Supporters listen to U.S. President Donald Trump speak during a political rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina on Dec. 19.ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images

John Rapley is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. He is an author and academic whose books include Why Empires Fall and Twilight of the Money Gods.

Someone needs to tell Donald Trump that yelling a lie won’t make doubters believe it.

In his defensive, Scrooge-like message from the White House last week, Shouty Claus railed about the awful economy he’d inherited and how hard it’s proving to mend. Nonetheless, he boomed in staccato until he grew breathless, the economy was doing great, it was on the cusp of a take off ‘the likes of which the world has never seen,’ prices were coming down and wages were going up.

Unfortunately, according to a growing mountain of polling evidence, the folks who voted him into office are starting to doubt it. Wage growth has been slowing, prices are rising and jobs are getting harder to find. And unlike the other lies that peppered his speech, these are ones that ordinary people fact-check daily with their own eyes – on their grocery shelves, doctor’s visits and electricity bills.

It’s possible that Mr. Trump knows what he’s doing and is being clever by extolling the virtues of an economy which belies the facts. Reports from the White House press corps suggest he’s convinced that fiscal and monetary........

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