The Big Lie Begins

Donald Trump's inauguration address was filled with bleak images: "American carnage," "deprived of knowledge," "rusted-out factories," "trapped in poverty," yada yada.

Now, the United States has its problems. But it's a hell of a lot better off than it was eight years ago, when Barack Obama took office. We are so much better off today than we were after the economic carnage wrought by Bush, the Republicans and the very same billionaires, CEOs, Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers who Trump has put in his cabinet.

Though Republicans did everything they could to sabotage Obama, in the two short years Democrats had control of the presidency and Congress they made enough progress to put the country back on course again.

So now unemployment is low and wages are up. Inflation is still low, the federal budget deficit is down. Abortions are down, mostly due to readily available birth control. Violent crime is still falling, except for a few places like Chicago, where people with ready access to handguns use them for every petty dispute. An armed society, it turns out, is not a polite society.

So why is Trump trashing America, making it seem like a third-world hellhole?

Trump is setting expectations, creating the foundation for the Big Lie. By claiming that America is a vast sewage pit now, he's setting the stage for election campaigns in 2018 and 2020.

Even if Trump does absolutely nothing to improve the economy, and the unemployment rate, wages, abortion rates, crime rates, graduation rates, etc., stay exactly the same or even get worse, Trump will claim credit for turning the "dire situation" that Obama left us into an earthly paradise.

For example, Trump won't bring more jobs to America. Companies like Carrier are making plans to bring manufacturing back, but that's because they're hiring robots, not humans. It turns out that wages are rising in China and Mexico too, and automation is the only way to reduce costs.

Under Trump we're likely to see millions of truck and cab drivers lose their jobs to robots. Robots that don't have kids to feed.

And the crazy thing is, Trump supporters will believe him. They don't care at all about the reality of the economic situation, or abortion rates, or murder rates, or any of that.

In their minds the United States was a hellhole under Obama because he was a black liberal, and the only reason things will be better under Trump is because he's a white conservative.

Meanwhile, Republicans will make people sicker by eliminating health care and clean air regulations. They will make people poorer by overturning minimum wage and overtime regulations. They will cause more unplanned pregnancies, abortions, and miscarriages by defunding Planned Parenthood and making birth control harder to obtain.

Somehow conservatives think that prosperity will simply trickle down from Donald Trump. But the only thing trickling down from Donald Trump will be a golden shower.