Trump always wins at golf, even when he doesn’t play (story here).
He’s also a big talker, and his talk invariably is about himself. He’s always the biggest, best, and brightest, a “very stable genius.”
At his Washington, D.C., rally on January 19, 2025, a consolation event for his supporters who book flights and hotel rooms only to discover there’s no room for them at his indoor inauguration the next day, Trump declared, “This is the greatest political movement in American history, and 75 days ago, we achieved the most epic political victory our country has ever seen.” (Read story here.)
It isn’t. The abolition movement was. The civil rights movement was the second greatest. I would put women’s suffrage third. By any rational measure, MAGA is far down the list of importance, and while it’s influential, few thinking people would use the word “great” to describe MAGA.
He also said, “By the time the sun sets tomorrow evening, the invasion of our borders will have come to a halt, and all the illegal border trespassers will in some form or another, be on their way back home.” (Read story here.)
This one is easy enough to fact-check; all we have to do is wait for Tuesday sunset. If anybody is still crossing the border, or any of the 11 million illegals in the U.S. aren’t enroute to Mexico, he’s full of it.
The 2024 election was epic, I guess in some sense, e.g. as in “epic disaster.” In the sense Trump meant, it’s nothing of the kind. Hardly a blowout, it was one of American history’s closest elections, with Trump again failing to win a popular vote majority, although he did get a narrow plurality this time, but against an improvised opponent who ran an improvised campaign.
Here are some illustrative numbers:
- In 1932, FDR won 57.4% of the popular vote against an incumbent president, and was re-elected in 1936 with 60.8% of the votes
- In 1964, LBJ won with 61.1% of the popular vote
- In 1984, Reagan was re-elected with 58.8% of the popular vote
Trump, by contrast, lost the popular vote in 2016, was defeated for re-election in 2020, and won in 2024 with 49.8% of the popular vote. He re-enters the White House with the lowest initial approval rating of all time (see story here), and it’s not likely to improve.
Trump isn’t the superman he pretends to be. He’s a banal demagogue who dragged American politics into the gutter, and that’s how history will remember him, after all has been said and done.
