Oct 22, 2020 6 min read

President Trump is very good at knowing his audience and telling them what they want to hear. Unfortunately, what he tells them is not limited to reality. According to the fact-checkers at the Washington Post, he’s told more than 20,000 false or misleading statements during his presidency. Getting a fact wrong as president is understandable; repeating it after it’s been demonstrated to be wrong shows you don’t care about the truth.

A good salesman identifies the wants of the consumer and finds the product that best fits those desires, which encourages repeat business. Grifters and conmen, on the other hand, only care about making a sale once. They will tell the buyer whatever is necessary to get the buyer to make the purchase, regardless of whether it’s true. The buyer will usually realize they’ve been had, but often after it’s too late to do anything about it. Trump learned from his dad that life is a competition, and you either take advantage of others, or they take advantage of you. Trump doesn’t look for mutual benefits; he values his ability to “win” these transactions.

The tragedy of Trump was that he ran on some genuinely populist ideals that appealed to a lot of people across party lines; he promised to bring back blue-collar jobs in steel and coal, and create more jobs through and infrastructure program (both of which appealed to traditionally Democratic union members), preserve Social Security and Medicare, eliminate the deficit and reduce U.S. involvement in costly overseas adventures. The problem is, he’s done none of that. He’s executed the classic bait and switch. Though he ran as a populist, and continues to campaign as one, he’s governed as a traditional Republican. His premier accomplishment was his tax cut, which exploded the deficit but saved corporate owners (16% of whom are foreign) and private business owners (like Trump) a lot of money.

He’s also gotten rid of a lot of regulations: rules that required money managers to put their client’s interests ahead of their own, limited the amount of mercury that power plants could put into the atmosphere, and limited the amount of coal waste that coal companies could dump in creeks. Most of the regulations protect consumers, workers or the environment. Eliminating them will help corporations reduce their costs, but won’t improve the lives of the people he claims to care so much about.

The economic elites who supported Trump, people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, are often horrified by the brusque and combative behavior that energizes his less wealthy supporters, but they benefit from his tax cuts and deregulation efforts. So they tolerate his name-calling and rage tweeting because they know his other major accomplishment, appointing conservative judges to lifetime federal appointments, will lock in his anti-union, pro-corporate agenda for the foreseeable future.

Trump’s recent proposal to send $200 “Trump Cards” to Medicare recipients just weeks before the election exemplifies the way he operates. He sees it as an opportunity to get support from seniors by helping them pay for high-priced prescription drugs. But he was going to pay for it by raiding the Medicare trust fund; essentially he was taking out money from the program, putting his name on it, and giving to the recipients before the election (and making it seem like it was a gift from him), when they would be stuck with the bill after the election. His proposal for a Social Security holiday as a stimulus was similar; workers see more money now (before the election) because businesses don’t withhold the taxes, but the workers still have to pay what’s owed come January. These things make no sense economically; they are only techniques a conman would use to close a sale.

On foreign policy, Trump promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico, and have Mexico pay for it. Needless to say, that didn’t happen (though he did rebuild some of the existing border wall). He promised to put “America First,” but it’s really been “America Alone.” Trump jeopardizes our relations with traditional allies, insulting the leaders of Germany, Great Britain, Canada and France while publicly admiring brutal dictators such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdogan, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Rodrigo Duterte, Mohammed bin Salman, and Viktor Orban. He’s pursued a policy of noncooperation by pulling us out of international agreements, many of which took years to negotiate, and done nothing to address the problems those agreements were supposed to address. Although he promised to end our overseas adventures, troops remain in the same countries they were in when he took office, and President Obama brought dramatically more troops home than did Trump.

I understand why people who felt the political system was not addressing their very real needs might want to go with someone who was not a politician, and voted for Trump in 2016. But Trump has not brought back coal nor “easily” defeated China in a trade war, and has utterly failed to protect Americans from the ravages of COVID-19. While it was known that Trump would not be a traditional president, it is now clear that disruption does not necessarily make things better. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

At this point, Trump even seems to be failing to read his audience; instead of understanding that people have real fears about the economy and the pandemic, and have tired of his vilification of anyone he doesn’t like (even Dr. Fauci!), and changing his approach accordingly, he has doubled down on the bluster that got him elected, claiming the economy is great and the virus is nothing to worry about.

Joe Biden is a mature, responsible adult, who, as Obama’s vice president, has had the best on-the-job training one could have. A vote for Biden is a vote against hatred and division, and for a government that once again will work for all the people, not just Trump and his wealthy friends.

Kent James is an East Washington resident and has degrees in history and policy management from Carnegie Mellon University. He is an adjunct professor of history at Washington & Jefferson College.