Guys and Dolls: A Cringeworthy President Tells the Kids To Suck It Up

Jeff Robbins on May 6, 2025

Hard to believe, but President Donald Trump seemed to be just making it up this past week, selling Americans the line that the bad economic news was, in fact, good economic news. Ever the real estate salesman and historically practiced at the art of con-artistry, he claimed that the collapse of financial markets since his inauguration, negative economic growth for the first time in three years and lowest level of consumer confidence since the pandemic were all signs of a terrific state of affairs. "We're doing really well," said the president, who asked Americans to thank him for ushering the American economy into a "golden age."

Trump has in some sense earned the right to be brazenly full of it; he's confident that tens of millions of voters will remain certifiably impervious to mendacity, and he's correct. You could fill a book with the guy's falsehoods about COVID. "We have it totally under control," he blustered on Jan. 22, 2020, before the deaths of some 1.1 million Americans from the disease commenced and the economy tanked. "It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine." On Feb. 26, 2020, he boasted that he'd saved us from the disease. "Because of all we've done," he proclaimed, "the risk to the American people remains very low."

And so on.

The abrupt mass firings of tens of thousands of federal workers without anything approaching fact-based justification told the story of what looks more like a wrecking ball of a presidency than a golden age. That it was executed by Elon Musk, Trump's "special government employee," a chainsaw-wielding megalomaniac who is the richest person on the planet, sharpened the point. And all of this was before the president's manic announcements of massive tariffs on our closest allies, which, reinforced by the wild tariffs on China and a full-on trade war, guaranteed that American families would pay more for both imported goods and domestic ones.

Trump's response to questions about the effect of all of this on American families already grappling with the evaporation of much of their savings was typically empathetic. "Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls," said the Lord of Mar-a-Lago. "And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally."

Give Trump this: We've never had a president anywhere near as obsessed with self-aggrandizement or fixated on flaunting his disrespect for others. Days after Pope Francis's death, Trump posted an image of himself as the new pope. He loved it so much that he had the White House repost it. The New York State Catholic Conference spoke for Catholics and non-Catholics alike. "There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President," they responded. "We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the Cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us."

Trump furnishes so many reasons to recoil that one must work to avoid chronic recoilment. Bulletin! The president who declared that under the Constitution "I have the right to do whatever I want as president" and pledged to be a "dictator on Day 1" of his new administration is not exactly a Bill of Rights aficionado. Asked on "Meet the Press" last weekend whether he agreed that people in the United States "deserve due process," Mr. Make America Great Again made us all so proud. "I don't know," he said. "I'm not, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know."

Moderator Kristen Welker tried to make it really, really easy for him. "Don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?" she inquired.

Seemed like a softball.

Apparently not.

"I don't know," replied the president of the United States.

It's conceivable that some blinders have started to come off. An ABC News poll found that after his first 100 days in office, only 39% of Americans approve of Trump's performance, the lowest such rating for any president in 80 years.

Conceivable, but hardly certain. These have been some very stubborn blinders.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.