How Trump Can Actually Believe We’re in a Golden Age

There is a political cost to living inside a bubble, which is only intensified by surrounding oneself with bubbleheads. It’s increasingly clear that Donald Trump has done both.

“Truly, I think we’re in the golden age right now,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday when asked about the current state of the American economy. “You’re going to see a golden age like we’ve never seen before.”

It takes a certain talent—almost, a certain genius—to make assertions so completely contrary to Americans’ own assessments of the economy. Last week’s Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll, which was no outlier, showed that Trump’s approval rating on the economy stood at an anemic 34 percent, and on the cost of living in particular, at a pitiful 23 percent.

The public seems to know, and care, that the inflation rate last month reached 3.8 percent, that gas prices were continuing to spike, and that Trump’s still largely unexplained war on Iran was responsible for the soaring cost of gas. But Trump appears as oblivious to and dismissive of public opinion as he is to basic economic reality. Asked at that same Tuesday meeting with reporters if Americans’ current financial difficulties were prompting him to reach a settlement that would wrap up the Iran war, he answered, “Not even a little bit.”

If this were a one-off—a careless answer that belied what was otherwise his concern for public opinion—it would merely be a gaffe of potentially monumental importance for, say, the upcoming midterm elections. But it’s actually part of a pattern of affronting the American public on a range of issues, so much so that it has substantially eroded his support among non-MAGA Republicans and even threatens to weaken at least a smidgen of his support within his MAGA base. More amazing still, the Republican Congress persists in backing and bolstering the most mentally addled of his obsessions. As I mentioned last week, Senate Republicans have decided to augment the corporate contributions Trump has garnered to build his ballroom with $1 billion in taxpayers’ money as well, though public support for Trump’s obsession with monument creation, in a time of widespread economic anxiety and distress, is low and waning. And yet, Trump presses on: As The Washington Post reported earlier today, Trump has now eliminated the bidding process for prospective contractors so that one particular contractor can begin erecting the Arc de Trump at the end of Memorial Bridge by July 4th.

There’s also news today that Trump’s lawyers are in discussions (not negotiations, as Trump controls the discussants on both sides of the table) with the Justice Department on his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for one of its contractors (currently serving a prison sentence) having leaked some of Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times in 2020. (Until Trump came along, presidential candidates, not to mention presidents themselves, had routinely been releasing their tax returns to the public for decades.) The Times now reports that those discussants are considering having the IRS agree to cease any further audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses. Whether this means ending current audits of past tax filings, or any future audits of future tax filings, and whether this means ending the audits in lieu of the government paying Trump, or ending the audits in addition to the government paying Trump, is entirely unclear. Either way, Trump clearly gains, personally, at the public’s expense.

And either way, the kind of pervasive public mistrust about the government’s suppression of the Epstein files will only be augmented by the government’s suppression of whatever it has about Trump’s finances. Trump’s quest for a personal get-out-of-audit-free card can only deepen suspicions that he has a great deal to hide—as just a cursory list of the deals and scams he and his sons have pulled off since returning to the White House plainly indicates. (Trump, in the words of my friend Bill Curry, “is a one-man Gilded Age.”)

It would appear that Trump’s mental landscape has been shrinking. His chief financial supporters now are drawn from Silicon Valley and Wall Street centimillionaires and billionaires, whose wealth continues to rise even as the bottom 85 percent of Americans see their income and wealth either stagnating or declining. Those techies and bankers tell Trump he’s doing great, partly because it is indeed a golden age for them personally, and partly because they fear his retribution if they tell him otherwise. As for Trump’s own staffers and appointees, they know that bringing him bad news or contradicting the rosy scenarios he’s conjured from thin air would be a bad career move. As for Republican elected officials, having just seen Indiana state legislators defeated in Republican primaries for having opposed Trump’s push to get Indiana redistricted, they still cower in fear of Trump’s wrath.

So who among all the people Trump encounters—all the above—tells him that maybe it’s not really a golden age?

That they all adhere to the same misperceptions isn’t simply the result of a vindictive Trump dominating their landscape. All the above, including Trump himself, are daily and hourly misinformed about actually existing reality by right-wing media, beginning with Fox News and extending to the nethermost reaches of social media.

More than once, Rupert Murdoch calculated he could make a ton of money on ventures like the New York Post and Fox News. He failed to calculate that such ventures could in time create publics and even presidents (well, at least one president) who could be so delusional that they could no longer comprehend when a course of action wouldn’t be widely welcomed, or would even be self-destructive. Take a bow, Rupert: In Donald Trump and his minions, you’ve done just that.