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Democrats Are Coming For Trump While He Hurls Insults

Congressional Republicans running for election/re-election - and by extension, the Felon - are faced with the problem that putting aside daily lawlessness of ICE agents the last almost two years have seen only one real legislative accomplishment, if one can call it that, is passage of the falsely described "big beautiful bill."  Unfortunately for these candidates, more and more voters are coming to realize that the bill only served the interests of the very wealthy who received huge tax cuts while everyone else got table scraps, if that. All kinds of social safety net programs have been slashed, millions are losing healthcare coverage, and rural hospitals are being pushed to close due to lost revenues.  The Felon's two other signature policies have been tariffs and the war of choice with Iran that have caused consumer prices and gasoline prices to soar.  Added to the draconian cuts to public services and Medicaid under the "big beautiful bill" it's not exactly something one can run a positive campaign on citing beneficial policies.  The Felon's solution, sling insults at Democrats and lie about the failure of his policies.  A piece at The New Yorker looks at the state of things:

Only one subject truly animates Donald Trump on the campaign trail, and it is, of course, the same one that delights and fascinates him in the Oval Office and everywhere else: himself. “No President has ever achieved what we’ve achieved,” he told the audience at a campaign rally over the weekend, at a high school in Vandalia, Ohio.

“We achieved more in two years than any other Presidency in the history of our country,” he said on Wednesday, in San Antonio, Texas, where a Democrat—running against Trump’s hand-picked candidate—now stands an even chance of winning a Senate seat in the state for the first time since 1988.

No wonder, then, that Trump’s diagnosis of his party’s plight in advance of the midterm elections flows back to this one key insight of his, which is that politics is, and should be, solely about him. Hence his refrain at these rallies. “Please pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he told the crowd at the high school in Ohio, where Democrats are threatening to retake both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat just two years after Trump won the state by double digits.

By my reckoning, Trump spent some seven hours and fifty-six minutes addressing the (dwindling) Trump faithful in his campaign tour this week, a last-ditch effort to stave off what an increasing number of both Democrats and Republicans believe may be a loss of both the House and the Senate. The President’s itinerary speaks to the abrupt reversal of fortunes for the G.O.P. this election year, with Trump stumping in what should be safely red territory: Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio, Nebraska, and back to Texas. . . . In Texas, where he will soon return for a third visit, nearly all recent polls have the Democratic nominee for Senate, James Talarico, leading the Republican state attorney general, Ken Paxton, several of them with more than fifty per cent support—a key threshold.

Historically unpopular and trapped in a war of his own choosing in the Middle East, which has sent global prices spiking upward for just about everything, the President has nonetheless been going with a standard stump speech that is a litany of all the winning that’s taken place during his reign—so much of it that, really, he told the crowd in Ohio, one could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps, under Trump, America was actually “winning too much.” On and on he lectured his audiences about the great stock market, the terrific tariffs, and the most closed-shut border in history. He waxed poetic about his incredible poll numbers . . .

All this, and yet two-thirds of the country thinks the U.S. is on the wrong track?

Denial, of course, has long been one of Trump’s signatures as a politician. But in this of all years it seems a bit of a surprising choice for a campaign theme. “We have almost no inflation, by the way,” he said in Ohio. As for affordability, he explained in Nebraska, it was a plot that “they” had cooked up to attack him with.

In all of the rallies, Trump said little about the self-inflicted crisis that has become the dominant issue in the 2026 campaign: the war against Iran and the attendant global economic squeeze. To the extent that he mentioned the conflict at all, it was to promise that it would be over “very soon,”

But there was a note of un-Trumpian insecurity to it all that made this performance unlike any of the many previous Trump campaign tours I’ve watched during the past decade. In Alabama, he said the quiet part out loud and admitted that the conflict was not likely to end until “probably right after the midterms.”

One thing that struck me, listening to Trump at each of his six stops, was how little joy the President seemed to take from the exercise. Back in the 2018 campaign, his eyes still lit up with hatred for the enemies of the people, and he exuded delight to be joined onstage by some of the Fox News personalities whose shows consumed so much of his White House workday. Rallies were always his happy place. . . . But this 2026 Trump is not nearly so much of a happy warrior. His present mood seemed better exemplified by a threat that he casually threw out on Saturday night, in the midst of his Ohio speech, apropos of what I was not entirely sure: “We’re going to shove it up their ass,” he vowed. “O.K.?”

As a speaker, Trump remains at his best, or at least at his most animated, when on the attack, and there’s nothing more practiced in the Trump lexicon than the language of dark horror with which he describes conditions in the hellscape that is blue America. He is forever reliving the glory of that “American carnage” Inaugural address. . . . “When the blues get in, everything becomes dirty. The streets are dirty. The doorknobs going into stores are dirty. The sidewalks are filthy, dirty. Everything becomes dirty and has a bad smell.” Huh? That’s a new one, as far as I can tell, even for Trump.

And it’s not just those blue-state cesspools that Trump likes to rail against. Democrats, in his speeches, are “cheaters, they cheat like hell,” as he put it in Oklahoma, a rabble of Communists and child mutilators and illegal-immigrant lovers who are going to ruin everything that he and his base have done.

But, in almost all of his speeches, Trump reserved special ire for Talarico, or, as he referred to him in San Antonio, “Dumocrat Communist James Talafreako.” Perhaps Trump feels on the hook for the Texas Senate race, which most likely would have been easily won by the Republican incumbent, John Cornyn, had Trump not insisted on backing the scandal-plagued Paxton in the G.O.P. primary runoff. Whatever the reason, he seems to have saved up extra bile for Talarico, demeaning him as a “weak, gutless, self-hating, transgender-promoting freak show” who threatens to “destroy everything that we’ve built.”

I did not learn from Trump all that much about what nature of threat to the Republic Talarico poses, though I found it notable that, at several rallies, the President took off on rants about Talarico’s alleged veganism, accusing him of eating meat only in order to suck up to the meat-loving Texas electorate and thus causing himself to be “throwing up all over the place.”

In 2018, the President closed with what seemed, at the time, a pretty crazy message: Vote for me and my party, because we’re the only ones who can stop the invasion of a caravan of brown people currently making their way toward our southern border. It was untrue, of course, yet also something of a model of clarity compared with this year’s parting thoughts from our President: Vote for me because high prices due to my policies don’t matter and also because, if you don’t, the Dumocrats will turn your kids into Communists and force them to have gender-reassignment surgery, unless they happen to live in Los Angeles, in which case the Iranians will nuke them. Got that? Twenty-six days to go. 

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Trump's and the GOP's Big Lie About the Economy

One of the biggest public misconceptions over the last fifty years or more is that the U.S. economy does better under Republican administrations. Like most of the myths pushed by today's GOP this myth is untrue and historically the opposite is true: there is far more job creation under Democrat administrations and the increase in the federal deficit is either reduced or eliminated by Democrats.  The current state of the economy has been driven into the ditch by the Felon and rubber stamp Republicans in Congress and the Felon has exploded the deficit. An increasing number of surveys shown considerable percentages of American families are struggling to pay bills, buy food, and make ends meet. Nothing in the Felon's "big beautiful bill" helped average Americans. Social programs have been slashed, millions will soon lose healthcare coverage, and child nutrition funding has been cut - all so the very wealthy can have huge tax cuts and live more extravagantly.  Belatedly, the American public is believing that a Democrat controlled Congress would bode better for the economy and perhaps rein in the Felon's most disastrous policies.  A piece at Salon looks at this issue: 

Donald Trump lies. Telling untruths is not merely second nature to him; it is of the first order, automatic. He lies as naturally as he breathes.  From his claim to being a great businessman and dealmaker to calling himself not the worst president in U.S. history — which he is, by far — but the best, Trump has spewed a firehose of falsehoods to the public. But he has never reserved his lying only for his political opponents.

He has lied to his MAGA followers about, well, everything — bringing grocery prices down, ending this or that war “on day one,” the value of his cryptocurrency offerings, creating any number of “unbelievable” plans to fix our infrastructure, our healthcare, our economy. All those “beautiful” plans that were never plans but so-called concepts of plans. You know, back-of-the-envelope musings on critical national issues while heading off for another taxpayer-funded golf outing. Suffice it to say: If you can name it, Trump has lied about it.

Journalists often write of Trump’s Big Lie about how the 2020 election was stolen from him, but that is only one of the big lies Republicans tell, and it is not the one that most adversely affects working Americans.

The biggest lie is the one Republicans have told for more than half a century — about how they are better than Democrats at managing the economy. A majority of Americans have believed this for my whole lifetime. But with Trump’s wild mismanagement of the economy, public sentiment is finally changing. More people now trust Democrats on the economy, and for good reason.

The idea of telling a lie so massive that not many people would think that it could be made out of whole cloth comes from Adolf Hitler’s 1925 book “Mein Kampf.” The failed artist and future German führer thought that most people would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” This theory was later put to use by Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, to scapegoat and dehumanize Jewish people, and it led directly to the Holocaust — a horrible truth many Nazi-curious conservatives love to deny.

Trump, a fanboy of ruthless dictators, was determined to stay in office after losing the 2020 election decisively in both the Electoral College and the popular vote to Joe Biden, and he naturally turned to Hitler’s technique.

The Republican’s lie on the economy is such a whopper — so “colossal,” as Hitler put it — that it has defined American politics for decades. That’s the ruse of the colossal lie, which is not merely the propagandist’s use of repetition (Trump’s main go-to move) but a sort of verbal legerdemain. People are cunningly led to disbelieve what they see with their own eyes and feel in their own pocketbooks.

As we head into the November midterms, and as candidates begin to emerge in the 2028 presidential race, it’s a good time to refresh our memories of how costly the GOP’s colossal lie about trickle-down economics, which began with President Ronald Reagan, has been for Americans.

Running for the presidency, the former Republican California governor and B-list actor said that giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations would “trickle down” benefits to the working people of America. This sounded good in theory, but it was “voodoo economics” in practice, as George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s opponent in the 1980 Republican primaries, noted — until he was chosen as the Californian’s running mate).

In his two terms, Reagan’s tax cuts increased the national debt from $1.1 trillion to $2.7 trillion. But that’s nothing compared to Trump. While occupying the White House, the president has increased the national debt by a staggering $11.6 trillion so far, an increase of more than 25%.

Democratic presidents have almost always done better — I should say much better — than Republican presidents in managing the U.S. economy. According to a 2016 academic study by Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson, this was true from the Truman administration through the first Obama term across all major macroeconomic measures: job creation, unemployment, national debt, GDP growth, growth in real wages and controlling inflation.

As Blinder and Watson concluded: [T]here is a systematic and large gap between the U.S. economy’s performance when a Democrat is president of the United States versus when a Republican is. Democrats do better on almost every criterion.

We can tack on Biden’s term as well, which, amid the global inflation spikes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down supply chains, recovered far better than any other advanced country. As The Economist put it at the time, the quickly recovering economy under Biden was “the envy of the world.” People may not have felt “the vibe,” but things were on the right track by all standard economic measures.

In addition, in 2021, the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was passed with bipartisan support to rebuild or upgrade the nation’s aging transportation, water and broadband systems. The following year, the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act was enacted and called for microchip manufacturing to be started up in rural areas, mostly Republican-voting districts. Unlike Trump, Biden understood that the president is charged with working on behalf of all Americans, not just those who voted for him.

Since the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, about 70% of all jobs have been created during Democratic administrations, and in recent decades, the percentage is more than 90%. Of the 11 recessions the country suffered between 1953 and 2020 — when the pandemic began — 10 began while a Republican was in the White House.

What Blinder and Watson studied was independently updated in 2024 with similar findings of a “striking” positive difference on the U.S. economy when a Democrat is in the White House. One doesn’t need academics or economics experts to tell that Republicans never look out for the interests of the working class, or even the middle class. But for those who still like evidence, a series of charts by Steven Rattner and graphic artist Taylor Maggiacomo tell the story of Trump’s promises on the economy and his results so far.

What these charts cannot show is the long-term economic disaster of lost markets for farmers and U.S. manufacturers caused by Trump’s tariffs and his disparagement of our trading partners, or what it will mean to our economy as countries move to de-Americanize their tech — which they must do to protect themselves from Trump.

Democrats are not only better stewards of the economy, but they also want the wealth created by American workers to be shared more equitably and for the social safety net to be made more robust, so Americans can better weather any financial vicissitudes.

Do I need to point out that Republicans have little to no desire to help workers and those in need, outside of, say, charitable contributions or church work? Indeed, rather than looking out for the poor or loving the stranger — and growing increasingly annoyed by those darned Biblical verses about a camel passing through the eye of a needle — the wealthy and powerful long ago undertook to remake American Christianity.

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently noted, the right’s perversion of the message of Jesus knows no bounds; to justify their greed and avarice, they are taught that it is inconceivable to be Christian and vote other than Republican, which is yet another colossal lie by the GOP.

Public sentiment about which party does best in managing the economy has finally shifted to Democrats in the face of Trump’s gross mismanagement of the recovering Biden economy. Trump’s tax cuts, tariffs, attacks on education and journalists, his disparagement of historical allies and his war of choice with Iran have undermined nearly every aspect of what has made the United States prosperous.

But it is up to journalists to regularly tell this truth to the public in the face of the colossal Republican lie about the economy that began with Reagan, a man who had the sheer audacity to claim that the budget deficit was affected by restaurant servers not declaring their tips.

Today’s Republicans are even more Dickensian, focused as they are on deporting hard-working immigrants who long to be American citizens and taking healthcare and even food stamps away from struggling American families.

Why are Republicans terrible with the economy? Because they do not believe in government — unless it helps them.

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The Felon's BBC Lawsuit Backfires

The Felon likes to file lawsuits to intimidate both critics and the news media outlets that accurately report on his failed policies and misdeeds.  Often the targets of the Felon's intimidation either roll over and pay money to make the lawsuits go away or reach some other kind of settlement. One such defendant, the British Broadcasting Corporation ("BBC") is not rolling over as the Felon expected and the rules of federal court discovery in lawsuits now has the Felon - and other Trump family members - dodging depositions where testimony would be under oath and perjury charges could be applied to parties giving false testimony (the only thing that comes out of the Felon's mouth). The Felon hates anything and any forum where he is not free to lie at will. As pieces in the New Republic and Politico lay out the Felon is again trying to dodge being deposed and is claiming to be unavailable until after the court ordered discovery period is over.  Hopefully, the court will force him to testify or dismiss the case with prejudice so that it cannot be revived down the road.  Here are excerpts from The New Republic:

[The Felon] President Trump is trying to get out of testifying in a lawsuit that he initiated.  As part of his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC, Trump was scheduled to sit for a deposition with the U.K. broadcaster’s lawyers on Friday. However, according to a court filing Tuesday, the president’s attorneys canceled the session, saying he would be unavailable for about two months, well after the discovery period in the case ends, Politico reports. . . . The broadcaster is trying to get a federal judge to force Trump to commit to a date for the deposition.

“Nearly eight months into discovery, after seven depositions of BBC witnesses, and with only two months of discovery remaining, the BBC still has not been able to depose, and does not even have a schedule to depose, the most central figure in this case: Plaintiff himself,” BBC attorney Charles Tobin wrote in the filing. “There is hardly a more crucial and relevant piece of discovery in a defamation lawsuit than the deposition of the Plaintiff.”

Trump’s lawyers had reportedly agreed in July that Trump would testify on October 16 as long as both sides agreed to keep the location and other details secret. But on September 28, the president’s attorneys said that the previously agreed date no longer worked. This past Friday, they finally suggested moving the deposition to the second or third week of January, nearly one month after the discovery period ends.

Now the BBC’s lawyers want the judge on the case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett, to add the deposition’s scheduling to the agenda of a hearing scheduled for next week.  

Trump sued the BBC last year, claiming the broadcasting company funded by the British government defamed him by deceptively editing one of his speeches on January 6, 2021, for a documentary aired one day before the 2024 presidential election. 

Since then, the lawsuit has backfired for him, as the court ordered the release of Trump’s finances, as well as records from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Even Trump’s children are dodging subpoenas from the BBC’s lawyers for records related to the January 6 Capitol insurrection.   

The BBC is trying to get Trump’s case thrown out entirely, pointing out that the documentary never aired in the U.S. and that the south Florida federal court where Trump filed the lawsuit doesn’t have jurisdiction over the case. Trump’s refusal to testify on camera is probably going to help the BBC’s efforts and expose his attempts to browbeat news organizations he doesn’t like. 

The piece in Politico notes how the Felon has avoid being deposed in other lawsuits of his own instigation:

In 2023, Trump dropped a lawsuit he’d filed against his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, after a judge ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in the case and refused further requests to change the established date. Trump said through a spokesperson that he had elected to “pause” the suit, rather than cancel a campaign rally he had planned in New Hampshire for the same day as the testimony. The suit was never refiled.

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