Trump is exposing the big lie at the core of Trumpism - By Greg Sargent
September 6 at 10:22 AM
It could not be more fitting that only 24 hours after scrapping protections for 800,000 young immigrants brought here illegally as children, President Trump is set to deliver a big speech extolling the need to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. The juxtaposition captures the massive lie at the very heart of Trumpism as perfectly as anyone could ask for.
Two of Trump’s new tweets neatly bracket this big lie. In one tweet, Trump announced he will give a speech today in North Dakota calling for “tax reform and tax cuts,” arguing that “we are the highest taxed nation in the world.” This is itself a repeatedly debunked falsehood that Trump employs to push an agenda in tune with the trickle-down GOP economic orthodoxy he used as a foil during a campaign in which he portrayed himself as an economic populist.
In the other tweet, Trump asserted that Congress has six months to act to protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals “dreamers” via legislation and hinted that if Congress fails, he might renew the executive protections he just rescinded. But Trump has not told us what legislation along these lines he’d be willing to sign. There’s a reason for all this vagueness: Trump cannot come out squarely for protecting the dreamers, because that would reveal another side of his alleged economic populism — the demagoguing about immigrants threatening U.S. workers — to be hollow.
Two Republican senators have aptly called out Trump on this point. The Post reports that Trump’s call for Congress to protect the dreamers has thrown Republicans into “chaos,” partly because nobody knows what Trump wants from such legislation. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) urges Trump to show “where your heart’s at” on the dreamers. Marco Rubio (Fla.) adds that Trump “needs to show what he’s willing to support.”
Trump needs to decide what he really wants for the dreamers. He is widely being described as “conflicted” on their fate: We are told that he empathizes with their plight — he says he has “great heart” for them — but that he felt pressure to end DACA because the immigration hard-liners insisted he must deliver for his base. But let’s be clear on what this conflict is really about. Trump isn’t wrestling with a dilemma made difficult by two valid competing moral imperatives. He’s torn between (on one side) the reality of what it actually means to scrap protections for hundreds of thousands of people who know no other country, are thoroughly American and just want to contribute positively to American life; and (on the other) the need to continue propping up his campaign lies about how deporting these people will boost American workers. The conflict is between the inescapably awful truth about the real-life consequences of ending DACA and the imagined need to continue making empty gestures to his core supporters.
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Using a term like that suggests that Cheeto has some kind of philosophy or moral code that he lives by.
There's no such thing that I can see.
"Trumpism" only means one thing - more, more, more for me and my friends.
More money, more power, more adulation, more votes.
Less, less, less for you and everybody else, just so I can get yours too.
Am I close enough?
