Every president is a disappointment when compared to his predecessor; even, as in Donald Trump’s case today, when compared to himself.

Trump 45 got an income tax reduction passed, while Trump 47 raised tariffs across the board.

Trump 45 didn’t start any new wars, while Trump 47 started bombing Yemen.

But Trump has taken his current presidency to the next level, once again proving that Horton’s Law, i.e., that presidents only keep their bad promises, remains valid. Every president disappoints, but who would have figured Trump would have locked up the title so quickly?

Trump promised America First while simultaneously claiming “I’m for Israel First.” And he has kept the latter promise. He rightly criticized Biden on the campaign trail for “dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don’t have to do that,” and then bombed Yemen himself, for Israel.

In fairness, anyone who supports foreign aid to Israel is Israel First, not America First, just as anyone who supports foreign aid to Ukraine is Ukraine First, not America First. And anyone who supports foreign aid to multiple countries is for America Last.

In Trump’s case, there’s a long list of how Trump has already done the opposite of his good promises: 

• As already mentioned, Trump promised various tax cuts but raised the tariff.
• Trump promised the tariff increases would be reciprocal, and they weren’t even remotely so. 
• Trump promised to end censorship, and then sent masked officers to kidnap people off the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts for writing op-eds.
• He promised an end to bailouts, and then pronounced a taxpayer bailout of farmers and a tariff bailout for, of all industries, Hollywood (and laughably, on “national security” grounds).
• He promised to cut overall spending by $2 trillion with DOGE, but then sought out primary opponents against Thomas Massie for opposing the spending increases Trump was pushing through Congress.
• He proposed to cut military spending by 50%, and is currently pushing a record-high $1 trillion Pentagon budget.

What is conservative about a defense budget that spends more than all your potential adversaries combined and saying “we need to spend more”? The only thing it says about you is that you can’t get value for a dollar, and the only thing it conserves is the military-industrial complex.

The moment Trump put a Kennedy Democrat in charge of the world’s largest welfare agency, with no mandate to cut a penny of spending, should have been all the evidence people needed to know he would fail to cut spending. The moment he put warmongers Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz and co. in charge of foreign policy, it was obvious the bombings would expand again. Trump’s current military budget would transfer all the claimed savings from DOGE (even that proportion likely to be overturned by the courts) for spending increases over at the Pentagon.

Trump’s administration is already a complete failure, and we’re only a few months in.

Americans, and his fellow Republicans in particular, need to face the reality that Trump is not so much a liar as he is a bullshitter. The difference between these two categories is critical: A liar expects you to believe his lies. But a bullshitter doesn’t care if you believe what he says. He just says everything to provoke a reaction. The truth is immaterial because the reaction is the goal. A bullshitter doesn’t try to convince you of any truth.

Trump’s bullshitting presidency is as unserious as the White House tweet of Trump as the new pope or his insistence on renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. These are genuinely funny outbursts, but they also reveal the fundamental unseriousness of his presidency. They send Democrats into conniptions, precisely the sought-after reaction. Neither his followers nor his opponents realize they’re being trolled, and that’s the real pity.

Trump’s more likely to make good on his ongoing trolling that he’ll run for an unconstitutional third term than he is to win any of his promised tax cuts for working people.

In the past year, he has promised to end taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime. His administration also floated the idea of a $5,000 baby bonus and that they’d use tariff revenue to replace income taxes for people earning less than $150,000 per year. 

None of that is going to happen. 

He’s more likely to fulfill his outlandish preferences to buy Greenland, make Canada the 51st state, or build Gaza into a casino resort than he is to get any tax cuts passed with ongoing federal $2 trillion annual deficits. 

Sure, Trump is a clever guy, and a really funny one. But that has long been his only real talent. During his first term, he was so stupid he let his own FBI frame him for treason with Russia, and get away with it. And with no prosecutions over FBI and intelligence agency abuse, he’s given Americans no reason to believe he has smartened up on that front. Why would anyone think Trump has grown the stones to release the Epstein files or the Diddy files, considering Epstein was such a regular at Mara Lago?

Trump only has two discernible, though vague, principles in the end: He wants to control immigration using the hideous Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and to retain America’s status as Israel’s biggest, dumbest vassal state.

Who would have thought the Democrats were right that Trump was a foreign intelligence agency asset? They just got the country wrong, stupidly thinking it was Russia, because they were led around by the nose by the Mockingbird media.

The Democrats are a party whose leadership are every bit as fundamentally unserious as Trump.

Working people, on being told in 2024 by Democrats that they can change their pronouns to “we/they” were predictably unimpressed, which explains why Democrats lost the election with their empty pants-suit nominee Kamala Harris. The only way to win working people over with the pronouns gambit would have been to declare each of their fifty-seven “we/they” genders could be claimed as a dependent exemption on their income taxes. 

Democrats have instead been focused on meaningless outrages, like the fact that Trump wore a blue suit to Pope Francis’ funeral. Oh, the decorum! Of course, the Mockingbird media only showed close-cropped photos of other world leaders wearing black, even though a zoom-out photo showed nearly a quarter of world leaders were also wearing blue. 

Then there’s the silly specter of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (D-NY) touring the nation railing against “oligarchy” while $1 trillion in new wealth was created for the richest nineteen billionaires during the end of Joe Biden’s Democratic presidency while half of Congress was controlled by Democrats. Bernie Sanders in particular, and Democrats in general, are responsible for the subsidies, inflation, and punitive payroll taxes that have increased the wealth divide in America.

America has a two-party system of governance today, until the voters decide on something different. To paraphrase the late Samuel T. Francis, we have the “Evil Party” (the party in power) and the “Stupid Party” (the party too stupid to attain to power). And often they get together to do something both stupid and evil which we call “bipartisanship.” 

Thus, Americans are saddled with ongoing bipartisan deficits, bipartisan wars, bipartisan inflation and bipartisan attacks on the Bill of Rights.