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Trump Backs Off on Economy Claims
He is realizing that he can’t improve on the strongest economic numbers in decades
Deep breath. The disruption we have expected from the incoming Trump administration has already gone beyond my worst expectations and I’m pretty skeptical by nature. It’s a bit hard to keep up with it. But here we go. Hang on.
It looks like Trump is going radio silent on his grandiose claims of ‘fixing’ the economy. And the reality he faces has two aspects causing him to back off. First, Joe Biden has left him a stellar economy on a silver platter and it is hard to improve on those numbers.
And this time around, the press appears poised to not blindly accept his lies about what Biden left him. It’s revisionist history and his people know it. Yes, his MAGA followers continue to believe the economy is in tatters and that won’t change. They don’t want to know that the reality he sold them is based on outrageous falsehoods.
But reality has a way of eventually showing up. Maybe not for them, but frankly, their viewpoint has no basis in reality. Trump knows this stuff and he also may have an eye on history, though that is questionable. What it seems he is realizing is that his myths about how bad the economy has been are lies too big to be sustained.
So the likely outcome is that he avoids the topic, or more likely, falsely claims to have miraculously ‘fixed’ things by simply claiming the Biden economy as his own. Nothing new there of course.
But the constant media reminders that the Biden economy is almost unbelievably strong, especially after we came so close to collapse due to the poorly handled the pandemic during Trump’s last years of his first term. Biden’s name for it, Bidenomics, was easy to mock during campaign rallies but the term is seemingly now gaining viability as the numbers are quite astounding.
Slowly falling interest rates are still too high for consumers, but there is virtually nothing Trump can do to magically lower them without crashing the economy. That just takes time. But record employment, rising wages, and record low unemployment rates are hard to hide.
Even gas prices have plummeted. In that indicator Trump is revealing his own…