There is a familiar pathology in political decline: leaders begin narrating reality rather than engaging it. Richard Nixon reached that stage when he started invoking “the President” as a third-party authority, a rhetorical trick meant to confer grandeur and inevitability on decisions that were, in truth, unraveling. Last week in Iowa, Donald Trump dipped into the same well. “Just after one year of President Trump, our economy is booming,” he announced. “Incomes are rising. Investment is soaring. Inflation has been defeated.”

The problem is not tone. It is the truth. Nearly every claim collapses under modest scrutiny.

This is not a partisan complaint, nor the reflexive anti-Trump posture that has dulled public debate since 2016. It is a narrower, more serious concern: a president who repeatedly misrepresents economic reality corrodes public trust, and democracies do not survive long once citizens are instructed to disbelieve their own balance sheets. When a leader insists the emperor is fully dressed while everyone else can see bare skin, someone has to say it out loud.

Start with Trump’s self-declared status as the “AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT,” rendered in capital letters, as if typography could substitute for evidence. Within days, he dismissed affordability concerns themselves as a “hoax” and a “Democrat scam.” That is not strategic ambiguity; it is a contradiction in a governing style. One suspects the diagnosis was reached not through data but through dinner conversations at Mar-a-Lago, where economic hardship is understood as the inconvenience of choosing between private jets.

Yes, gasoline prices are lower than last year. Trump claims credit, though the link between presidential willpower and global crude markets is tenuous at best. Oil prices move on geopolitics, OPEC........

© Blitz