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The inaugural speech was dark, ominous, painting a picture of a disintegrated America. The inaugural speech was also a lie. All of it. This should not come as a surprise; if there has been any consistency about Trump, it’s been that he lies, constantly. It’s in Trump’s interest to paint such a picture, and it’s also necessary for his plans for fascism – reality is not his friend. Fortunately for us, Think Progress has a nice point by point refutation of all Trump’s inaugural claims.
During his inaugural address on Friday, President Donald Trump painted a bleak picture of an America beset by violent crime, drugs, and lack of education. He presented himself as a savior who will “fight for you with every breath in my body and I will never ever let you down.”
[…]
But as was the case during Trump’s similarly dire Republican National Convention speech, many of the claims he used to paint his picture of “American carnage” were false. In other instances, Trump referred to real problems, but didn’t mention that he has no plan to fix them.
[…]
Here are some of the ways in which Trump tried to deceive the American people about the state of their country during his first speech as president.
Jobs
“Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed… We will bring back our jobs,” Trump said.
But during the Obama years, the economy has actually been adding jobs each month at a steady pace: it added jobs for 75 straight months, the longest streak on record. There were 2,157,000 more jobs added over the last year, and 11,250,000 created over Obama’s presidency.
Head over to Think Progress for the full reality check.
This is another area we need to be careful not to fall into the conservative trap of defending the status quo. Yes, Trump is lying about the number of jobs and that number did increase under Obama. But we can’t just defend the status quo otherwise we appear, again, to be conservatives who don’t want change.
The problem isn’t the number of jobs, but the compensation for the available jobs. Low pay and no benefits (such as medical coverage). The solution isn’t more crappy jobs. The solution is better pay with decent benefits and severing health care from employment.
The problem is that, since the 1970’s in America, real income for the lower and middle class has been flat or even dropped while the rich have taken more and more of the gains in productivity. Taxes for the lower and middle class have increased (mainly due to regressive tax systems such as sales taxes going up so much) while the taxes on the wealthy have plummeted.
Obama, unfortunately, was yet another neo-liberal, austerity-driven leader, and Clinton would have been even more so. We need to acknowledge that while deriding Trump lies and lack of solutions. Again, even if Trump could delver on his promise of more jobs, more crappy jobs isn’t the solution. That’s a lesson we learned under Obama.
We are the progressives. We are the ones who push for change (for the better) while the conservatives work to maintain the status quo. They have trapped far too many of us into defending the status quo and taken up a false progressive mantle. Don’t fall for the trap. Listen carefully, and point out the shortcomings of their plans, but also push hard for the true progressive solutions rather than just defend the status quo.