The Trumps continued their family tradition this week of proving unfazed by, well, reality. During a Friday conversation on Fox & Friends, Lara Trump — the president’s daughter-in-law and Eric’s wife — went to outlandish new lengths to describe Donald Trump’s presidency, touting it as supposedly one of the best in the history of the United States. Across hundreds of years of American history full of ups and downs, she wants us to believe that the guy who misspells “hamburgers” as “hamberders” is one of the greatest leaders this country has ever had.
She told host Ainsley Earhardt, who’d asked about the family’s reaction to harsh criticism:
‘We all sleep well at night knowing that we’re behind a man who is leading this country in the right direction, who will go down in history as one of the greatest presidents we’ve ever had. So we know we’re doing the right thing and fighting for the right thing.’
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The Trump team has actually wielded this nice sounding but completely non-substantive argument before. In perhaps the most infamous example, speaking before the United Nations General Assembly last fall, President Trump himself asserted his team had “accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country” — and drew audible laughs from the audience. Even still, they’ve trotted out the line again and again in the time since, sometimes naming Trump as the best president ever and sometimes saying he’s the almost best.
Quite simply, there’s not really much data to back them up. Sure, Trump signed dozens of executive orders during his first year or so in office, rocketing past most every other president’s rate for the last at least several decades. That’s not a sign of success of his administration, however, just considering how many of those orders encountered strenuous court challenges almost immediately, although the Trump team has pointed to the data all the same.
Other accomplishments the president’s team has pointed to as supposed evidence of the president’s greatness include the placement of a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court within 90 days of taking office and the supposed defeat of the Islamic State terror group. However, Senate Republicans paved the way for that first accomplishment via refusing to confirm Barack Obama’s nominee for the seat, and numerous ground reports assert that Trump’s claim that ISIS is “100% defeated” is false. One writer for Foreign Policy with family ties to Syria asserted that while “it may no longer be an expansionist caliphate,” the group “is strategically reorganizing itself as an insurgency to terrorize the people of Syria.”
The Trump team has also often pointed to the economy as evidence of the president’s prowess, but as has been walked through many times before, most of the economic indicators the Trump team loves began their improvement under President Barack Obama.
There’s just a lack of evidence for Lara Trump’s assertions. How much is she getting paid to make them anyway? She’s a “senior campaign adviser” for the president’s re-election effort, working on projects like fundraising. Former Trump associate Omarosa Manigault-Newman revealed evidence that Lara had tried to get her to sign on as an adviser for the campaign — with a concurrent nondisclosure agreement. There’s little reason to take Lara Trump’s latest public commentary as anything other than more of the same misinformation campaigning.
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