The level of Trump’s panic can always be measured by the number of tweets he posts in a day, most particularly first thing in the morning. On Monday morning, in just over an hour, Trump had tweeted eight times on everything from trade with China to his rage against the intelligence community for daring to investigate evidence that Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign allegedly colluded with Russian government operatives to win the election.
For some time, Trump and his team have dismissed criticism of the president by insisting that he’s doing so many great things for the country and the economy that nothing else matters. Unemployment is down (it was already on a significantly downward trend because of President Obama). North Korea was going to denuclearize because of Trump (they’ve now made it known that they won’t and that progress so far has not been because of Trump). Repeatedly, Trump’s biggest blunders have been covered by those in his inner circle by pushing the idea that Trump is doing great things, so the bad or alarming things shouldn’t matter.
In that same vein, there’s also the “he’s better than Obama” line. No matter what Trump does, it’s better than the way Obama handled it, according to this logic. Of course, this is generally followed by inaccurate statements and blatant lies, which his administration is able to push because they know his rabid band of followers won’t understand, anyway. For instance, Trump is better on trade and especially with China, according to the rhetoric, and Obama did nothing in that area in eight years of his presidency.
That’s not exactly true.
Obama did address trade with China and even tried Trump’s strategy of raising tariffs. That plan ended up costing American jobs and was quickly scrapped. Trump is doing nothing more than reviving a strategy already proven not to work for the economy. What is also true is that Trump has not been nearly as active in trade negotiations and actions as Obama had been during his presidency, although the Trump team will never admit that.
Trump also resorted to his tactics of discrediting a person instead of discrediting the accusations the person has made against him. No matter how many times it’s proven that the Steele dossier simply confirmed pieces of a story the intelligence community already had of possible Russian collusion, Trump will still mislead his followers by saying that it was. No matter how many pieces of that dossier are proven legitimate (none so far have been proven false), Trump will continue to push it as fake news.
At some point, Trump will have to address his own failings instead of pushing everything onto his predecessor and insisting that every criticism of him is just “fake news.” First it was James Comey who discredited and shamed the FBI and therefore the entire intelligence community, then it was Andrew McCabe, now it’s John Brennan.
Perhaps it’s just that President Trump is a liar desperate to cover up his own wrongdoing.
Twitter reacted to Trump’s latest tantrum. See some of their responses below:
Featured image via Getty/Bloomberg
