During his interview with Fox News hack Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, Donald Trump completely abandoned his campaign-season rhetoric, saying that America is no longer the hellscape that it was just two months ago, before he took office.
Instead, the president said America is doing “really well” and even cited a man he saw on Fox & Friends who called him “the greatest president ever.”
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Trump said:
The country is doing, right now, really well. The level of optimism is up, highest it’s been in 15 years. You see the kind of numbers coming out. It’s amazing, the enthusiasm. I saw this morning on Fox & Friends … They had a man who was saying, “Trump is the greatest president ever, and there will never be one like him.” Now, the thing is, I’ve only been there for, like, 50 days, but he was very enthusiastic … We’re just starting, we’re just starting.
First and foremost, it’s remarkable to hear this president talk about how “well” the country is doing now. After all, this is the same guy who stumbled around the country for more than a year painting a nightmarish picture of the U.S., saying the American dream is dead and falsely telling voters that crime is as bad as it’s ever been.
After less than two months in the White House, Trump is now claiming those problems no longer exist. Instead, the only emotion that should be felt is optimism, and he was able to make it all possible.
To justify how great things are now that he’s been president for “like 50 days,” Trump referred to “the numbers coming out,” which we can assume are the jobs numbers that he bragged about last week on Twitter.
Great news. We are only just beginning. Together, we are going to #MAGA! https://t.co/BSp685Q9Qf pic.twitter.com/K7yeBZsf6r
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2017
The only problem with this is that when the Bureau of Labor statistics released the same, consistently positive jobs reports under President Obama, Trump said they were made up, phony, fake. Now he’s using them to justify how good a job he’s doing, even though he hasn’t signed a single, substantive piece of legislation that has any meaningful impact on job creation.
This is before we even get to the part of the interview when Trump braggingly talked about the man he saw on Fox News call him “the greatest president ever.”
As the White House becomes increasingly paralyzed by scandal and incompetence, choosing to use valuable time to peddle conspiracy theories and implement unconstitutional executive orders, it can safely be said that the ship has already sailed on any chance for Trump to even be near a list of great presidents.
There is one part of Trump’s remark that was correct, though. When he quoted a man saying there will never be another president like him, he couldn’t have been more correct. Once Trump leaves the White House in 2020, there will never be an occupant of this office quite like him.
For that, all Americans can be thankful.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
