Donald has a remarkable talent for saying the quiet part out loud. Sometimes it is an admission of corruption. Sometimes it is a confession of incompetence. And sometimes it is simply a sentence so grammatically mangled that it becomes the perfect metaphor for the state of his presidency.
This week, it was the latter.
Donald looked at polling showing Americans’ deep dissatisfaction with the economy and somehow managed to produce a sentence that was even worse than the numbers themselves.
Donald: I saw polls today on television. I say Donald Trump polls from the economy aren’t good. The economy is the greatest economy we’ve ever had by far. The economy aren’t good.
“The economy aren’t good.”
That is devastating news, not just for those of us who actually care about inflation, but apparently for English grammar as well.
Welcome to this week’s episode of Trump Trolls Trump. As of today, it has been 565 days since Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025, and Donald’s promise that we had finally entered America’s so called golden age. The golden age, it turns out, looks suspiciously like rising prices, sinking approval numbers, and a president insisting that reality itself is lying.
Everyone who is sentient knows that the cost of nearly everything continues to climb. Gas is more expensive. Groceries cost more. Families are making increasingly difficult choices about what they can afford and what they have to do without. Donald, of course, will never admit any of that because doing so would require admitting that he is wrong. In this case, he is.
With the midterm elections now only eighty seven days away, Donald has settled on an economic strategy that is both familiar and deeply absurd. Do not believe your grocery bill. Do not believe your gas receipt. Do not believe the polls. Do not even believe your own eyes. Believe Donald because, according to Donald, he deserves an A plus.
Donald: We’re doing an unbelievable job. Costs are coming way down. I inherited very, very high costs and they’re all coming down now. The food, the groceries, it’s all coming down. We’ve done a great job. I think we should be given an A plus for the economy, but I think it’s coming. People are starting to talk about it.
Only an A plus? Honestly, I think he is selling himself short.
Personally, I blame Herbert Hoover for today’s inflation. Surely Herbert Hoover is responsible for grocery prices, fuel costs, and farmers struggling under Donald’s disastrous economic policies. That explanation makes about as much sense as anything else we have heard from this administration lately.
Naturally, Fox Business was more than happy to reinforce the narrative. Stuart Varney welcomed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, better known as the backyard chicken enthusiast who once suggested Americans could solve high egg prices simply by raising chickens at home. If you happen to live in a Manhattan apartment, apparently all you need is a balcony, several hens, and understanding neighbors.
Rollins insisted food prices were falling, grocery prices were improving, and everything was moving in exactly the right direction. There was only one small problem. Fox accidentally displayed reality on the screen. Their own graphic showed ground beef up more than twelve percent year over year and milk up nine percent. Apparently, even state television occasionally forgets to coordinate its propaganda with its graphics department.
Brooke Rollins: What we inherited was unbelievable. In the four years of Joe Biden, the cost of food went up 25 percent. Over the last year and a half, we’re at about 3 percent, which aligns with the national average. Eggs are actually down about 90 percent, ( graphics show they are -27%), Berries are down, fruits are down, chicken breasts are down, but there are some outliers. One of those is beef. Our cost today of ground beef is actually down from where it was six months ago, so we’re trending in the right direction. The president is right. As soon as we get the job done in Iran, the gas and fuel prices start coming way down again, and we’ll begin to see even more relief.
Outstanding journalism, Stuart Varney. Even you must know the difference between a plus sign and a minus sign. By the way, I should probably take some credit for falling egg prices. It is genetic. The chicken coop I built in the hallway of my apartment building has apparently transformed the national economy. The chickens are thriving, the eggs are plentiful, and America has been saved.
Unfortunately, grocery prices are driven by far more than eggs. Energy costs affect virtually everything Americans buy, transport, and consume. Which naturally brings us to one of America’s foremost energy experts. Or, more accurately, somebody who believes he is one.
Of course, running the Trump regime requires a certain amount of finesse. More importantly, it requires knowing when to call in the experts. When we have questions about medicine, we ask physicians. When we need engineers, we consult engineers. But when Donald has a question about virtually anything, there is apparently only one person qualified to answer it.
Donald.
According to Donald, he knows more about the economy than economists, more about military strategy than generals, more about trade than economists, more about taxes than tax experts, and now, apparently, more about Europe than the people who actually live there.
Donald: Look, you have to stop illegal immigration in Europe. I know Europe better than anybody, better than the people that run it and have great relationships there. Two things are killing Europe. Number one is immigration. Number two is energy. They have windmills all over the place. Windmills, you lose your shirt. Any country with windmills is a loser. If they have windmills, they’re a loser.
It is remarkable how often Donald’s personal grievances become public policy. His obsession with wind turbines has never had anything to do with science, economics, or energy production. It has everything to do with the fact that he has spent years complaining about windmills near one of his golf courses in Scotland. Apparently, because Donald dislikes the view, renewable energy itself has become one of civilization’s greatest threats.
Unfortunately for Donald, reality continues to refuse to cooperate. Wind energy remains one of the fastest-growing and least expensive sources of electricity in much of the world. Meanwhile, the Trump regime recently spent more than seven billion taxpayer dollars paying a company not to build wind farms that would have produced exactly the kind of inexpensive energy Americans actually need. That is quite an achievement. It takes a special kind of incompetence to spend billions of dollars ensuring that less energy gets produced while simultaneously complaining that energy costs are too high.
Speaking of things Donald apparently knows better than everyone else, he delivered another astonishing revelation this week while speaking to a room full of NCAA national champions at the White House.
Donald: And already we’ve done a lot to help save women’s sports. And we’re also saving college sports. We’re in the process of working very hard. We had a bad judge’s decision and a judge that knew nothing about sports declared sports unconstitutional. Can you believe it?
Actually, no.
I cannot believe it.
Mostly because it never happened.
There was no judge who declared sports unconstitutional. That is not a thing that exists outside Donald’s imagination. Yet somehow he managed to say it with complete confidence, and a room full of people simply listened as though it were perfectly normal.
That has become one of the defining characteristics of the Trump era. The lies are no longer even tethered to reality. They do not have to be plausible. They do not have to withstand the slightest scrutiny. They simply have to be delivered with enough confidence that the people surrounding Donald choose not to question them.
What makes all of this even more disturbing is that the Trump regime continues to wage a relentless campaign against the transgender community while simultaneously dragging the country into an illegal and unconstitutional war of choice against Iran and making life increasingly unaffordable for millions of Americans. Yet somehow, in Donald’s version of reality, the great constitutional crisis facing the nation is that a judge supposedly outlawed sports.
That brings us, inevitably, to what Donald actually spends his time thinking about.
Americans are struggling to pay rent. Families are deciding whether they can afford groceries or healthcare. The cost of living continues to rise while economic uncertainty grows by the day.
Donald, meanwhile, has far more pressing concerns.
During an Oval Office executive order signing, he revealed the monumental decision currently occupying his attention.
Donald: That was one mistake with the reflecting pool. They hadn’t put up the cameras yet. But we’re very proud of Lafayette Park. Now we have a big decision to make. Do we take the pavers that are red, the red brick pavers, and do we change them into granite? Gray granite. They’re beautiful, but they’re not the original. So we’re going to have to make that decision. You have a good sense of taste. What would you do?
This, apparently, is what keeps the President of the United States awake at night.
Not inflation.
Not healthcare.
Not housing.
Not the cost of food.
Not the growing financial pressure facing millions of American families.
The color of the pavers outside Lafayette Park.
One almost expected him to ask whether the granite should be accented with gold leaf. After all, no vanity project is complete until it reflects Donald’s aesthetic priorities rather than the country’s actual needs.
That is perhaps the most revealing thing about Donald’s presidency. His attention is always drawn toward appearances, monuments, decorations, and self-aggrandizement while the real problems confronting ordinary Americans become little more than background noise.
For Donald, image has always mattered more than substance. The façade is everything. The people living behind it barely seem to exist.
Donald has always had an extraordinary ability to focus on precisely the wrong things. While Americans continue struggling with rising costs, shrinking access to healthcare, and growing economic uncertainty, he remains preoccupied with vanity projects, aesthetics, and whatever happens to catch his attention in the moment.
That disconnect was on full display once again this week. As families across the country are forced to choose between groceries, gasoline, rent, and medical bills, Donald revealed the issue he apparently considers most pressing: whether the brick pavers near the White House should be replaced with gray granite.
If you have ever wondered whether Donald understands what ordinary Americans are experiencing, the answer was right there.
The economy may be faltering. Healthcare may be slipping further out of reach. But Donald is worried about landscaping.
Before wrapping up the week, however, there was one final moment of breathtaking irony.
Vice President J.D. Vance appeared on Fox State TV to discuss what he described as one of the country’s most serious problems: public officials enriching themselves through fraud at the expense of American taxpayers.
On that point, at least, we can agree.
J.D. Vance: I don’t care where you came from. I don’t care what your name is. If you are committing fraud against the American people, all of us, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and try to throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer.
That is excellent advice.
In fact, I would be more than happy to help.
Jamaica Estates, Queens, New York.
Donald John Trump.
There you go, J.D.
I just made your first investigation considerably easier.
After all, if we are serious about public officials enriching themselves at taxpayer expense, it would seem logical to begin with the person who has spent decades turning public office into a personal revenue stream. Between the endless self promotion, the taxpayer funded vanity projects, the no bid contracts, the licensing deals, the fundraising schemes, and the seemingly limitless opportunities for personal enrichment, there is certainly no shortage of material.
Yet somehow, that investigation never seems to make it onto anyone’s agenda inside the Trump regime.
That, perhaps more than anything else, captures the defining contradiction of this administration. They speak constantly about accountability while avoiding it themselves. They warn about corruption while normalizing it. They rail against fraud while presiding over one ethical scandal after another.
And still they expect Americans to believe them.
That is why Trump Trolls Trump continues to matter.
Authoritarians depend on mythology. They depend on spectacle. They depend on convincing people that they are powerful, inevitable, and beyond criticism. Donald, in particular, has spent his entire political career trying to cultivate exactly that image.
The problem for him is that reality keeps getting in the way.
Every rambling speech, every impossible statistic, every imaginary accomplishment, every bizarre grammatical construction, and every self congratulatory fantasy chips away at the myth he has spent decades building. He wants Americans to see strength. More often than not, what they see instead is insecurity wrapped in bluster.
That is precisely why ridicule remains so effective.
Mockery strips away the performance. It reminds us that beneath all of the bombast, grievance, and self importance are profoundly insecure people who desperately want to be feared because they cannot bear being laughed at.
They deserve accountability for the damage they continue to inflict on this country. They also deserve to be ridiculed when they hand us material this absurd because, week after week, they continue proving that nobody trolls Donald Trump more effectively than Donald Trump himself.
Thank you so much for joining me for Trump Trolls Trump.
Remember, mockery remains one of our greatest superpowers. We will be back next week to continue ridiculing this corrupt, incompetent, and profoundly unserious administration because, as always, they simply cannot help themselves.
They keep giving us more material than we could ever ask for.
I can't believe I am spending a fine August day on line, reading yet more garbage about the TwatWaffle. The only good in him is the day he will die and leave us alone.
The whole Emperor-New-Clothesness of the people around him -- people who are smart enough to know better, but who prefer to lie rather than stand up to His Heinous -- depresses me even more than having an insane, narcissistic, destructive person at the top of the government.