Catherine Rampell: Donald Trump Is Falling Into the Same Trap That Ensnared Joe Biden

"THE PARTY IN POWER just lost an election because the party out of power hammered them hard for not cutting prices. If that sounds familiar, it’s because pretty much the same thing happened last year, except the antagonists have swapped places.

Turns out it’s easy to win while running as an outsider promising “affordability.” It’s much harder to actually do anything about it.

It’s doubly hard if you insist the problem doesn’t exist in the first place and suggest voters should just shut up about it. Triply hard if your economic policy agenda (cough-cough, tariffs) cuts in the opposite direction, making life more expensive.

In short, President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have learned nothing from how badly Joe Biden and the Democrats bungled inflation. Instead they’re repeating some of the same mistakes and adopting the same useless gimmicks. Only this time, they’re also pursuing policies that make the problem worse.

Affordability crisis? What crisis?

USUALLY TRUMP AND HIS ALLIES are great at creating their own alternative reality, and getting their voters to buy into it. Tax cuts pay for themselves? Sure. Horse dewormer cures your ills? Swell. Immigrants are eating your pets? You betcha.

This strategy is a bit more challenging when it comes to the cost of living, because voters presumably notice whether their grocery and electricity bills have gone up or down. Not that that has stopped the White House from trying.

In the past week, Trump has called complaints about affordability a “con job” orchestrated by the Democrats. Asked about voters’ anxiety on the economy—as documented in numerous polls—Trump told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham: “I think polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”

Not only that, he has stressed, but maybe prices are already falling!

As he explained to reporters last week, “The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under ‘Sleepy Joe Biden,’ and the prices are way down.” Republicans, he has said, can win on the issue if only they resolve to “talk about the fact that prices are down.” (To be clear, prices are not down. They’re still rising, up about 3 percent in September from a year earlier.)

In some ways this is a more strident version of what Biden and the Democrats did during the first year of his term.

For most of 2021—until, coincidentally, the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving—Democrats and allied commentators often downplayed or dismissed public concerns about inflation. The significance of rising inflation had been, well, inflated by media exaggeration, right-wing “propaganda,” and Republican lies, they stressed. Surrogates and pundits said stuff like this even as inflation seemed increasingly un-transitory, and continued shooting upward; in November 2021, the headline consumer price index was 6.9 percent higher than it was a year earlier...

Source:Catherine Rampell is an economic affairs columnist.

From The Bulwark

In Donald Trump's world (perhaps that's also called The Donald) it's not: 

censorship when he does it, 

not corruption when he does it

inflation doesn't exist on his watch

he's not a dictator, even though he believes that he he has the power to do whatever he wants to do, or whatever he doesn't want to

pardons don't count, if they come from a Democrat

and everything that is negative that's going on either about him, or his administration, the state of the economy, his personal fitness for the office... that's all fake news. 

The term "alternative universe" has been used a lot during the last 10 years. Why? Because we've had a professional reality TV star, whose only professional success in life, has been as a reality TV star... trying to either become President of the United States, or has been President the last 10 years. And remember: it's not real, it's just reality TV. 

So Mr. Trump has taken from what he's learned from reality TV 20-25 years ago and has applied that to his politics and style of governing. And most of his fans/followers must also be reality TV fans, because they believe everything that The Donald says and does. And that he's never wrong about anything: 

It's always someone else's fault 

that didn't happen 

it's all fake news. That's the fan base of Donald John Trump. 

And to respond to something that Catherine Rampell has said: the only thing that Donald Trump has learned from Joe Biden, is that's it': 

always someone else' fault 

or the situation is not as bad as the media is reporting it to be 

or the people are just overreacting to what they're seeing and feeling in their own personal lives 

or it's better now than it was before they came to office, etc. 

Not that difficult to see why Mr. Biden is no longer President. When you tell the voters that they should believe you, instead of what they're actually seeing and feeling in their own lives, that tends to backfire. American voters tend to not want to be told that they are stupid, or crazy, they are overreacting, etc. They want their politicians to first acknowledge that their problems are real, especially if they happened on the politician's watch. And then address those concerns and tell them what they're doing to try to fix those problems and help he people improve their own lives. 

But Donald Trump never became President to "make America great again". He became President because he wanted absolute power and probably nothing else.

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