Who Were Those Gullible People Who
Believed Donald Trump’s Bullsh*t?
His campaign promises, from peace in
Ukraine to “beautiful” tariffs, were truly unbelievable. And yet, somehow, many
people believed him.
So Russia proposed an Easter ceasefire in Ukraine and then promptly ignored its own proposal. Vladimir Putin announced, around 4 p.m. local time Saturday afternoon, that a ceasefire to honor the risen savior would commence at 6 p.m. By noon Sunday, according to The New York Times, Russia had fired 445 rounds of artillery and launched 300 drones and 45 infantry assaults. (Russia says Ukraine violated the ceasefire first.)
Surprised?
After what Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday, why should we be?
He told reporters that
if the United States can’t get a peace deal very soon, we’ll just wash our
hands of the whole affair and “move on.” How do you think that was heard in the
Kremlin? Green light, baby! Do whatever you want, Vlad.
Rubio’s
eh-whatever statement that “it’s
not our war” will live in infamy next to James Baker’s unprincipled 1995 avowal, with respect to the Serbs’ war on
Bosnia, that “we don’t have a dog in that fight.” (Why is it always
tough-talking Republicans who hand democratic regimes to authoritarian ones on
a silver platter?) But as I watched Rubio speak Friday, and then rewatched
since, one thought keeps popping back into my head: Who were these
people who were gullible enough to believe Donald Trump’s bullshit?
How
many times did Trump say he’d end that war on the first day of his presidency?
It had to have been hundreds. I saw a lot of those clips on cable news over the
weekend, as you may have. He did not mean it figuratively. You know, in the way
people will say, “I’ll change that from day one,” and you know they don’t
literally mean day one, but they do mean fast.
But
that isn’t what Trump said. He meant it literally. He used the phrase “in
24 hours” many, many times. So I ask you: Who really believed that?
Ditto
with tariffs, “the most beautiful word in the
dictionary.” Just wait, Trump said, until you see me unveil my
beautiful tariffs. They’ll fix everything.
Well
… it’s not as if there weren’t hundreds of economists and others pointing out
how much smoke he was blowing. Experts predicted exactly what has unfolded:
that he’d start a trade war, which would roil the markets and result in higher prices,
and that the rest of the world would stop trusting us.
Who’s
looking more right today, Trump or the experts? The hated experts, by a mile.
In fact, if anything, the experts understated the problem because Trump’s
tariffs (at least the latest incarnation of them; it’s hard to keep track) have
been higher than everyone thought they’d be.
Again:
Who on earth believed his nonsense?
Four
days before the election, Trump campaigned in Dearborn, Michigan. Obviously,
one can understand the anger Arab Americans felt toward the Biden
administration and Kamala Harris over Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and Harris
handled the whole matter in a craven fashion. But did anyone seriously think
Trump was going to be better? The war, after a very brief respite, is back on; there’s the
usual finger-pointing about who’s to blame, but the fact remains that Israel
cut off humanitarian supplies and started bombing again. Since Israel broke the
ceasefire on March 18, about 1,800 Palestinians have been killed.
Israel has Trump’s full backing in this. How full? This full: “There was no
need for a green light because Trump gave us the option to open the gates of
hell,” an Israeli source told The Jerusalem Post.
Again
I ask: Who ever believed otherwise?
Trump
is the biggest liar in the history of American politics. And no, I don’t know
the precise extent to which Millard Fillmore or Benjamin Harrison was prone to
prevarication. And yet, I write that sentence with serene confidence because I
know enough about Fillmore and Harrison and the whole lot of them to know that,
while many of them were mediocrities and some operated according to a rather
elastic ethical scale, none of them was an outright sociopath.
But
Donald Trump is. He will say anything to anyone at any time with utterly no
thought of consequences or ever being held accountable. When the moment of
accountability comes, he just tells another lie. When he was just a sleazy real
estate grifter, this was merely annoying. But now that he’s the president, and
he has an army of propagandists behind him insisting that he is American
history’s great truth-teller, it’s sick and it’s dangerous.
There
is one set of campaign promises that he is fulfilling to beat the band, and
that’s his eagerness to shred the Constitution to punish or round up political
enemies and people he doesn’t approve of. He’s managing to fulfill that promise
for one simple reason: He and his jackboots can execute those moves
unilaterally. Trade and diplomacy, in Ukraine or the Middle East, require
negotiation with other parties. But throwing innocent people in foreign prisons
is just something he can do, at least until the Supreme Court tells him he
can’t (we hope).
But
these other promises—that he’d bring peace to Ukraine in one day, that his
tariffs would produce economic nirvana, that he’d lend a more sympathetic ear
to the Palestinian plight—were ridiculous and obvious lies. Anyone who couldn’t
see that was either brainwashed by right-wing media and social media or—well,
or what?
It’s
hard to say. Maybe those people’s instinct is to hate liberals. Maybe they
believed all that “he’s a businessman” crap. Maybe they just didn’t want a
woman in the White House. Whatever the case, they’re poor judges of character,
and we—and this is a “we” that includes them—are about to pay a high price for
their bamboozlement.
In a
week when The Who fired and rehired Zak Starkey,
we can only hope these people learn the words and message of the great anthem
and won’t get fooled again.
Michael Tomasky is the editor of The New Republic and
the author of five books, including his latest and critically acclaimed The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a
Return to Shared Prosperity. With extensive
experience as an editor, columnist, progressive commentator, and special
correspondent for renowned publications such as The Guardian, The
Washington Post, The New York Times, the Daily Beast, and many others,
Tomasky has been a trusted voice in political journalism for more than three
decades.
