LIAR-IN-CHIEF DONALD TRUMP
This article first appeared on RobertReich.org.
1. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it.
Then he bombed Syria.
2. He said he’d build a wall along the border with Mexico. You bought it.
Now his secretary of homeland security says, “It’s unlikely that we will build a wall.”
3. He said he’d clean up the Washington swamp. You bought it.
Then he brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses.
4. He said he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “wonderful.” You bought it.
Then he didn’t.
5. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it.
Then he created the most chaotic, dysfunctional, backstabbing White House in modern history, in which no one is in charge.
Related: Robert Reich: What the Kushner/Bannon brawl is all about
6. He said he’d release his tax returns, eventually. You bought it.
He hasn’t, and says he never will.
7. He said he’d divest himself from his financial empire, to avoid any conflicts of interest. You bought it.
He remains heavily involved in his businesses, makes money off of foreign dignitaries staying at his Washington hotel, gets China to give the Trump brand trademark and copyright rights, manipulates the stock market on a daily basis and has more conflicts of interest than can even be counted.
8. He said Hillary Clinton was in the pockets of Goldman Sachs and would do whatever they said. You bought it.
Then he put half a dozen Goldman Sachs executives in positions of power in his administration.
Related: Robert Reich: Where are the grown-ups in the White House?
9. He said he’d surround himself with all the best and smartest people. You bought it. Then he put Betsy DeVos, an opponent of public education, in charge of education; Jeff Sessions, an opponent of the Voting Rights Act, in charge of voting rights; Ben Carson, an opponent of the Fair Housing Act, in charge of fair housing; Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Russian quisling Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.
10. He said he’d faithfully execute the law. You bought it.
Then he said his predecessor, Barack Obama, spied on him, without any evidence of Obama ever doing so, in order to divert attention from the FBI’s investigation into collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives to win the election.
Related: Robert Reich: Trump’s smokescreen cannot hide the Russian link
11. He said he knew more about strategy and terrorism than the generals did. You bought it.
Then he green-lighted a disastrous raid in Yemen, even though his generals said it would be a terrible idea. This raid resulted in the deaths of a Navy SEAL, an 8-year-old American girl and numerous civilians. The actual target of the raid escaped, and no useful intel was gained
12. He called Obama “the vacationer-in-chief” and accused him of playing more rounds of golf than Tiger Woods. He promised to never be the kind of president who took cushy vacations on the taxpayer’s dime, not when there was so much important work to be done. You bought it.
He has by now spent more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama did in the first three years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.
Related: Robert Reich: Four (or five) grounds for impeaching Trump
13. He called CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times “fake news” and said they were his enemy. You bought it.
Now he gets his information from Fox News, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit and InfoWars.
More to come.
Robert Reich is the chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, and Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective Cabinet secretaries of the 20th century. He has written 14 books, including the best-sellers Aftershock, The Work of Nations and Beyond Outrage and, most recently, Saving Capitalism. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-creator of the award-winning documentary Inequality for All.
