President Trump Equals Truth!

If you happened to miss President Donald J. Trump’s press conference Thursday, I am here to help you out. If you’re a masochist you can read a mind-boggling transcript of the entire 77-minute show.

Otherwise, I will save you the horror of wading through 13,025 words. Mr. Trump originally called the press together to announce Alex Acosta as his new pick to head the Department of Labor.

Done in 94 words.

Next, he mentioned Mick Mulvaney, who had just been confirmed by the Senate to head the Office of Management and Budget. Trump neglected to say Mulvaney had come close to being derailed because he failed to pay $15,000 in taxes for a nanny he employed. 

Just a little “fake news.”

Besides: paying actual taxes to the actual government of the actual country you want to lead is a actually a low priority, where Trump is concerned.

He then described how he was “negotiating a lot of different transactions to save money on contracts that were terrible, including airplane contracts that were out of control and late and terrible. Just absolutely catastrophic in terms of what was happening. And we’ve done some really good work and we’re proud of that.”

Here the President was referring to Lockheed Martin’s contract to build the F-35 fighter jet, at a price liberals have long insisted was ridiculous. In fact, most liberals have argued that defense spending is too high—and that any giant corporation, given a chance to milk a contract for every penny it can, will do so without an ounce of red, white or blue pride.

See: Haliburton.

See: Haliburton again!

Next—what else—Mr. Trump complimented himself: “We have made incredible progress. I don’t think there’s ever been a president elected who in this short period of time has done what we’ve done.”

Abe Lincoln? Chopped liver.

How could Trump be so sure he was doing the best job of any president in the whole history of a nation? He cited a poll. This was a poll, apparently, that was not rigged. He explained: “A new Rasmussen poll, in fact, because the people get it, much of the media doesn’t get it, they actually get it but they don’t write it, let’s put it that way, but a new Rasmussen poll came out a short while ago, and it has our approval rating at 55 percent and going up.”

Okay: that’s true about one poll.

Sadly, in other “fake news,” five polls taken the same week showed Trump favored +1, -3, -4, -12 and -15.

Naturally, Trump mentioned the stock market was up. He took all the credit. He didn’t mention it was up something like 12,000 points under Obama during the last eight years. 

Later he would whine about “the mess” he inherited. Oh, it was hard! 

By comparison, I think he meant, Obama had it easy when he was handed an economy in free fall in January 2009. The Dow Jones stood at 7,949, having plunged from a high of 14,164, and would bottom out at 6,627 in March.

Since the media wouldn’t do it, Trump had to pat himself on the back:

Plants and factories are already starting to move back into the United States, big league, Ford, General Motors. I’m making this presentation directly to the American people with the media present, which, it’s an honor to have you this morning because many of our nation’s reporters and folks will not tell you the truth and will not treat the wonderful people of our country with the respect that they deserve.

At that point, Trump started to sound nuts. 

“The press,” he wailed, “has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice. We have to talk about it. We have to find out what’s going on because the press, honestly, is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.”

Meanwhile, I hear GOP Representative Lamar Smith, from Texas, has insisted on the floor of the House of Representatives that we should all get our news straight from Mr. Trump. Smith (who also denies climate change is real) attacks the “liberal media,” explaining, “Better to get your news directly from the President. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.”

As for Trump, in his press conference, he isn’t yet done getting in touch with his inner-dictator. “Some of the media’s fantastic,” he admits. “I have to say, honest and fantastic—but much of it is not.” 

I am guessing here that he means Fox News—that Fox is fantastic because if he ran over a baby with a steamroller, Sean Hannity would still approve.

Anyway, it was time for Mr. Trump to complain about how hard his job has been, after almost a month:

As you know, our administration inherited many problems across government and across the economy. To be honest, I inherited a mess. A mess. At home, and abroad. A mess. Jobs are pouring out of the country. You see what’s going on with all of the companies leaving our country, going to Mexico and other places. Low pay, low wages.”

Again, I wonder. Who moved those jobs out? President Obama? Democrats? Or greedy corporate types, a backbone of the Republican Party?

Trump seems to believe Obama had it easy when he took office. In reality, the federal deficit for Fiscal 2009 was $1.4 trillion, before President Obama could sit down in the Oval Office and straighten his tie. The U. S. economy had been shedding jobs for twelve straight months—hemorrhaging jobs in November 2008 (-766,000), December (-694,000) and January 2009 (-793,000).

More recently, in “fake news” the Bureau of Labor Statistics “faked” this entire chart—showing that, starting in October 2010, jobs had been added to the economy for 76 successive months. Damn.

What a mess.

Next, the Complainer-in-Chief focused on “mass instability” in the Middle East. Everything was apparently fine when Obama inherited two wars back in 2009, which were so easy to deal with at the time. Remember how “good” Obama had it? Estimates of the cost of those two wars ran to $4 trillion—or one-fifth of the entire federal deficit for the last 200+ years. Again one expected Trump to dab a tear streaking his cheek. Oh, he had a mess to deal with in North Korea! But he promised “we’ll take care of it, folks. We’re going to take care of it all. I just want to let you know. I inherited a mess.”

He seems to forget that North Korea developed nuclear weapons when President George W. Bush was in office—and fails to mention that no new nation acquired nuclear weapons during President Obama’s eight years.

Meanwhile, President Trump hastens to tell gathered reporters, Secretary Mattis is working on a plan to defeat ISIS, which seems odd, because Candidate Trump said he had a plan to defeat ISIS long ago.

“Another mess I inherited,” he squeals. 

I think he hopes Jim Acosta from CNN will give him a hug.

Next, he says he loves the military—hopes he never has to use the military—but, if he does, “They don’t have the right equipment, and their equipment is old…Depleted. It’s depleted. It won’t be depleted for long. One of the reasons I’m standing here instead of other people is, frankly, I talked about we have to have a strong military.”

I wonder. 

How did we spend at least $500 billion annually, eleven years in succession, and end up with a “depleted” military and a giant mess on our hands? In his State of the Union address in 2016, President Obama called this kind of claim, that the United States was weak, “hot air,” and said we spent more on defense than the next eight countries combined. 

Well, that was “fake news” for sure!

PolitiFact checked his math—and actually, we spent more than just the next seven countries combined.

Still, if Trump claimed our military was “depleted” who was I to question? Representative Smith had already made it clear.

Trump = truth.