Just how much 2024 GOP platform is based on lies?

September 14, 2024 8:35 AM

@HidingInPrivate's video "How the GOP Lies to Us: The Trump Economy" fact checks GOP claims in the 2024 platform, and found it with holes big enough you can probably drive a Star Destroyer through... Some examples to follow:

* Platform claimed Trump's term spurred "historic economic growth, job creation, and resurgence in American manufacturing". Would it surprise you that NONE of that was true?

* GDP during Trump admin was +2.24%, +2.95%, +2.29%, -2.77%, which are virtually the SAME numbers as during the Obama admin.

* Same with job creation, and that's NOT blaming COVID job loss on Trump either. Remember, unemployment was over 8% when Trump left office (and he didn't want to go either!)

* There was no resurgence of manufacturing either. It's been flickering between +2% and -2% for multiple administrations, except during 2020 when it hit -9%.

* It was Trump that killed the bipartisan border control bill, so he can keep it a talking point during the election. Some GOP reps and senators wanted to sign, but was told either by Trump or Trump-associated "influencers" that if you become a collaborator your GOP political career will be over.

* The often-GOP-repeated "8 million illegals have crossed the border" was total bunk. They were citing DHS arrest records, which would have counted multiple attempts by same person, but also counts people who have been detained in border "camps" awaiting processing by immigration court (legally, they're NOT in the US, but in limbo).

And I've barely covered HALF of the fact checks. Unfortunately, there's no written version of this video that I can find, so I do encourage you to watch it.

posted by kschang (9 comments total)

I don't see why we have to engage with this bullshit. We've already had 4 years of Trump, and that ended with his fans rioting and shitting all over the capitol on 1/6. Dealing with their lies just amplifies what they want to bullshit about, like how many Haitians in Illinois are eating cats etc.

Appointing the justices that finally killed Roe vs Wade plus all the Federalist Society crooks like Cannon appointed 2017-2021. Off-the-record face-to-face talks with Putin, the punk in charge of North Korea, who knows what else was going on.

Basically not a single decent GOP person who served in that admin is supporting his election now.

2018 tax cuts that eviscerated receipts; it's 11% now, should be 2 - 3X that.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1tKaF is real corporate tax burden (blue).

The red dashed line is 33% of corporate profits, the tax rate of the 1960s.
The green line is 25%, the tax rate of the 1990s.

This graph is showing corporations should be paying $800B/yr more than they are, that would greatly help close the deficit. (Of course, lowering after-tax profits 25% would knock the stock market back to 2023 levels, and nobody wants that...)

We also need to talk about Social Security, improving PPACA, getting this goddamn war in Ukraine over the best we can, etc. The GOP had government 2017-2018, all they did was cut taxes on themselves and try to end PPACA a dozen times. Golf claps.
posted by torokunai at 9:24 AM on September 14 [16 favorites]

So essentially all of it?

This is my surprised face...
posted by Windopaene at 9:54 AM on September 14 [4 favorites]

It was Trump that killed the bipartisan border control bill, so he can keep it a talking point during the election. Some GOP reps and senators wanted to sign, but was told either by Trump or Trump-associated "influencers" that if you become a collaborator your GOP political career will be over.

This recalls one of the more revealing things Trump said in the debate (emphasis mine):

Why are we allowing these millions of people to come through on the southern border? How come she's not doing -- and I'll tell you what I would do. And I would be very proud to do it. I would say we would both leave this debate right now, I'd like to see her go down to Washington, D.C. during this debate 'cause we're wasting a lot of time. Go down to -- because she's been so bad, it's so ridiculous. Go down to Washington, D.C. And let her sign a bill to close up the border. Because they have the right to do it. They don't need bills. They have the right to do it. The President of the United States, you'll get him out of bed. You'll wake him up at 4:00 in the afternoon, you'll say come on. Come on down to the office, let's sign a bill. If he ... if he signs a bill that the border is closed, all he has to do is say it to the border patrol, who are phenomenal. If they do that, the border is closed.

Aside from everything else - maybe he was trying to paint Biden as sleeping during the day, but it really sounds like this was how his own presidency ran: wake up the president, put "a bill" in front of him, have him sign. Really simple, being president!
posted by trig at 12:00 PM on September 14 [8 favorites]

Just to make a point, the video is really for conservatives, i.e. existing Trump supporters or undecided who MAY be thinking of supporting Trump on "issues". It's not for people who had already seen through GOP lies.
posted by kschang at 12:36 PM on September 14 [1 favorite]

Here's a Trump T- shirt shop, no doubt, the lagress of change for freedom is only an armband away.
posted by clavdivs at 1:18 PM on September 14 [1 favorite]

The only truth they care about: We shouldn't matter and we and our votes are in their way. And that is simply intolerable to their entitled way of thinking.

Cory Doctorow writes, quoting Norm Pearlstein, "The American right has, since the founding of the Republic, been bent on creating a system of hereditary aristocrats, who govern without "interference" from democratic institutions, so that their power to extract wealth from First Nations, working people, and the land itself is checked only by rivalries with other aristocrats. The project of the right is grounded in a belief in Providence: that God's favor shines on His best creations and elevates them to wealth and power. Elite status is proof of merit, and merit is "that which leads to elite status."

When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power, this is merely a hereditary meritocracy: a bloodline infused with God's favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience, with the "good bloodline" reflecting superior genetics and not the favor of the Almighty. Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his "race realism" with mystical nonsense: "God favored me with superior genes." The corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn't favor you, or because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes."

This hegemony is the future they are fighting for, and the veracity of what they say is irrelevant compared to the extent it will get us out of their way and them closer to it.
posted by zaixfeep at 2:07 PM on September 14 [11 favorites]

there's no written version of this video that I can find

If you go to the video, click More at the end of the shortened description (begins with "Dedicated to my Grandmother", then scroll to the bottom of the now-expanded description, there's a Show Transcript button that adds a transcript to the upper right. (This works with many Youtube videos.) (Also, if anyone reading this is handy with the yt-dlp tool, it's possible to download the transcript.)

Thanks for posting this, kschang. Even if MeFites know about the extensive lies of the Republican party, it can be handy to have a link like this to pass on to others. I'm particularly appreciative of all the links to citations in the extended description on the video.
posted by kristi at 2:46 PM on September 14 [2 favorites]

> found it with holes big enough you can probably drive a Star Destroyer through...

Sorry for the off topic comment but the "probably" in this sentence is killing me 😂🤣 calls to mind someone solemnly measuring the exact size of those holes with, what, tape? and then bringing forth their star wars geekery to determine that, yes, this entirely fictional vehicle might fit in there. Damn, if only we had an accurate way to literally measure figurative holes, we'd know for sure!
posted by MiraK at 4:03 AM on September 15 [2 favorites]

Just how much 2024 GOP platform is based on lies?

All of it. All of the GOP platform is based on lies.

I'm reminded that Daniel Davies pointed out fully a generation ago (in reference to a previous round of GOP lies, about our attack on Iraq):

"Fibbers' forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to "shade" downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can't use their forecasts at all. Not even as a 'starting point'."

Everything that the Republicans say is fatally tainted by their fundamental dishonestly about their goals and policies.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 5:26 AM on September 15 [3 favorites]