How Trump Plans to Manipulate US Economic Data to Gaslight the Public

For what it’s worth, you can’t tell people their paychecks are getting bigger when they aren’t. Biden presided over a “great economy” but wages stagnated and buying power decreased. Trump is going to Strangelove-ride this economy into a pit so deep it’ll be hard to convince people that everything is roses.
- It'll work for a while on some people, but yeah, eventually it'll come crashing all down, especially if companies start using the fake figures into their future planning.
  
  I'm pretty sure this is also why they want to annex Canada, Greenland, and Panama (maybe Mexico if they think they can get away with it). It's the exact same strategy the Nazis used, and I'm not invoking that lightly: when their economy was absolute dogshit, the Nazis made it look WAY better by A) going to a war footing and B) invading other countries and stealing everything that wasn't nailed down (then stealing everything else, including the nails.)
- TBF Trump did exactly this in his first term when he changed the withholding to make people think their taxes went down, when in reality they ended up paying the same or more when they filed.
  
  Very true, but that only works on a small scale for a specific thing. This economy is about to crush almost all of us. There will be no denying it.
- And that's why trickle down is always a scam.
- Yet this is all so politically driven.
  For example, there were many minimum wage hikes during Biden’s term, lifting the lowest wages. At the state level. In blue states. Politicians in the states that needed this most blocked both federal increases and those for their own states. How are those politicians not the ones getting the blame?
  As another example, legislation signed by Biden resulted in many additional business benefits in factories and trades. This would have created many new jobs, especially in some of the most low wage parts of the country. But not until the factories are built. And political changes where the government won’t follow through with its commitments means many of these will no longer be built. Why isn’t the administration stopping these new jobs getting the blame?
  
  A huge difference between the left and the right is that the left respects the citizens and gives them the benefit of the doubt on how much they understand and consider. The right doesn’t overestimate them and accurately reckons and takes full advantage of their reactive, unanalytical character.
- When all the additional money is going to the billionaires, it's hard to see that economic improvement.

Trump doesnt need to manipulate much. I live in deep red country. They are upset that fox has "completely changed" and they want to go to newsmax instead.
They are soooo fucking close to getting it. But the propaganda seed has already been planted.
- That is not the insight you think it is. Newsmax is the successor to Fox. What you're saying is they want to bury their heads even deeper into the fascist propaganda machine.
  
  Seth Meyers:
  Newsmax, if you're not familiar, is if Fox News had a crazy uncle.
  
  I know what newsmax is.
  I also known that this is just enough cognitive dissonance to maybe turn someone...
  Its a matter of "if they can turn on a dime, you can too".
  I get that they are doubling down. I also get that this is the first disconnect they have had with mainstream media in eight years. And maybe that is my in.
  I understand that it is a small shift, but honestly, its the first shift ive seen in many of them in almost a decade. Ill take it.
- That actually sounds like they're not getting it at all.

"With Sleepy Joe Biden, nobody had cardboard, it was so hard to get, terrible economy, everybody said so, even the Democrats. Now you look around this great nation of ours, under my plan, everybody has cardboard. Everybody. Look at any sidewalk, every person has a big piece of cardboard they can write on. Everybody is willing to work, it says so on the cardboard that everybody can get now."

People are still gonna notice that they can't afford groceries.
- Are they though? "Idiot Biden, sleepy Joe as they say, left us a terrible economy, terrible, this is the worst economy we've ever seen. Poor America. But I have very bright minds, the smartest minds, hard at work on it. To fix the economy, we're gonna make it all better."
  
  trumpers can blame biden all they want. You can't deny an empty belly, and if the president is saying everything is great while the evidence to the contrary is literally visceral, that's not gonna work for long. Just look at how well doing that exact thing worked out for biden and harris.
  I suspect that trump will try it anyway and once it fails, he'll pick the next entry on the "then they came for" list and start blaming them.
  
  The problem with the Biden economy was that the conventional economic measures were good, but groceries still went up. Effectively, this already didn't work for Biden, even though Biden technically wasn't lying.
  
  I'm pretty sure you were not necessarily quoting him directly, but I would point out that he and his apparatchiks have literally said such things, including how Biden's economy, which was by objective measurements (yeah, I know they are imperfect) the "envy of the world, was AXETUALLY the "worst" economy ever.
  Which is just such ridiculous nonsense. Meanwhile, donvict takes actions that have consequences, one of which is crashing the economy and they expect us to sit there and believe such nonsense? I know a lot of idiots won't even bother to look it up, even if it's just a graph of the S&P, but holy shit, that is some next-level, Orwellian-type brazen lying.
  
  They convinced enough people that crime was rampant because of illegals when crime was down and immigrants (illegal or legal) are less likely to commit crimes.

Dude just wiped billions of the economy, and he still thinks he's going to be alive next year. Honestly, Russia got what they needed out of him. Just just a liability for them at this point
- Trillions. There's an article that hit my feed that shows that the NYSE and DJ indexes have lost 5 trillion dollars in value in the last 3 weeks.
  
  I'm awful with the economy, dont understand it. Can you ELI5 how Trump has done that?
  
  "value" lol.

Cannot wait for the bothsiderists to claim how donvict doing things to actively crash the economy and then gaslight about it is equivalent to how terrible it was for Biden/Kamala to speak about an economy that was "the envy of the world".
- With some people, if they didn't have dual standards, they'd have no standards at all.
- /> Trump does something outrageously fascist
  /> "Man.... leftist bug me"
  Thanks for letting us know which side you're on, and for spending your time critiquing the real issues.
  
  Democrats can't keep pretending theyre immune to criticism because they're not fascists. Especially when they're bending the knee to Fascists. You do have to keep the moral high ground to use the moral high ground.
  
  Every time Trump does something stupid, a liberal will barge in and go "See? Aren't I so much smarter than the leftists?" without being prompted, making up strawmen to be angry at. And if you get mad at them inventing people to be mad at, they claim you're the strawman they made up.

We've gone full circle from "Eggs are too high" to "Eggs are fine just shut up about it".
Man I can't wait for Trump to tell me that our wages being the same as they are since 2020 is actually a good thing when rent and groceries are going up, so we have even less purchasing power.

Chocolate rations have been increased to 20g a week.

You can fool some people sometime, but you can't fool all the people all the time

Not surprisingly, he is a narcissist. https://youtu.be/cmTeg0B9tH8
- I honestly think he's a psychopath. He's hugely narcissistic, impulsive, highly manipulative and believes whatever suits him in that moment

Its not a good thing but I dont think it will really gaslight the public. The average persons understanding of if their countries economy is doing well or not boils down to "do i feel richer or poorer than last election?"
Despite what some might think of bidenomics, which showed by most traditional metrics that the US economy was improving and recovering well from the pandemic, people still felt the economy was doing poorly because they felt poor.. Because a lot of people now are poorer than previous generations. Which of course those tradtitional metrics dont really take into account that people get paid fuck all now, but my point is just that the official numbers dont mean a lot to the average voter.
- Even when people are objectively better off, if they're told they're not, they believe it.
  Just like crime statistics. Crime keeps going down, but people perceive it's always going up because that's what the media keeps telling them.

The Us already does this. This is only news if you think Biden was any different.
- Is this a joke?
  They are definitely different. Skewing perspective is always the thing they do but you know one of them is fucking insane about it. Dunno if you notice
  
  No, this time he's right. They both manipulate economic data shamelessly. There's no greater evil if you ignore everything except lying about economic data for political reasons.
- I remember being told the economy was great and that complaining about the cost of rent and groceries going up, while the paychecks stayed the same with buying power going down, was because jealous of anyone else because the stocks were going up.

- Apparently you don't read articles, and didn't realize this is an opinion piece. Also:
  What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics.
  He's saying there are more realistic numbers to be had when considering economic data and how voters experience the economy in everyday life.
  It has nothing to do with Biden or Harris, don't come in here with your particularly dumb takes on "WaT ReElly meEnZ".
  
  I mean, it's pretty easy for @sleepyleaf@sh.itjust.works to cherrypick things from a story, as most do when trying to make a point. Thanks for the impetus to actually read that article.
  My favorite part of the article happens to be about unemployment numbers. The government might say that the unemployment rate is 4.1%, but…
  If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.
  Every administration, for a century at least, is guilty of using rose-colored glasses to look at numbers and present whatever they think will allow them to hold on to power.
  Looking at your daily life and the circumstances of your neighbors has therefore been a more valuable metric than any devised by politicians to make themselves look good.
  Thanks for your comment!

Genocide Joe told us the economy was doing awesome too.
The pseudo-science of "economics" is a fundamental tool of capitalist control. The subjective measurements of politicians are worthless. Why the fuck do I care about the "gross domestic product" when it's literally destroying the planet, we're all being paid shit, and I live in a concentration camp for opposing genocide?
- It's convenient that you let everyone know that you're unserious in the first two words of your comment.
- /facepalm
  I commented before I read all the comments, and was predicting this bothsiderist take, lol....I didn't actually think there was already one. :)

Is this going to be different from the gaslighting that we've been receiving for the last four years that things are good? So far, one of the few things good to come out of the Trump administration is liberals finally admitting that the economy sucks, But they tend to think it started just a month ago.
- NOT LIKE TRUMP = LIBERAL I AM SMART POLITIC MAN MY TEAM BEST TEAM
  
  OP is a Pakled.
- "I can't afford groceries and rent right now"
  Democrats in 2024: "That's fine, the economy is great! Stocks are up!"
  "I can't afford groceries and rent right now."
  Republicans in 2025: "That's fine, the economy is great! Stocks are [redacted]"
  If you asked the libs here 4 months ago about their paychecks they'd be honest and now they just lie to themselves. The economy is basically the same for everyone now, not just the 1%, but now it's suddenly the worst thing ever because of eggs, or something.
  Wanna bet if we ever get a Dem in office again they won't arrest these fuckers?
  
  I said since Biden got into office that the entire January 6th was a dog and pony show. And that Democrats would never charge one of their own which includes people like Trump. And 4 years later I was proven right.
- But want the economy good? I mean I think Americans have faired better then most other countries. When shit is happening globally sure your going to be effected but compare to others.
  
  The economy has not been good. Regardless who the lie is coming from.
  
  Yes, the economy has been good by the most common statistics, and by direct experience of many of us.
  However our increasing divisiveness also means too much of the population sees the opposite, or too many people are manipulated by outrage and emotion rather than fact. It’s hard not to call this politics, but it sure seems directly related to politics of each state.