If nothing else works, brag
“We had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College.”
President-elect Donald J. Trump in a Tweet on December 11, 2016
The President of the United States must certainly suffer from serious shoulder problems.
He pats himself on the back with such frequency and ferocity that I wonder if he’s under the watchful eye of a presidential chiropractor.
That quote above, as false as it was, was just one example of how he’s in constant need of congratulating himself – and in some cases for things he never did.
Truth is he didn’t win the presidency by a “massive landslide.”
In fact, he was even called on that during a February news conference.
“I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan,” he told reporters.
He’d claimed he got 306 Electoral College votes, which, isn’t true. He only got 304.
But one reporter reminded him that Barack Obama won in 2008 with 365 electoral votes.
That revealed just how fast Mr. Trump can think (and brag) on his feet.
Since Obama was a Democrat, Trump said, he’d only been referring to Republican presidential candidates.
That wasn’t enough either, since George H.W. Bush got 426 electoral votes when he won in 1992.
Trapped in a whirlwind of truth swirling around him, Trump had no alternative but to claim, “”Well, no I was told — I was given that information.”
Who gave him that information? Did he read it on a billboard? Did it come to him in a dream?
Who knows.
What we do know is that despite him ceasing to blurt out that phony claim about his “massive landslide,” he continues to brag about his “big” victory.
In fact, Slate.com keeps a running tally of Trump’s victory brags.
Since his inauguration day, he’s mentioned it 36 times. That’s one mention every six days.
Slate even keeps a running clock about the last day, hour and minute since his last victory brag.
And when he isn’t offering unsolicited boasts about how he beat Hillary Clinton, he’s busily patting himself on the back about the latest economic news in ways that he might pull his arm clear out of its socket.
“Excellent Jobs Numbers just released – and I have only just begun. Many job stifling regulations continue to fall. Movement back to USA!” he tweeted on Aug. 4th.
Even the Republican National Committee got into the act by calling the 1 million new jobs under Trump “unprecedented.”
But Trump and the RNC should have taken a look at the number of jobs added from February to July this year (1.07 million), and compared it to the number of jobs that were added during the same time period in 2016 under Obama (1.24 million), before engaging in such hyperbole.
Back in July, Trump’s (supposed) re-election campaign claimed that Trump was, indeed, beginning to “Make America Great Again,” when it was announced that 209,000 jobs were added to the economy.
That’s a lot fewer than the 291,000 jobs that were added in July 2016, when Trump and his fellow Republicans were calling those numbers “anemic.”
One of Trump’s favorite boasts during his presidential run was, “I know how to make deals.”
So far, he’s shown none of that.
He couldn’t even negotiate with members of his own party to figure out a way to get his promised “repeal” and “replace” of Obamacare.
Nor, has he been able to get Mexico to pay for that southern border wall.
He’s even been outed as somebody who not only didn’t make a deal with Mexican President Pe帽a Nieto, that newly released transcript of their January phone call revealed Trump as somebody who is more willing to grovel.
“If you are going to say that Mexico is not going to pay for the wall, then I do not want to meet with you guys anymore because I cannot live with that,” he told Nieto.
Think of that.
The leader of the free world pleading not be to be revealed as charlatan.
That’s nothing to brag about.
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net