In the wake of President Donald Trump’s national address last week, in which he once again promoted his election denial “Big Lie,” one prominent conservative is raising the issue of Trump’s “Big Myth.”
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“As we enter a news cycle in which the Qatari’s wingéd bribe is grounded, the Pentagon is running out of cash and the term ‘explosive diarrhea’ has entered the conversation,” wrote longtime conservative media figure Charlie Sykes on Tuesday, ”a quick reminder: Trump’s Big Lie was about the 2020 election, but his Big Myth was about his competence — the delusion that the man who bankrupted a casino, ran Trump University into the ground and presided over the serial botches of Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, the Trump Shuttle, Trump Mortgage, the Tour de Trump, Trump the Game and Trump Magazine, actually knew how to run anything more complicated than a bottle of spray tan.”
While there has been much discussion of the president’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 race was rigged against him, which he has leveraged to draw support from the conspiracy theory-hungry MAGA movement and justify his efforts to “federalize” elections, Sykes notes the importance of the “Big Myth” that got him elected in the first place. Voters bought Trump’s claim that his background as a shrewd businessman made him uniquely capable of fixing the economy, which polls showed they overwhelmingly declared their top priority.
But Sykes argues that Trump’s actual business track record doesn’t hold up to the “Big Myth” of his competence. Before entering office, Trump presided over decades of failed business endeavors run using shady practices, like failing to pay hundreds of contractors he hired. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Skyes suggests he’s have seen the results of believing the president’s “Big Myth.” Inflation is “wiping out” what sluggish wage gains there are. The floor has fallen out on labor force participation, with massive manufacturing job losses. And a string of other disasters caused by mismanagement have plagued the administration.
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Trump lost many of his MAGA supporters with the bungled handling of the Epstein file release. His war and negotiations with Iran have been decried as botched at best and a surrender at worst, making the war historically unpopular as Trump keeps it going. And his attempt to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary was characterized by disasters and will probably be best remembered for the Reflecting Pool ordeal.
“It’s only gotten worse,” writes Sykes, “as he purges experts and grownups from his government, and surrounds himself with toadies, chodes and zealots who tell him what he wants to hear and never, ever suggest that the emperor’s shortcomings are dangling in the breeze.”
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