It’s Saturday in America, which means Donald Trump is whining on Twitter about how he and his supporters don’t get the respect they deserve.
In the tweet, which contains at least one grammatical error, the president bragged about the intelligence level of his supporters, calling them “the smartest, strongest, most hardworking and most loyal that we have seen in our countries history.”
My supporters are the smartest, strongest, most hard working and most loyal that we have seen in our countries history. It is a beautiful thing to watch as we win elections and gather support from all over the country. As we get stronger, so does our country. Best numbers ever!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2018
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Two things to clear up first: 1. It’s “country’s,” not “countries.” And 2. Hardworking*
The real sin of Trump’s latest Twitter rambling isn’t the spelling errors, though. It’s the ease with which this man tells lies about all things, big and small.
Say what you want about the minority of the country that supports this orange embarrassment, but they aren’t the smartest this country has ever seen.
We have known this from the start: Trump’s strongest support comes from the least educated pockets of America. That’s not a knock on anybody. It’s just the truth.
As FiveThirtyEight noted after the 2016 election, “Education, not income, predicted who would vote for Trump.” The most educated regions of the country voted for Hillary Clinton en masse, while the least educated areas broke largely for Trump.
No, the country isn’t seeing the “best numbers ever!”
There’s no question that the U.S. economy is in a strong position. It has been since former President Barack Obama prevented a second Great Depression and implemented policies that laid the groundwork for the growth we continue to see today.
Take a look at any chart of America’s economic growth over the past decade, and you’ll see it was well underway before Trump was even in the political arena.
Despite this Obama-fostered economic strength, Trump is claiming it’s all his doing and he’s lying when he says the economy he now oversees is the best ever.
As ABC News pointed out, “His boast of record achievements on the economy and jobs ignores the Roaring Twenties, the war-time boom in the 1940s, the 1990s expansion and other times when unemployment was lower than now, economic growth was higher than now, or brisk productivity made the U.S. the world’s economic powerhouse.”
The loyalty of Trump’s supporters isn’t something to brag about
Loyalty is often seen as a good trait. But in this case – Trump supporters standing by their president no matter what – it’s dangerous. It’s cult-like, not something to brag about.
Trump has repeatedly embarrassed the country on the world stage, waged war on American institutions at home, and he’s done it while deepening Americas’s divisions – racial and religious, in particular – and implementing policies that hurt the supporters he pledged to represent. Not to mention the unprecedented levels of corruption we are seeing from his administration.
During the campaign, Trump famously said that he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” That’s true, but it’s also frightening.
It’s particularly terrifying given how increasingly unhinged and unfit this president is, as he once again demonstrated on Saturday.
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.
