Donald Trump Takes Bizarre Third-Person Credit for Consumer Confidence Index
By Hrafnkell Haraldsson on Wed, Dec 28th, 2016 at 8:00 am
"The U.S. Consumer Confidence Index for December surged nearly four points to 113.7, THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN MORE THAN 15 YEARS! Thanks Donald!"
In yet another fit of self-love and overweening pride, President-Elect – that is not President Donald Trump, tweeted a bizarre third person tweet taking credit for the U.S. Consumer Confidence Index: The U.S. Consumer Confidence Index for December surged nearly four points to 113.7, THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN MORE THAN 15 YEARS! Thanks Donald! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2016
Reuters explained that,
“The Conference Board said on Tuesday its Consumer Confidence Index rose to 113.7 this month from an upwardly revised 109.4 in November. That topped estimates in a Reuters poll for a reading of 109.0, and was the highest since August 2001.”
To listen to Trump, it is almost as if the past eight years, and President Obama’s restoration of our economy in the face of endless GOP obstruction, never took place.
When Obama took office, the Consumer Confidence Index was a woeful 37.7 and had gone up 86 percent just four years later. By the end of 2014, consumer confidence was back to it’s January 2007 high.
It is difficult to say whether Trump’s self-congratulatory tweet or the fact that it quickly amassed 30K “likes” was more disturbing. Because, as one observer noted,
You mean, Thanks Obama. Obama is still the President of the United States. HE gets the credit. Not you, you blithering idiot. #TheResistance https://t.co/fL7hPBGl5Y — Justice ? Prevails (@BlueVindication) December 28, 2016
Of course, Trump’s claim to what does not belong to him is in keeping with another bizarre post-Christmas claim of his:
The world was gloomy before I won – there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2016
So his ego is at least consistently over-inflated. There is that. Trumpists are calling it “The Trump Effect.” Apparently, all he touches and all that flows from him is gold, explaining that golden toilet in Trump Tower.
It is anyone’s guess what Trump’s next miracle will be.
Trump had all along pretended the US economy was in shambles, despite all President Obama’s hard work restoring it to pre-crash levels. Trump claimed he would restore the economy Obama had already restored, and this is his mendacious promise come to fruition.
In GOP annals, it will not be President Obama who performed the economic miracle. Just as Obama got the blame for all President Bush’s misdeeds, Trump will get all the credit for President Obama’s good deeds.
It is not “thanks, Donald” but “thanks, Obama.” Credit must go where it is due, and Donald Trump and his raging ego are out of line. In four years, the “Trump effect” will mean something very different.
BOREALIS: "Trump has often been the butt of Obama’s jokes. Now he can sit his butt on his golden toilet, smartphone in hand, and do what he does best: whine, while a real president takes the accolades that are his due"
IMO, in 4 years Trump or any of us will not have a pot to piss in much less a "gold toilet".
As America's Most Unpopular President-elect, Trump's Not Invincible
"Trump Wins Electoral College And Becomes The Most Unpopular President-Elect In History"
.. dated, yet potently prescient ..
Israel has been living through a form of Trumpism for years. But Netanyahu has one enormous advantage over his U.S. counterpart: the public still loves him.
Larry Derfner Jan 16, 2017 1:21 AM
People protest against President-elect Donald Trump as electors gather to cast their votes at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg, December 19, 2016. Jonathan Ernst, Reuters
Do not despair, fellow Trumpophobes. At this rate, the incoming president might be politically paralyzed before too long by his deep, wide, accelerating unpopularity with the American public.
After being the most disliked major U.S. presidential candidate in the annals of public opinion surveys, Donald Trump heads into the White House on Friday as a “historically unpopular” president-elect, according to Politico’s wrap-up .. http://www.politico.com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/2017/01/poll-trumps-transition-is-historically-unpopular-233583 .. of recent polls. Gallup puts his disapproval rating at 51 percent; at this time eight years ago, only 12 percent of Americans held a negative opinion of then-president-elect Barack Obama.
Polls showed that Trump enjoyed a “honeymoon” after the election, just like all newly-elected presidents do. But unlike his predecessors, he squandered it with his unabated attacks on his opponents, among whom he includes America’s intelligence agencies; his uncontrollable bragging; his cabinet appointments of mainly white nationalists, anti-government radicals, bankers and Putin-lovers; and, worst of all, the confirmation by U.S. intelligence that Vladimir Putin did his dirtiest to throw the election Trump’s way, leading all but the president-elect’s hardcore supporters to face the horrifying possibility that on January 20, the White House will effectively pass into the Russian tyrant’s hands.
There’s one more reason, I think, why Trump’s unpopularity is growing: All those Americans, millions if not tens of millions of them, who “held their noses” and voted for him because they hated Hillary Clinton even more, are now looking at the man on his own, without benefit of Hillary's reflection, and they're feeling serious buyer's remorse. They're getting a very stark reminder that the lesser of two evils (as they saw it) is still evil.
A whole lot of people – reporters, intelligence officials, politicians and political activists worldwide, along with Democrats and at least some decent Republicans in the U.S. – are gunning for him. Trump has a long, gruesome record. The revelations are highly unlikely to stop – as are his wild reactions. The voters rejected Trump by a margin of nearly 3 million ballots; he has the committed, even fanatic support of maybe a third of the American public – but beyond that, the water gets very deep for him very quickly.
If the center of the American electorate – those who “held their noses,” along with those who voted for the “change agent” – turns on Trump, which the polls say is happening already, what will he do? How will he carry out his malicious designs? He is not an absolute ruler, not over America and certainly not over the rest of the world – how will he get others to do his bidding if they’re running away from him for fear of being tainted?
That’s what tends to happen to massively unpopular leaders in a democracy – it gets so that they can’t lead. Think of Nixon after Watergate, George W. Bush after Americans turned against the Iraq War and the economy crashed, Ehud Barak after the second intifada broke out – as heads of state, they were dead men walking. The Putin-Trump connection may already be a debacle of that size – with the potential to dwarf them all. And unlike Nixon, Bush, Barak and so many other leaders whose time at the top ended badly, Trump starts off deep in the hole.
With his shameless lying, demagogic genius, contempt for the checks and balances of democracy, superiority complex, greed and bigotry, Trump has rightly been compared to Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli liberals are warning their American counterparts about what to expect, because this country has been living through a Hebrew version of Trumpism since before the decade began.
But Netanyahu only gets away with it – eternalizing the occupation, demonizing Arabs, Jewish leftists and African refugees, persecuting human rights NGOs, siding with an executioner in uniform against the IDF, flaunting his contempt for the Obama administration, luxuriating in the largesse of billionaires, plotting to enslave the media, etc., etc., etc. – because the Israeli public supports him. They’ve elected him four times. He’s consistently alone at the top in polls of the public’s choice for prime minister.
If he was as unpopular here as Trump is in America – or, certainly, as unpopular as Trump could become – Netanyahu wouldn’t be able to work his will on Israel like he does. His allies and enemies would see him as vulnerable, dispensable, nobody they need to obey, and probably somebody they should avoid.
There’s no guarantee, of course, but this could turn out to be Trump's fate, and in not too distant a time. Even if he doesn’t get impeached, he could find himself crippled as president, all but impotent. He’s not invincible – in fact, as a megalomaniac, he has blind spots all over. The way he’s going, he most definitely can be taken down.
So chin up, Team Decency, as Inauguration Day approaches. Maybe Satan isn’t ruling heaven and earth yet. And maybe what goes around comes around.
Larry Derfner is a copy editor at Haaretz and he blogs at www.larryderfner.com. His memoir "No Country for Jewish Liberals" (Just World Books) will be published in April 2017. Follow him on Twitter: @DerfnerLarry
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