With Republicans about to control the White House, all of Congress, and the Supreme Court, Donald Trump’s ability to blame Democrats for everything bad that happens will be severely tested.
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Donald Trump’s ability to effectively gaslight Americans has always been one of his greatest skills. He proved so once again last month, when he managed to convince voters that everything was awesome under his leadership and immediately turned into a nightmare after he was defeated in 2020.
Setting aside that this narrative hardly makes sense (after all, if the US had really been in the best shape ever, shouldn’t it have been able to withstand a few months of mismanagement?), it is also not supported by the facts.
Trump, after having been handed a thriving economy in 2017, then did a decent job of keeping things going until the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a massive loss of jobs and the largest contraction of the gross domestic product in US history.
So, in reality, he presided over a mediocre economy (even when accounting for the pandemic).
However, that has not stopped Trump, or his supporters, from pretending that everything was fantastic.
Now, with Republicans about to control the White House, all of Congress, and the Supreme Court, his gaslighting skills will be severely tested.
After all, Trump made a whole lot of promises on the campaign trail that he will not be able to keep.
So, what to do when there is no Joe Biden to blame?
If the past is an indicator for the future, Trump is going to try to overstate his successes, pretend that his failures never happened (or blame them on others), and take credit for the accomplishments of others.
This is already happening now.
Trump and his supporters have attributed every good thing that has happened in the past four weeks to the fact that he got elected.
Take the stock market, for example.
Following Election Day, the Dow Jones gained 1,600 points the rest of the week. That makes sense, because Trump’s victory was decisive enough to assure Wall Street that there would not be weeks of uncertainty like in 2020, when the then-president tried to overturn Biden’s victory.
But, according to Republicans, that rally was the direct result of investors being thrilled that Trump won.
A week later, the Dow Jones predictably went through a correction and dipped 1,000 points over the next eight days. So, was that also because of Trump? Of course not.
Or take the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Lebanon.
It was the result of lengthy negotiations and high-level diplomacy between several different countries. On his way out of the door, it was also a real accomplishment for Biden.
But not according to Republicans, who gave Trump credit for closing a deal he was not involved in at all.
And then the president-elect claimed a win last week after having threatened Mexico and Canada with 25 percent tariffs unless they prevented migrants and drugs from entering the US.
“Just had a wonderful conversation with the new President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo,” he announced. “She has agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”
Sheinbaum, on the other hand, said that, while the two had a productive discussion, Mexico would do no such thing and instead pursue its current policy, which, according to her, is “already taking care” of migrant caravans heading for the US.
And those are just some of the examples of how Trump has already begun once again to try to gaslight America.
You’ll see this at work again on Friday when the Department of Labor releases its new unemployment figures for November.
If job growth was poor, then that will be the fault of Biden’s failed policies. If payrolls increased significantly, however, then clearly all credit will belong to Trump.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
