Trump Trolls Trump: Week 78

18 July, 2026

Donald denying the affordability crisis.

Welcome back to Trump Trolls Trump, the weekly reminder that the most effective response to authoritarian absurdity is not fear. It is ridicule.

We are now 544 days into Donald’s second occupation of the Oval Office. Somehow, January of 2025 already feels like several geological eras ago, and yet here we are, looking back on Week 78 of a presidency that continues to redefine incompetence in increasingly creative ways.

As it turns out, we did not need to spend two full days watching Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing to understand why he should never be Attorney General of the United States. Republican Senator John Kennedy, Foghorn Leghorn of Louisiana managed to distill the entire problem into a single question.

This is what Senator John Kennedy asked:

Are you and President Trump friends?

This is how Blanche responded:

I’m his lawyer. Was his lawyer.

That should have ended the conversation.

Todd Blanche accidentally admitted exactly what everyone already knew but what he could never publicly acknowledge. He is not an independent public servant. He is Donald’s lawyer. Or, as he awkwardly corrected himself, Donald’s former lawyer. Either way, it is an extraordinary admission from somebody seeking to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

That brings us, naturally, to Donald himself.

Donald spent part of the week in Pennsylvania attending a summit on defense and weapons production. At least, that was supposedly the reason he was there. Before long, his attention wandered toward something he clearly considers far more important than national security.

The midterm elections.

More specifically, Donald wanted voters to remember a brand-new word he believes perfectly captures the Democratic Party. Not affordability, because according to Donald, that is apparently a fake word.

This is what Donald said:

I had my first news conference the day after I took office and they said, Affordability. Affordability. That’s a fake word that they use. They cause the affordability problem. It’s called high prices. They came up with this word. They’re good at coming up with words, but we came up with a good word too. They’re Democrats. Dumb. You take the B out. Most people don’t know that dumb is a B, okay? But the U replaces the E and you have a Dumocrat. And I just don’t understand because their policy is so dumb, what they’ve done to this country and what they will do to the country. If we don’t win the midterms or win the election, everything that I’m talking about, you can just write it off.

There is a lot to unpack there.

First, the only person who apparently did not know the word “dumb” ends with the letter B is the person attempting to explain it.

Second, Donald accidentally revealed what this election is really about for him.

When he warns that everything can simply be “written off” if Republicans lose the midterms, what he is really saying is that accountability might finally catch up with him. Donald understands perfectly well what losing congressional protection could mean. It could mean investigations. It could mean consequences. It could mean that he, along with several members of his family and administration, may finally have to answer for what they have done.

That possibility appears to terrify him far more than inflation ever could.

Donald, of course, quickly moved on to another subject he understands even less than economics.

Physics.

To be fair, narrowing down the subjects Donald fails to understand has become increasingly difficult. We could spend hours discussing water pressure, shower heads, windmills supposedly murdering whales, or any number of other longstanding obsessions. This week, however, Donald returned to one of his favorites.

Magnets.

Nobody has spent more time proving they do not understand magnets than Donald Trump.

Sometimes magnets are dangerous. Sometimes they do not work. Sometimes they stop working because they get wet. Sometimes they are apparently the key to unimaginable wealth.

The rules change from sentence to sentence.

Donald: The elevators are no good, sir. They’re lifted up by magnets. So here’s my deal. I said, when Caterpillar tractor, and I watch more tractors than any human being on earth, rip earth, rip rock, right through a rock. It’s all hydraulic. So I said, when Caterpillar goes into the business of using magnets to lift up their little blades, and when they go away from hydraulic, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to do something. I’m going to start using magnets, but we don’t want to use them. So we’re not letting any... Pete, we’re not letting any more ships be built with the ridiculous... And the same thing with the magnetic elevators. We want them to be made hydraulic, which it can be hit by lightning. It can be hit by anything. When a little water touches the magnets, it doesn’t work anymore. You’re in the Atlantic Ocean with waves at a 60 feet high and the Pacific Ocean with waves at a 70 feet high. And they’re talking about magnets. It makes you want to get sick.

Personally, I would think sixty or seventy-foot waves would make most people sick long before magnets entered the conversation. I also remain completely unclear about which elevators Donald believes are suspended by magnets somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

What continues to amaze me is not simply that Donald says things like this. It is that tens of millions of people still listen to him as though any of it makes sense. There are weeks when it feels impossible for him to become more ridiculous, more uninformed, or more detached from reality.

Then he opens his mouth.

As though the first explanation were not bewildering enough, Donald somehow managed to contradict himself only moments later.

Donald: I hope you’re going to do magnets. Somebody out there, I hope you’re all brilliant people. Magnets. Do magnets. Okay. I’ll tell you how to make money. Do magnets. You’re doing a lot of great stuff. Do magnets because one thing we don’t have, but we’re getting close, but do magnets so... I hope John Gray is listening to me so he can give him a couple of bucks and go into the magnet business. I guarantee it’s going to be a success. It’s one thing we don’t, for some reason, it’s not complex, not hard.

Only Donald could spend several minutes insisting magnets are a catastrophic engineering failure before pivoting seamlessly into investment advice about the magnet industry.

Hydraulics are good.

Magnets are terrible.

Actually, magnets are the future.

Invest in magnets.

Avoid magnets.

All within the span of a single press conference.

It almost feels as though making sense has become optional inside the Trump regime.

Then again, perhaps consistency has never really been the point. Donald has spent his entire public life saying whatever serves him in the moment, regardless of whether it contradicts something he said thirty seconds earlier. Logic is irrelevant. Facts are negotiable. Reality is simply another obstacle to be ignored.

Unfortunately, that same approach extends well beyond magnets. It now shapes the propaganda ecosystem surrounding Donald, where television hosts, political allies, and administration officials spend every day asking Americans to reject what they can plainly see in favor of whatever fantasy Donald happens to be selling at that particular moment.

And that is where we turn next.

If there is one thing the Trump propaganda machine has perfected over the last decade, it is convincing people that corporations and human beings have exactly the same interests. They do not.

Nevertheless, Fox State TV devoted another segment this week to making precisely that argument. Laura Ingraham triumphantly cited a survey ranking the best states in which to do business, pointing out that many of them are governed by Republicans. She then expressed genuine confusion over another ranking showing that many of those same states were among the least desirable places to live. Apparently she could not reconcile how a state could simultaneously be attractive to large corporations while failing the people who actually live there. This is, of course, only confusing if you deliberately ignore how the modern economy works.

Laura Ingraham: Now check out this recent list. Six hundred fifty CEOs were polled and they rated the best states in which to do business. The top ten, including Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina are Republican. They’re run by Republicans except Virginia, which is at number ten and North Carolina, kind of a purple state at number five. So money and people, resources are pouring into red states. So how do the socialists brush this off? Well, they do so either by ignoring it or distorting the data or with a little help from their friends. This CNBC report just comes out. They listed the ten worst states to live in for 2026. All the states on this list, okay, Trump won. Every state except Georgia in 2020. And the list included four of the top ten states for business. How does that make any sense?

The answer is remarkably straightforward. Businesses are not people, despite what the Supreme Court has spent years trying to convince us otherwise. Corporations evaluate states according to tax structures, labor costs, regulations, and how cheaply they can maximize profits. Human beings tend to care about somewhat different things.

They like functioning public schools, affordable healthcare, clean air and water, decent wages, safe communities, and the ability to build a stable life. Those priorities do not always overlap. A state can become extraordinarily profitable for corporations while becoming increasingly difficult for working families. In fact, that is often exactly how those corporations become so profitable in the first place. Workers produce the wealth while executives and shareholders collect the rewards. People are left paying higher costs for housing, education, and healthcare while being told they should celebrate because somebody else’s quarterly earnings look terrific. Oddly enough, most people do not enjoy being exploited, even if the corporations doing the exploiting happen to love the business climate.

Personally, I have always thought there was a fairly simple metric for determining whether a place has become politically unlivable. If Donald continues winning elections there, chances are something has gone terribly wrong. Fortunately, Fox State TV is no longer even pretending to understand that distinction. They simply conflate corporate prosperity with public well-being and hope viewers never notice that those are two entirely different conversations.

If Fox occasionally asks its audience to suspend disbelief, Newsmax asks them to abandon reality altogether. This week the network enthusiastically promoted Donald’s latest voter suppression effort, misleadingly titled the SAVE Act, by comparing voting in a constitutional democracy to shopping at Costco.

I wish I were exaggerating. Representative Ryan Zinke apparently decided that the best way to defend restricting voting rights was to point out that warehouse clubs require membership cards. Somewhere along the way, constitutional rights became interchangeable with bulk paper towels from Costco.

Representative Ryan Zinke: The bill before them, the SAVE America Act, demands that you should have an ID to vote and you should be a US citizen. You need to have an ID to go into Costco. But this is exactly what we face with the Democrats.

I actually like Costco. It is one of the few large corporations that has continued supporting diversity initiatives while paying employees a living wage. None of that, however, has anything whatsoever to do with voting. I have never walked into a polling place and been asked to present my Costco membership card. Nor have I ever been informed that buying mayonnaise in industrial quantities somehow establishes my citizenship. The comparison collapses almost immediately because it was never intended to withstand scrutiny. Like so many of the Trump regime’s arguments, it exists solely to distract from the actual objective. This legislation has never been about election security. It has always been about making voting more difficult for the people Donald assumes are less likely to support him. Dressing that effort up in the language of “common sense” does not change what it is.

Of course, none of this exists in isolation. It is simply the latest chapter in Donald’s endless campaign to relitigate the 2020 election, a contest he lost by nearly eight million votes despite spending years insisting otherwise. Every recount confirmed the outcome. Every serious investigation confirmed the outcome. Court after court rejected the conspiracy theories because there was never credible evidence that widespread fraud changed the election. Donald lost. That simple reality has become the one fact he appears constitutionally incapable of accepting. So this week he tried again, delivering yet another nationally televised speech insisting that newly declassified documents proved China interfered in the election on behalf of Joe Biden. Thankfully, several major television networks recognized exactly what they were being offered and declined to broadcast another uninterrupted stream of misinformation.

By the following morning, the White House communications team had already begun defending Donald’s newest fiction. Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson reached for what may be one of the strangest analogies I have heard in quite some time. Apparently unlimited pasta at Olive Garden now provides an important constitutional lesson about American democracy.

Jackson: I saw a tweet yesterday from Olive Garden of all places that in order to take advantage of their never-ending pasta pass, you have to show voter ID. And I thought, that’s weird. Olive Garden takes pasta pass security more seriously than Democrats are taking election security. So yes, President Trump is going to keep pushing this and it just shows how absurd the Democrats are that they can’t even get behind common sense policies that even somewhere like Olive Garden can say, Hey, we need this for us too.

I honestly do not know where to begin. Voting as a registered American citizen is not remotely comparable to qualifying for discounted fettuccine. Constitutional rights are not loyalty programs. The right to participate in American democracy is not contingent upon satisfying the same requirements as an unlimited pasta promotion. The absurdity of the comparison is almost beside the point because it serves the same purpose as every other analogy this administration invents. It shifts attention away from the fact that Donald is still attempting to convince Americans that the 2020 election was stolen despite the overwhelming evidence demonstrating otherwise.

The irony is that Donald’s own administration continues undermining his claims. Even the documents he released fail to support the conspiracy theory he desperately wants Americans to believe.

More importantly, they continue reinforcing what investigators concluded years ago: Russia interfered in the 2020 election in ways intended to benefit Donald Trump. That finding has not changed simply because Donald wishes it would. Evidence has an irritating tendency to survive propaganda campaigns, no matter how often they are repeated. Reality is stubborn that way.

That is ultimately why these performances have become so predictable. Every week there is another manufactured crisis, another conspiracy theory, another bizarre analogy, another desperate attempt to convince Americans not to believe their own eyes. Donald cannot defend his record, so he invents alternate realities. His allies cannot explain away his failures, so they compare constitutional rights to Costco memberships and Olive Garden promotions. The details change from week to week, but the strategy never does. Distract people long enough and perhaps they will forget what actually happened.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Donald keeps making the same mistake. He never stops talking. Every press conference, every rally, every interview, every rambling explanation about magnets, elections, or whatever new obsession captures his attention provides another reminder that beneath all the manufactured spectacle is simply a profoundly insecure man who cannot keep his own stories straight. These people desperately want to be feared. They want to project strength, inevitability, and power. Strip away the propaganda, however, and what remains is something considerably less impressive.

There is nothing intimidating about a movement that compares voting to buying bulk groceries, treats unlimited pasta as constitutional scholarship, and cannot decide whether magnets are destroying civilization or creating unimaginable wealth. There is only absurdity. And absurdity deserves exactly what we continue to give it. Not reverence. Not intimidation.

Ridicule.