President Donald Trump sold the American people a bill of false goods, even from the perspective of people who agree with him politically, editor Michael Tomasky wrote for The New Republic substack — and it's time for his supporters to stop buying what he's selling.
One of the key new examples, he wrote, is Trump saying he'll "take a pass" on the Russian invasion of Ukraine if the two sides can't make a deal. This comes months after he took office a second time and despite his promise he would end the war within 24 hours.
"How many times did Trump say he’d end that war on the first day of his presidency? It had to have been hundreds," he wrote. "I saw a lot of those clips on cable news over the weekend, as you may have. He did not mean it figuratively. You know, in the way people will say, 'I’ll change that from day one,' and you know they don’t literally mean day one, but they do mean fast. But that isn’t what Trump said. He meant it literally. He used the phrase 'in 24 hours' many, many times. So I ask you: Who really believed that?"
It's the same on so many issues, Tomasky continued — Trump promised a golden age of prosperity with his tariffs, and instead they're disrupting markets and causing recession and price hike forecasts. Similarly, Arab-American and Muslim voters who took a chance on Trump out of frustration that President Joe Biden couldn't make a clean break from Israel are now seeing Trump give Israel a free pass while deporting Muslim students who dared to protest Israel on campuses.
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"Trump is the biggest liar in the history of American politics," wrote Tomasky. "And no, I don’t know the precise extent to which Millard Fillmore or Benjamin Harrison was prone to prevarication. And yet, I write that sentence with serene confidence because I know enough about Fillmore and Harrison and the whole lot of them to know that, while many of them were mediocrities and some operated according to a rather elastic ethical scale, none of them was an outright sociopath."
"Anyone who couldn’t see" Trump was lying at least on those three issues, he continued, "was either brainwashed by right-wing media and social media or — well, or what? It’s hard to say. Maybe those people’s instinct is to hate liberals. Maybe they believed all that 'he’s a businessman' crap. Maybe they just didn’t want a woman in the White House. Whatever the case, they’re poor judges of character, and we — and this is a 'we' that includes them — are about to pay a high price for their bamboozlement."