstered by a Supreme Court abusing its emergency docket and applying “interpretation by originalism” – a system that requires historical context, rendering the Constitution a dead and mostly voidable document.
Perhaps you believe that those “donors” to the monarchical Trump ballroom are contributing financing out of their patriotic goodness… not expecting favorable federal approvals when required, relief from tariffs or lucrative government contracts. Maybe you believe the billions of dollars of increased Trump family wealth during his presidency were simply a matter of luck. Or was the reality of the “Big Beautiful Bill” – with massive tax cuts for the wealthiest in the land, with a few token gestures for a few others, while decimating medical coverage for tens of millions of Americans, raising healthcare costs for almost all but the richest Americans, increasing the deficit that bears massive interest paid by all Americans – just good policy… and not the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle and lower earning brackets to the mega-rich in US history?
Maybe you were one of those gullible Americans who actually believed that Trump would not involve the US military in overseas military conflicts or that using federal or federalized troops was truly necessary to purge crime from the streets of blue cities, wherever located. Perhaps you understood the logic of declaring Canada should be the 51st state or that, after centuries, annexing Greenland was a national security necessity. Perhaps you were one of those who believed that it was ok to blow up small cocaine boats (without congressional or judicial approval), perhaps not even headed for the United States, to stem the tide of narco-traffickers… even though the flow of fentanyl, America’s drug culprit on steroids, was not touched. And that it was just fine to pardon the incarcerated ex-president of Honduras, responsible for the importation of 400 tons of illicit drugs into the US… and then hint that what was really happening was forcing regime change in Venezuela.
While Trump’s usurpation of the congressional right to set and approve tariffs settled down to an average 15% across the board, this form of regressive taxation (where those who spend the most of their income on average consumables pay an effective tax rate higher than the rich who only spend a small part of their income on such products), maybe you believed that these tariffs had no impact on rising costs. With a supermajority of Americans believing that Trump has mishandled the economy, rejecting administration platitudes that in just a year or two, Americans would see positive results… few believed that projection… recalling the pledge to cut costs on “day one” of Trump 2.0. And then there was the Trump administration’s expertise: lying with statistics.
“On Dec. 18, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation had fallen to an annual rate of 2.7% in November, down from 3% in September and well below the 3.1% consensus of economists. And on Tuesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that real gross domestic product had shot up by a surprising 4.3% annual rate in the third quarter of 2025 ended Sept. 30.
“Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration and its Republican acolytes seized on the figures to boast about Trump's economic policies. White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett proclaimed the inflation figure to be ‘an absolute blockbuster report.’ He described the GDP figure as ‘a great Christmas present for the American people.’… ‘America is winning again,’ crowed House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) after the GDP report. He called it ‘the direct result of congressional Republicans and President Trump delivering policies that drive growth and expand opportunity for American families and workers.’… Um, not so fast.
“The economists whose jobs involve scrutinizing those statistics to glean what they really mean don't view them as unalloyed support for Trumponomics. Quite the contrary. Many see them as artifacts of the long government shutdown, which halted the collection of data that go into those reports, severely distorting the results. Furthermore, they expect the flaws in those reports to persist well into 2026, undermining their usefulness as true economic indicators… ‘You’ve got to take it with a grain of salt,’ said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, of the inflation report. ‘It's confusing and it doesn’t quite square with prices that we’ve observed.’” Michael Hiltzik, writing for the December 25th Los Angeles Times.
Sure, the stock markets and GDP growth are good for those with asset-based incomes, a very small percentage of Americans, but what we have is a K-based economy (that red and green chart above, which resembles the letter “K”)… a massive accelerating split in both income and net wealth between the very rich (green) and the rest of us (red). And as Trump cancels alternative energy projects, as massive effluents (and a few earthquakes) are the results of a “drill baby drill” failing policy, just as demand for electricity is skyrocketing, the cost of living will only get worse… just like all the recent jobs reports.
I’m Peter Dekom, and Trump’s efforts to distract Americans with all kinds of new issues are insufficient to convince all but the most stubborn of us that he is not one of this nation’s most failed presidents… but as he nods off at governmental meetings, perhaps he’s dreaming about how to fix his mistakes.
Posts
