Political Irony

Donald Trump has been trying to appeal to blacks, although for some reason he keeps doing it in front of all-white crowds (the theory being that he knows he can’t actually get any minorities to vote for him, but at least he wants his supporters to be able to think that he isn’t actually racist). But this isn’t the first time Trump has pulled this trick (and gotten away with it).

In 1993, Trump descended on Gary, Indiana promising to make that run-down exurb of Chicago great again. Trump wanted to open a showboat casino off the Lake Michigan shoreline, in an area full of shuttered factories. But he needed a license from the authorities.

At first, Gary turned him down (he had just had two recent bankruptcies), so Trump went into hard sell mode.

Trump promised to revitalize the city’s waterfront by building a casino that would be a floating Shangri-La, and the the tax revenues would fill the city coffers to the tune of $19 million a year. He also promised that at least two-thirds of the employees would be local minority residents. The icing on the cake was that he formed a board of eight “local minority participants” made up of respected doctors, lawyers, and businesspeople. This group was promised a 7.5% stake in the casino. And he promised another 7.5% to go into a trust benefiting local charities.

And it worked. Trump got the license. And almost immediately he started reneging on his promises. The “local minority participants” weren’t given anything, and the money for charity was less than promised (sound familiar?). He also reneged on his promises to hire minority residents.

But here’s the really hypocritical part. Two of the “local minority participants” he had used to get the license sued, and at trial Trump claimed “I have never even seen them until this morning. I never had a contract (with them). I never even met any of these people. I was shocked by this whole case. I had no idea who these people were.” Trump lost the case but appealed and had it overturned because the judge ruled that his promises were not legally binding.

And then, in 2004, Trump declared bankruptcy again, leaving a boat with faded carpets and dated interiors. The money, the tax revenues, the jobs, pretty much everything he promised, he reneged on. But of course, Trump made money.

Has Trump ever kept a promise unless he couldn’t find a way to wiggle out of it?

A Trump campaign county chairwoman in Ohio has resigned after an interview with The Guardian in which she said a whole bunch of ignorant racist things:

She called the Black Lives Matter movement “a stupid waste of time”.

She blamed low voter turnout among blacks on “the way they’re raised”. Which is strange because in her county voter turnout is actually higher among black people than white people. Maybe it’s the way they’re raised?

She actually said (yes, this was on video):

If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you. You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.

Then she blamed racism on Barack Obama. On the racial tensions that were rife in the 60’s (which is when she graduated from high school):

Growing up as a kid, there was no racism, believe me. We were just all kids going to school.

About segregation and the civil rights movement:

I never experienced it. I never saw that as anything. I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this […] Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.

When the interviewer pointed out that some people might find her remarks offensive, she pulled a Trump and replied “I don’t care, it’s the truth.”

You know the old saying about “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”. Well, it has never been so true. Last week, Donald Trump revealed his economic plan, and could you guess that it was more trickle-down economics. He is going to lower taxes on the rich dramatically, cutting the highest tax rate to only 33%, and lowering the corporate rate from 35% to 15%. He is also going to institute a “moratorium on federal regulations”. What kind of regulations? Well, he suggested eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules for lowering carbon emissions from coal-fired plants. So more global warming and more pollution!

In other speeches Trump has promised to increase military spending. Where is this money going to come from? He doesn’t say, but he also promises that his plan will reduce the federal deficit. Independent analysis of his plans “estimated they will bloat the US deficit by trillions, even after economic growth is taken into account”. So even if trickle-down economics somehow magically works this time and stimulates the economy, we will still be passing on huge debts to our children. You know the huge debts that Republicans have been screaming about for years that will destroy our country.

The last person who sold us this putrid bill of goods was Dubya Bush, and anyone still supporting Trump obviously doesn’t remember how that turned out for us.

Trump also promises that the economy will grow at more than four percent. Ironically, the last time the economy grew that fast was when Hillary Clinton was in the White House as First Lady.

What should be the response to “fool me three times”?