Trump's Pre-Covid Economic Miracle is Fake News

All the opinion polls show the same thing: the single issue on which Trump is perceived as better than Biden is the economy.?Not law and order, not judges, not abortion.?Trump’s economic track record before Covid-19 is widely believed to have been miraculous and this may be the sole remaining support post for many otherwise Trump-queasy Republicans.?I hear it all the time, a veritable laundry list of noxious Trump stuff that “country club” Republicans hate about Donald Trump.?And they all end with, “but the economy!”?“He did it before, he can do it again.”?This is apparently so powerful an allure for Republicans with chunky brokerage accounts that no matter how many other appalling things he does, their faith in his economic omnipotence offsets them all.?That and the fact that they’re dead certain the Dems will hike capital gains taxes and lead a communist revolution (not sure of the order).?I can’t help with paranoid fantasies about Chuck Schumer and Karl Marx -- but Trump’s economy was not spectacular.?He did not do it before.?This is a myth, nothing more.?Even before Covid-19, the US economy was not the greatest in history, it was not the greatest in American history, and it wasn’t the greatest in any context whatsoever.

What explains the durability of this myth??And why is Trump’s ever worsening behavior so easily shrugged off? ?For many Republicans it would have been impossible without the Editorial Board (EB) of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).?The morning after the latest Trump abomination, there it appears, as predictable as the tides: the Editorial Board’s “explanation”.?The Journal advertises itself as “essential reading” and indeed, so it’s become for well-off but morally uneasy conservatives.?The EB is the fix which excuses bad behavior, burnishes the myth, and let’s Republicans get back to golf, boating, and speculating on vaccine stocks.?The successors of Robert Bartley sell opiates to the business class. ?

Their methods are simple.?The Journal’s opinion pieces are as formulaic as a North Korean newscast.?These “easy bake” editorials all follow the same simple template the day after the latest Trump slander, crime, or imbecility:

Part 1: Find something else Trump did recently that wasn’t horrible and praise it like the rapture

Part 2: Pose as aware of reality by saying that [anodyne euphemism for corruption, extortion, etc.] is [anodyne euphemism for bat-shit crazy]. Tut tut, furrowed brow, we’re taking it seriously

Part 3: “BUT THE DEMOCRATS ARE SO MUCH WORSE BECAUSE [sinister euphemism for politics]”

Once you see the pattern, you really no longer need to actually read them.?Let’s look at an example.?On September 23rd Trump said he may not step down if he loses the election and on the 24th we get our tiny paper cup with the pink pills from the EB:

Part 1: “The rule of law is vital to free and fair elections, and Mr. Trump is right not to forswear his legal options.”?He wasn’t subverting democracy, he was saving it!?God bless this man!

Part 2: His comments were “reckless” (tut tut) and he should “clarify his views” (furrowed brow)

Part 3: But the Democrats are “hysterical”, in “a frenzy”, their concerns are “a fantasy” and “preposterous”, their ideas are “dangerous” and, my favorite, “who’s really plotting a coup?”?

This, of course, is standard-issue gaslighting.?Trump’s not the issue, you and your crazy emotional overreactions are the issue. ?Trump tells four Congresswoman of color to go back to the dirty places they came from.?Democrats (and people who know right from wrong) are appalled.?The Journal furrows its brow at Trump then proceeds to ridicule any who are appalled.?

The following are the first words of The Trump Disruption, the Journal’s non-endorsement endorsement from August 28th:

When Donald Trump won the Presidency four years ago, half of America gnashed its teeth or cried…

Note the distinctive use of what rhetoricians call the pre-emptive gaslight.?The first recorded use of this technique was by Pope Pius VII in 1804 in Paris when the Catholic Church “endorsed” Napoleon Bonaparte (“stop being hysterical, think of the judges!”). ?In their pitch for a second term, before the EB mentions a single word about Trump’s behavior, they tell us that anti-Trump voters, “gnashed (their) teeth or cried” when he won.?So people who dislike Trump are disturbed emotional wrecks who grind their teeth, got it. ?Then, after carefully and thoroughly applying a pre-emptive coat of slime to those who dislike Trump, then and only then do they get around to dismissing the actual arguments against him.?The corollary would be if I wrote the following:

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, noted for its stunning overnight abdication of 50 years of principled conservatism in favor of a plastic orange El Hefe, made the following points in Trump’s favor…

In the following pages, I’ll explain why Trump’s pre-Covid economic track record was the worst miracle in history and why, in a second term, the risk to the long term economic prosperity of the US is far too great to justify the microscopic chance he might do better the second time.?I will use as my starting point the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board’s two endorsement-type editorials published in late August. ?I offer this essay not as ready-to-tweet talking points but as a comprehensive (i.e., surprisingly long) review which others may find useful as a reference source when rebutting similar propaganda.?I would apologize for how ridiculously long it is but the myth of the miracle economy is so completely ridiculous and has so many different ridiculous parts to it and the EB made so many supremely ridiculous points that I feel obligated to shred every last ridiculous one, down to its last sad ridiculous punctuation point.

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