“I built the greatest economy in the World, the best the U.S. has ever had,” Donald Trump tweeted in June. “I am doing it again!”
Obviously, the first part of that tweet is a towering Trump lie.
Trump inherited a great economy from his predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and for a while, he managed to keep it going — until his weak and ineffective efforts to deny coronavirus into submission led to 150,000+ deaths, record job loss, and ongoing economic uncertainty as the pandemic persists.
And the second part of Trump’s tweet?
As a presidential candidate in 2015, Trump used to brag about how, in his businessman days, he had showered “a lot of money” on elected officials in both major parties to buy their influence. Then, after rigging the system like this for decades, Trump promised he alone could fix it.
Now, after choking like a dog in the face of a pandemic he still has no idea how to fight, Trump is once again promising he alone can fix something he broke.
But fixing an economy as big as America’s is not a job for a single individual — especially an individual who always puts his own interests first, his family’s interests second, and everyone else’s interests last.
In January 2009, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden inherited a truly bleak economy from the Bush Administration, they didn’t just post angry 3 AM tweets until the GDP started magically rising again. They created a plan, put together a team, and then empowered that team to carry out their plan. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Recession officially ended just six months later.
Meanwhile, at the same time that Barack Obama and Joe Biden were reviving the American economy and effectively catalyzing 75 straight months of job expansion, Donald Trump was firing game-show contestants on The Apprentice.
Ten years later, the approach to leadership that Trump honed on The Apprentice continues to define his performance as president.
On The Apprentice, two teams competed against each other, but ultimately it was every man for himself. And while each episode ostensibly showed players working hard to sell products or create…
