Instead of trying to stop Donald Trump from plunging the world into a trade war, Republicans will blame the economic pain Americans face on the Democrats.
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While Donald Trump is the most prolific liar in the history of the United States — a fact that should please him immensely since he likes superlatives — even without him in the picture, Republicans have long abandoned the strategy of telling their voters the truth.
This isn’t to say that Democrats are beacons of trustworthiness, but what the GOP wants to do to the United States is so extreme (and evidently unpopular) that being honest about it with the American people would not win elections.
“Do you like Medicaid? Too bad, because we don’t.”
“You need to tighten your belts because billionaires want your money!”
“We will destroy the environment for your children so that our corporate donors can make a buck today.”
“Your whiteness is important to us.”
“Fox News, not facts!”
“We pay lip service to your Christian values while betraying every one of them with our policies.”
These just aren’t winning slogans (although, to be fair, that last one seems to resonate just fine with their base).
Fortunately for Trump (and Republicans in general), they are increasingly cornering the market on low-information voters, which means that their supporters are generally a pretty gullible bunch and will believe just about anything.
The 2020 election was stolen? Sure.
Trump is some sort of genius? Well, he was on TV and keeps telling us he is, so that sounds right.
Immigrants are all dangerous predators? Hey, that’s what they talk about nonstop on Fox News, so it must be true.
Of course, the key to winning elections is not just to turn out one’s own base but also to convince Americans in the political center, which can be a bit of a challenge when you have to rely on selling them an alternative reality.
That being said, Republicans have made an art out of deceit, which has proven to be very successful for them… but it’s much easier to do that when not governing.
It’s one thing to tell Americans that things are terrible when the other guys are running the show; it’s another to convince them that everything is going great when the country you are in charge of is on fire.
And now, less than three months after Republicans took total control of Washington, the country is definitely on fire.
So, what to do?
Obviously, one option for the GOP would be to shelve its plans of destroying the government, gifting trillions of dollars to billionaires, undermining democracy, and laying waste to the global economy. But that would also mean abandoning the party’s core ideals (apart from that last one, which is a Trump thing), which is why Republicans are banking on a tried and tested strategy: Blame the Democrats.
The stakes are very high. The GOP is closer than ever to achieving all of its goals, e.g., getting rid of Medicaid and Medicare, privatizing Social Security, suppressing minority votes to a degree not seen since the 1950s, etc. However, because those goals are so unpopular, they also risk a real shellacking in the 2026 midterms.
And painting the Democrats as the arsonists who lit the economy on fire is a real challenge when Trump is holding the matches and Elon Musk eliminated the fire department.
However, they are still giving it a try.
It’s tough to blame them in light of their excellent track record of successful gaslighting.
Even though the entire country witnessed a Trump mob storm the Capitol — in a violent insurrection that unfolded on television — just four years later, enough Americans felt that it would be a good idea to return an aspiring dictator to power.
Therefore, it’s easy to understand why the guys who somehow convinced enough voters that this was all fine believe they can also pin the economic storm that’s coming on Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Enter White House Policy Ghoul Stephen Miller.
“We inherited from Joe Biden an economy in total free fall,” he said on, you guessed it, Fox News. “There has been zero job growth for American workers in four years. That is a depression for the American worker.”
Miller then stuttered when the host of the show pushed back and fact-checked him by pointing out that the economy (aided by the post-pandemic recovery) gained more than 16 million jobs under Biden, and that most of these jobs went to American workers.
Just kidding — of course he didn’t get fact-checked. That’s not something Fox does.
The underlying numbers, however, are correct. Miller is not.
We’re telling you this because you have to get ready for many iterations of this particular lie, and because we believe that it’s good to fight misinformation before it can really take hold.
Being forced to defend the indefensible, White House officials, GOP lawmakers, and right-wing talking heads all laid the groundwork this week for ultimately trying to tell the American people that all of this is Biden’s fault (and, in a meta way, it makes some twisted sense, but only because he refused to step aside for a better candidate early on, and we are now saddled with that orange fool again).
Therefore, as the Trump Tariffs turn into the Trump Stock Market Meltdown and perhaps the Trump Global Recession (he does love to put his name on things), it is really important to be armed with the facts.
Contrary to how many people felt about the economy toward the end of the Biden presidency (and Americans were stunningly ignorant about that), it was actually going pretty well. As in, “The US economy is the envy of the world” kind of well.
To be fair, the global economy is struggling right now, so being the envy of the likes of the EU is not a terribly high bar to cross.
Still, the United States was doing really well compared to its peers… until Trump took office.
Now, whatever happens is up in the air.
If every reputable economist is right, then his haphazard and reckless tariff “policy” is going to end in a spectacular failure that will cause incredible hardship in the US and abroad.
However, if the guy who has managed to bankrupt even casinos is right, then corporations from all over the globe will build beautiful factories in the US just to realize that there are not enough skilled workers to operate them.
Our money (and that of most investors across the world who are selling their stocks) is on it being the former.
And the worse it gets, the more finger pointing there will be from Republicans who will try to blame Biden.
It is really important not to let them get away with it this time.
We often emphasize that presidents have a limited impact on the economy and should not get too much credit or blame for cyclical fluctuations. We even defended Trump’s jobs record, which is dismal on paper but much better when taking into account that those jobs were lost during the pandemic and were coming back when he left office (i.e., after his coup failed).
That is not the case here, however.
In US history, there has never been one person more directly responsible for a stock market crash than Trump has been this week, and whatever happens next will also be entirely on him.
If it somehow works out, we will be the first to give him credit for being a more effective bully than we thought.
If not, however, nobody should forget when and how this economic downturn began and who is to blame.
