This is the definition of decline
Republicans are out of touch – it’s a statement that’s been true for longer than I’ve been alive, regardless of how desperately these clowns try to dress themselves up as “the party of the working class” when they try chasing votes. Donald Trump has had an ability to get his supporters to laugh with him and be in on the joke when he does inane stunts like cosplay as a McDonald’s employee or ride around in a garbage truck, which sets him apart from embarrassing mishaps like Mitt Romney posing with fast food workers or George Bush appearing to not understand how a supermarket scanner worked.
Trump isn’t totally immune, however – which was one thing he proved on Tuesday. It was bad enough he spent the weekend playing golf while waiting for the markets to panic. He decided to take things a step more insane, however, when he hosted an event for the coal industry at the White House, regurgitating his decade-old claims about clean coal and ending the Biden “war on coal” policies. He spoke so obsessively about coal workers in 2016 that it even led me to question what year the election was happening – as the industry has been steadily declining over the past 18 years, vastly outpaced by natural gas.
He’s acting as if the only fix here is to completely ignore the problem while hoping other countries come to the table quickly with trade deals and give him a win. In other words, he’s completely disconnected from how things work and he’s given up on even trying to pretend that everything will go his way on the country’s latest pointless trade war.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making