A Plea to Trump Supporters
The media is lying to us. If you love this country, please read until the end. Then decide what to do about it.
Media outlets that supported Trump in 2016 have hidden the truth and outright lied for the last 4 years. They knew that if they were honest, they would lose viewers/listeners/readers and their profits would tank. But this is the truth. I’ve sourced everything here, and whenever possible I’ve sourced from Trump speaking or his administration to avoid media spin.
Trump hasn’t even tried to keep his biggest promises
Across policy issues, the story is consistent.
Trade deals — President Trump said NAFTA was “the worst trade deal ever made” and the USMCA that he negotiated to replace it was “a terrific deal’. But the USMCA deal was basically just NAFTA with window dressing, and things have gotten far worse under Trump. The year before Trump took office (2016), our trade deficit with Mexico was $63 billion. Last year it reached $101 billion.
Oh, and remember when Trump tweeted “trade wars are good and easy to win”? Well, our trade deficit with China last year was basically the same as when he took office (after setting a record in 2018), and China is not even close to buying what they agreed to buy from us in the “Phase 1” agreement he struck with them.
Illegal immigration — Companies love illegal immigrants because they can pay them less and give them fewer rights than Americans. Reducing illegal immigration is pretty simple. You just need to require employers to use the E-Verify system to make sure their employees are legal and prosecute employers who break the law. But Trump has NEVER proposed doing that. Probably because he’s got a long history of employing illegal immigrants. When asked to confirm his businesses aren’t employing them anymore, he said, “Well, that I don’t know because I don’t run it.” The Trump administration hasn’t published any data on the size of the illegal immigrant population, but the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the leading nonprofit trying to end illegal immigration, estimates the illegal immigrant population went up by 1.8 million in Trump’s first two years. He doesn’t want to end illegal immigration. He just wants to act like he’s tough on it to get votes.
Health care — Trump said in 2016, “I want to keep pre-existing conditions”, and he promised to “repeal and replace Obamacare”. We’ve now had 4 years of Trump promising a healthcare plan, but he still hasn’t shared it because he doesn’t have one. Last month, he released an executive order that says, “It has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States to give Americans seeking healthcare more choice, lower costs, and better care and to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.” But the order doesn’t actually provide any legal protections or requirements — it’s just empty words. Meanwhile, his administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act, which actually does prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions.
Taxes and the deficit — When he ran for President, Trump promised to “reduce our $18 trillion in debt” and tweeted, “The deficits under @BarackObama are the highest in America’s history. Why is he bankrupting our country?” He said in an interview he’d raise taxes on the wealthy to reduce our debt. But he’s done the opposite. He passed $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, most of which went to the wealthy. His treasury secretary said the cuts would pay for themselves by stimulating economic growth. But in reality they exploded the deficit to levels not seen since the Great Recession. And that was before COVID.
Trump has given us more COVID deaths AND a worse economy than any other rich country
Conservative media keeps framing our current crisis as a trade off between opening up, which will bring some more COVID deaths but a better economy, and shutting down, which will save lives but put more folks out of work. But they’re framing the argument that way to distract from the reality that every large rich country has had fewer job losses AND fewer COVID deaths than we have.
This graph makes me angry. Our death rate is way higher than everyone else’s, and the only country that has had job losses anywhere close to us is Canada (because they’re stuck with us as their biggest trading partner). That’s right — they’ve had fewer deaths AND their economies are better off. All these other countries fixed COVID and either never shut down or got to open back up quickly.
Trump spent the early days saying the virus was going to “go away”, said Xi Jinping was “doing a very good job” on COVID, and gave himself a rating of 10 out of 10 for his response. Then, when it became clear his administration was failing in the testing and contact tracing necessary to contain the virus, he said “The governors are responsible for testing” so he could blame them for his failures. Now we’ve lost more jobs than in the Great Recession AND had more than twice as many deaths as World War I and the Vietnam War combined.
Trump hasn’t drained the swamp; he’s filled it
Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in 2016, but he admitted that his staff put that phase in his speech and he didn’t actually like it. And it’s clear why. He’s the swamp king. There’s never been an administration this corrupt.
Here’s a list of senior Trump officials and close aides who pled guilty, have been convicted by a jury, or are charged awaiting trial.
- Paul Manafort, Campaign Chairman, convicted by a jury
- Rick Gates, Deputy Campaign Chairman, pled guilty
- Michael Flynn, National Security Advisor, pled guilty
- Roger Stone, campaign advisor, convicted by a jury (and pardoned by Trump)
- Michael Cohen, personal lawyer, pled guilty
- Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist, awaiting trial
We didn’t see a world like that, even under Nixon. And it doesn’t count cabinet secretaries who had to resign because of scandals.
- Alex Acosta, Labor — chose not to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein when he was top prosecutor in Miami
- Tom Price, Health & Human Services — $400,000 in travel bills for chartered flights charged to taxpayers
- David Shulkin, Veterans Administration — European vacation funded by taxpayers and donors
- Scott Pruitt, EPA — getting a $43,000 phone booth installed in his office to have secret conversations; sweetheart condo deal from a lobbyist; deleting calendar meetings to hide his schedule
- Rick Perry, Energy — helped two friends get a 50-year oil contract with Ukraine despite bidding less than others
- Ryan Zinke, Interior — shady land deal
Of course, Trump has his own litany of scandals. He’s visited his hotels and resorts 400 days of his presidency, and secret service agents and staff supporting Trump and his children have paid over $1 million in tax dollars to his resort. Trump has been saying since 2014 that he would release his tax returns, and we finally know why he hasn’t — Michael Cohen has said he committed tax fraud, and the NYTimes found he had paid $0 in taxes ten years in the period from 2001–2015.
There are more, but that’s the gist.
People close to him says he’s an incompetent liar who doesn’t care about us
And those are just the comments on the record. Off the record lots of senior staff have referred to Donald Trump as far worse.
So what does all this mean?
If most of this comes as new news to you, It’s because the media you’re watching and listening to is intentionally hiding it. They don’t want you to know the truth because they need you for their advertising profits. You may think Trump is still better than Joe Biden, but the media is even less honest about him. So I’ve got two things for you:
1. Find some media that tells a different side of the story from what you’re hearing now. It’s the only way you’ll know if the media you’re watching or listening to is lying.
2. Vote for Joe Biden — seriously. He’s not perfect, but he’s better than what we’ve got.