By Stephen Macaulay

In my neighborhood in a suburb of Detroit, the number of Trump lawn signs vastly outnumber those for Harris. The signs are graphically consistent, with the dominating factor being the names Trump and Vance. 

The differences are found just below the top of the signs.

Sometimes it says “Promises Kept.” This is a curious statement. Near as I can tell, the only promise Trump kept was to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade. What is somewhat ironic about that situation is the pertinent justices, when questioned in the Senate about their positions regarding Roe v. Wade, cited stare decisis, saying that this is settled law. Then they, in effect, broke their implicit promises and treated it as though it wasn’t.

One of the things often noted today is that there were no wars during Trump’s term in office thanks to his mastery of international affairs, which included siding with Vladmir Putin and sending and receiving love letters to and from Kim Jong Un. Presumably that lack of a war is meant to underscore that he would “keep us safe.”

But a promise to keep us safe seems to have been shattered given that in 2020 350,821 Americans died from COVID — something that he repeatedly assured the public would “just go away.”

To be sure Trump didn’t cause COVID. But his administration’s efforts to mitigate the effects of the virus was something short of robust.

And to put that number of COVID deaths into context, 58,220 Americans died in the war in Vietnam, or 17% of the number of Americans who died from COVID during Trump’s last year in office.

Which lead to another of the slogans on the signs, the now-familiar “Make America Great Again.”

Presumably this now implies that things were “Great” during his administration. As the deaths from COVID indicate, perhaps not so much.

When Barrack Obama took office in January 2009 the U.S. unemployment rate was 7.8%. As you may recall, the economy in 2008-2009 was in horrible shape.

When Obama left office in 2017 the unemployment rate dropped to 4.7%.

So when Trump came into office he started with a 4.7% unemployment rate.

He left with a 6.4% unemployment rate.

What’s “Great” about that? Well, I guess you could say the 14.8% unemployment rate that occurred in April 2020, while he was still in office, makes that 6.4% really, really good.

And speaking of Obama, about whom Trump has nothing good to say, the average GDP growth rate during his time in office was 2.3%. He inherited the economic conditions from the Great Recession, so that’s at least positive.

One would imagine that under Trump the Gross Domestic Product soared.

Nope. 2.3%.

So how “Great” did Trump make America?

And finally, there’s this slogan on a Trump sign:

“No More Bullshit!”

This, I must confess, is a mystery to me. The Biden-Harris Administration has done plenty of things that can be vigorously criticized, but one thing that seems evident about the both of them is that they are anything but bullshit artists.

So while on that subject I submit this from a speech Trump gave on September 27 at Macomb County Community College in Warren, Michigan.

He opened by talking about voting. “I will, once and for all secure our elections.” There is little evidence that 2020 was unsecure, so arguably he secured that election, although he has spent the past many years arguing against that.

The next sentence, “We’re going to go to paper ballots.” Odd that there are supporters like Peter Thiel, who has made a fortune on digital technologies.

Then Trump said, “We’re going to have same-day voting, voting ID.”

But within a matter of seconds he told the crowd, “Whether you vote earlier, absentee, by mail, or in person, we are going to protect the vote.”

Didn’t he just say “We’re going to have same-day voting”? And didn’t he vote early this past August in Florida?

But people vote about the economy more than election methodologies.

Trump said:

“We had the greatest economy in the history of our country and we were just getting started actually. But we had the greatest economy, the greatest employment for everybody, men, women, African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, everybody, young people with a diploma, without a diploma.”

Well, as we have seen, to call the economy or the employment rate “the greatest” is quite a stretch. What’s more, the current unemployment rate is 4.1%, which is better than the 6.4% he left with.

Now, Trump claimed that illegal immigrants are taking the jobs of Americans. So, of course, when the issue is immigration, he has to talk about the Wall.

Trump:

“We built more wall than I said I was going to build. And then we had 200 miles of wall ready to go. It was all fabricated, all made to the highest specifications of Border Patrol and ICE, and it was all set. And then we got more votes than any sitting president has ever gotten by far. And they say we lost the election, so let’s leave it at this. You know what? We have one coming up in 39 days, so that’ll be a wonderful replacement. 

Wonderful replacement.”

This one is really chock full of, well, bullshit.

During the 2016 campaign Trump said he’d build 1,000 miles of wall. Then he ratcheted that back to 450 miles of wall. Then when he left office U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed there were 80 miles of new wall built. There were 452 miles in total, so that means 372 miles of replacement, reconstruction and secondary wall.

Mexico paid for none of it.

And amusingly enough, during the Obama administration there were 299 miles of vehicle barriers and 350 miles of pedestrian fencing built.

Then there was the clever use of a modifier in his statement regarding the number of votes he received as a sitting president.

Obama was the last sitting president who ran for reelection prior to Trump. 

In terms of votes, Obama received 65,915,795 votes in 2012 compared with Trump’s 74,223,234 in 2020.

However, Obama’s number is 51.06% of the total votes cast in ’12 while Trump’s number is 46.8% of the total popular votes cast in ‘20.

So while, yes, Trump got more popular votes than Obama did, he got fewer votes on a percentage basis.

And then there’s the fact that Joe Biden received 81,282,632 votes, or 51.3% of the popular vote, which is even better than Obama’s 51.06% and significantly better than Trump’s 46.8%.

Final example: China. While Trump has called Xi Jinping a “brilliant man,” China is as much of a boogie man as illegal aliens.

Trump told the assembled in Warren:

“I charged hundreds of billions of dollars to China in tariffs and taxes. No other president has ever charged China 10 cents, and we’ve taken hundreds of billions of dollars.”

As the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) wrote in July 2022, “Two years ago, President Donald Trump signed what he called a ‘historic trade deal’ with China that committed China to purchase $200 billion of additional US exports before December 31, 2021. Today the only undisputed ‘historical’ aspect of that agreement is its failure.”

Huh? Isn’t he the consummate dealmaker?

PIIE continues, “In the end, China bought only 58% of the US exports it had committed to purchase under the agreement, not even enough to reach its import levels from before the trade war. Put differently, China bought none of the additional $200 billion of exports Trump’s deal promised.”

Where do those “hundreds of billions of dollars” come from? Well, a non-trivial amount is from the pockets of people like those in Warren, every time they shop for goods at the local Walmart that are made in China. They are paying the price of tariffs.

The truth is hard. Bullshit is easy.

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings, writing primarily for the right column.