Youtube screenshot.
The debased and deranged wannabe fascist strongman-for-life Donald Trump’s bizarre, nationally televised speech to the American people last Wednesday night was quite insane.
The wild 18-minute oration was full of absurd and boastful misrepresentations of reality meant to support his ridiculous claim that the United States is entering a new economic Golden Age under his rule:
+ He claimed to have cut drug prices by 400, 500 or even 600 percent, all mathematical impossibilities. Drug prices would be zero after a 100 percent cut
+ He claimed to have slashed inflation when in fact the most recent available data shows that the rate of inflation is 3 percent, right where it was at the end of the Biden administration.
+ He claimed that his tariffs are sparking a boom in factory employment when in fact industrial jobs are declining thanks in no small part to how his tariffs are disrupting the global supply chains on which US manufacturers depend.
+ He cited absurdly false data to claim that foreign investment capital is pouring into the United States.
+ He said gas prices are $2.50 a gallon in much of the country and that there are states where its $1.99 even through his own Department of Energy reports an average of $2.90 and AAA reports that no state has an average gas price as low as $1.99.
+ He absurdly claimed that his tariffs will permit a massive reduction in income taxes.
As he told Americans that a glorious new age of prosperity was dawning under his reign, Trump left out the latest jobless numbers, which show the highest official unemployment rate in four years, fueled in no small part by his massive government layoffs. He also failed to mention that his assault on Obamacare means that health insurance premiums are going to skyrocket for tens of millions of Americans, forcing many to drop coverage altogether.
There were other ridiculous claims beyond the economic ones.
Trump repeated his preposterous xenophobic nationalist claims that Latin American countries have emptied their jails and prisons to invade the United States with dangerous “illegal immigrants.” He said that Joe Biden opened the US to an influx of “drug dealers, gang members and even 11,888 murderers, more than 50% of whom killed more than one person.”
Trump ridiculously claimed to be a great peacemaker who has “settled eight wars in ten months.”
He preposterously said that under Biden, “we had transgender for everybody, crime at record levels, law enforcement and words such as that just absolutely forbidden.”
Under the “radical Left” Biden administration, Trump told US-Americans, “the United States was ruled by politicians who flooded your cities and towns with illegal aliens…decimated your hard-earned savings, indoctrinated your children with hate for America” and “released a level of violent felons that we had never seen to prey on innocent.”
But all this absurdity was NOT the most remarkable thing about Trump’s speech.
There’s nothing remotely new about Trump lying and purveying falsehoods. There’s never been a bigger dissembler than Trump: The Washington Post calculated that Trump misrepresented reality 30,573 times during his first presidency; Mein Trumpf is the all-time world record holder when it comes to fibbing and falsification.
The most extraordinary aspect of Trump’s address was the wild way it was delivered. Barely stopping for a breath and sounding like he was late for an orgy at an Epstein property, Trump yelled his lies at the camera at a ridiculously rapid pace. The speech was barked out in a strange monotone staccato as if the orange-brushed ogre was both enraged and desperate to be believed. I half-wondered if he was on Adderall or some other stimulant drug that could help send him into cardiac arrest during his unhinged harangue. Were medical personnel nearby?
(On an optimistic note, it struck me at one point that he was he speaking like a man desperate to make his case before getting booted from office or drawing his last breath.)
The next most remarkable thing about last Wednesday night’s nutso Trump rant was the lunatic’s total silence about the preparations he is making for an epically criminal war on Venezuela. How strange. On the false claim that Venezuela is waging a narco-terrorist war on the US, Trump and his flying fascist monkey of a War Secretary Pete Hegseth have so far massacred 80-plus people in a string of arch-criminal extrajudicial executions on the high seas. Trump has declared the air space above Venezuela closed. He has seized a Venezuelan oil tanker right off Venezuela’s coast. He has declared fentanyl, which he falsely accuses Venezuela of shipping to the US, to be “a weapon of mass destruction.” He has assembled a giant “armada” of US military assets in the Caribbean to menace Venezuela and Colombia. Three nights ago, he ordered a blockade on tankers coming in and out of Venezuela. He said that Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro’s days are numbered and claimed that Venezuela has “stolen our oil and land” (no doubt a reference to past nationalizations under Hugo Chavez).
This is deranged imperial war talk, an odd fit for a self-declared “peacemaker” who is demanding a Nobel Peace Prize.
How does a POTUS get up in front of the cameras in a rare nationally televised special address and say literally nothing about a regime change war he appears to be on the verge of starting in the Americas?!
What madness.
