Do peple never tire of the unending bullshit?

Donald Trump, the consummate buck-passer, said the other day that voters are "angry at Republicans," but not at him. "They’re not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans," said the leader of the Republican party. Trump's personal approval rating has for some time been in the low to mid 30s across a range of high quality polls. He's deeply underwater on crucial issues such as the economy, inflation, and the war with Iran.

When Trump isn't throwing "Republicans" under the bus, he's in denial about his own low approval. "MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN," he wrote on Truth Social in June.

But what's "real" (or "REAL") is the fundamental problem with Trump. Literally nothing he says should be taken as aligning with actual reality.

On the economy, for example. Even going back to his first term, Trump the bullshitter has portrayed himself as the worker of economic miracles. But the claim, which was always farcical, is now comical. "The economy's the greatest economy we've ever had by far," Trump riffed the other day.

By far! That "greatest ever" economy lost 23,000 jobs last month. GDP growth for the most recent quarter was a tepid 1.5 percent. It was just 2.1 percent for Q1 and a scant 0.5 percent for Q4 of last year. Not exactly a roaring economy. See the reality problem? Annual inflation is running around 3.4 percent. Prices are high, consumers are unhappy, and jobs are becoming harder to find, especially for persons just out of school.

Americans should take the "the greatest economy we've ever had by far" nonsense as an insult to their intelligence.

In his version of a great economy, Trump has created an average of just 33,000 jobs per month for his first 18 full months in office. Joe Biden's monthly average was 321,000—ten times as many—over four full years. Obama averaged 226,000 jobs per month over his entire second term. Whatever he may be, Trump is not a job creator.

What he is is a bullshitter.

On the campaign trail running for his first term, Trump bellowed nonsensically that the "real" unemployment rate under Obama was 25 percent. Then he said "Our real unemployment rate is probably 30 percent." Next he said "I actually think it could be as high as 32, 35 percent." And finally, "As high as 35, in fact I even heard recently 42 percent."

No, Trump never "heard" that the real unemployment rate was 42 percent. Not from any authoritative source, at least. If you hear something from, say, your hair stylist, do not take it to the bank. And hilariously, in Trump's very first official unemployment report after taking office, the unemployment rate was instantly back down to less than 5 percent. In a briefing press secretary Sean Spicer said "I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly ... they [the unemployment numbers] may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now." Spicer was grinning at the undeniable absurdity he was spewing.

Trump's saying that he "heard" something is one of his common rhetorical tics. Another is his continual escalation of made-up statistics such as the ever increasing unemployment rate. I call that the "Trump ratchet." Trump can't resist using it, and it instantly flags him as an incessant confabultor or bulshitter or even liar. A recent example is the Reflecting Pool debacle, where Trump insisted vandals had cut the pool's lining with a knife, and in his subsequent retelling the size of the damage kept getting bigger and bigger. First Trump said it was a 250-foot gash. Two days later the gash had grown to 300 feet. Finally it became a 350-foot slit. Well, not finally. By July 13 the "slashes" had grown to "300 yards long." That's 3 football fields. In reality there were no slashes at all, just seams that were coming apart because of shoddy installation.

But Trump's ego was deeply tied up in the project, so he had to find a scapegoat. An innocent bystander got swept up in Trump's vandalism conspiracy theory and was indicted on felony charges for damaging the pool. He had merely stopped on a bike ride for a look, and touched a loose piece of the pool's liner. Those charges were ultimately dropped when Trump's own DOJ admitted in a court filing that "the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented."

The bullshitting is unending. Months ago Trump proclaimed that the U.S. won the war against Iran, yet six months in nothing has been resolved and the enormity of the debacle is increasingly apparent. (Trump loves to declare that he's "won" before the entire game has been played, such as his declaration of victory before all the votes were counted on election night 2020, and his shrieking that he'd been robbed when additional votes were counted.)

Some win. To this day the Strait of Hormuz is mostly closed, the U.S. has substantially depleted several major weapons systems, there's been significant damage to U.S. bases and allied energy infrastructure, U.S. forces have had extended deployments under deteriorating conditions, conditions on a major U.S. aircraft carrier are abysmal and morale is low, the ship can't be properly resupplied because of Iranian attacks on the navy's main supply hub in Bahrain, and Iran, which is surely taking pleasure from Trump's predicament, seems uninterested in even having serious discussions about a way forward. That's so even as Trump keeps pathetically blathering that Iran is desperate to talk. Trump has no idea how to clean up the enormous mess he has made, and so incessantly changes the subject to his ballroom.

Trump has always spewed monstrous lies, such as his despicable claim that Obama wasn't born in the U.S., and false averment that he saw thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrating when the Twin Towers came down. (It never happened.) But Perhaps Trump's biggest lie ever is his insistence, repeated to this day, that the 2020 election was stolen. Innumerable lines of evidence, including from Trump's own DOJ, his Department of Homeland Security, his campaign, state recounts and audits, and dozens of lawsuits, all show that the election was free and fair, and that there was no significant fraud of any sort. It's hard to imagine anything more poisonous and destructive to our democratic institutions than Trump's constantly repeated big lie. The reprehensible and systematic undermining of Americans' confidence in their elections is truly unforgivable. 

The continual confabulation, bullshitting, and lying are deeply corrosive to the national polity and to society, and should be thoroughly disqualifying. A president who lives entirely in made-up realities can't well govern the country, and a citizenry that willingly lives in a deranged man's made-up realities can't govern itself. We have been seeing what that looks like. Our situation should be utterly intolerable, but somehow isn't. We elected Trump a second time, four years after the start of the big lie and the attack on the Capitol, knowing full well what he is. How can anybody deny that the country is deeply sick? Can an electoral repudiation this November indicate real healing? I have my doubts.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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