||| from Hedrick Smith, ReclaimTheAmericanDream.org |||
Maybe you’ve forgotten, as I had, how sharply candidate Donald Trump declared war on Wall Street back in 2016, savaging Hillary Clinton as ”the puppet” of Wall Street – “they pull the strings” – and personally vowing to generate an economic renaissance that would lift the American middle class out of stagnation and restore 7.7 million lost manufacturing jobs.
“I know Wall Street. I know the people on Wall Street.” Trump boasted to a small-town crowd in the Gothic farm country of Ottumwa, Iowa, in January 2016. “I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us.”
A year later, at his Inaugural, Trump limned a glowing future for the anxious and disenchanted working class who helped put him in the White House. “We will bring back our wealth and bring back our dreams,” he promised. “We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work rebuilding our country.”
And what happened? Just the opposite of what Trump promised. With his massive tax cut of 2017, Trump handed a financial bonanza to Wall Street, Corporate America, and the financial elite, but he never made any serious effort to create all those middle-class jobs by investing significantly in rebuilding America’s aging, pothole-riddled infrastructure.
Now, once again, in the midst of the corona collapse, Wall Street and the top 1% are riding high, while the real economy and working-class Americans are in protracted pain. In short, Trump has failed the true believers in Ottumwa, Iowa, or Fargo, North Dakota, and small-towns across Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and beyond, who bought into his theatrical taunts at Wall Street and his gossamer promises of a miraculous Trump-Utopia for Middle America.
663 promises – Which Ones Did Trump Keep?
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