Here’s the Trump presidency in a snapshot: If there is an issue, blame former President Barack Obama and his administration. If there is a triumph that spills over from the previous presidency, take all the credit. And when not doing either, systematically work to undo the previous administration’s legacy.
On Tuesday, Satan’s most precious in-grown hair took all the credit for plans to build a Shell manufacturing plant in western Pennsylvania that he had absolutely nothing to do with. The Associated Press reports that what was originally billed as an official White House event turned into another white nationalist pep rally for his abysmal presidency. And in the process, Donald Trump rewrote history—which is just another way of saying Trump lied to benefit Trump—taking credit for the plant, which was announced in 2012 toward the end of Obama’s first term as president.
“I don’t think they give a damn about Western Pennsylvania, do you?” Trump told the crowd, which AP notes was littered with workers wearing work vests and who were paid by Shell to be there. Trump was “visiting Shell’s soon-to-be-completed Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex, which will turn the area’s vast natural gas deposits into plastics. The facility is being built in an area hungry for investment and employment, though critics claim it will become the largest air polluter in western Pennsylvania,” AP reports.
Trump doesn’t care about any of this; all he saw were voters who would most likely eat up anything he said and took full advantage of the opportunity to speak to the crowd. Trump is reportedly pushing for America to become a coal and oil country that is less dependent on the Middle East. I say reportedly because I don’t believe Trump even knows what is going on. Trump is an empty cup of hatred who only knows how to hate. This policy around coal and oil is something someone in his administration is pushing and Trump’s just going along with it. Basically, Trump has no policy plan other than to troll on Twitter. Anything else is a play by big companies to take advantage of the puppet in office.
“We don’t need it from the Middle East anymore,” Trump said of oil and natural gas, and then called the Shell workers, “the backbone of this country.”
As for the new complex—which, again, was announced during the Obama administration and had nothing to do with Trump—Satan’s favorite orange-stained slippers said, “This would have never happened without me and us.”
Trump’s notes from the impromptu rally read: “Make sure you mention that they are nothing without you. And say something like, ‘Never forget it was me. I did this for you. Me!’”
From AP:
Trump’s appeals to blue-collar workers helped him win Beaver County, where the plant is located, by more than 18 percentage points in 2016, only to have voters there turn to Democrats in 2018′s midterm elections. In one of a series of defeats that led to Republicans’ loss of the House, voters sent Democrat Conor Lamb to Congress after the prosperity promised by Trump’s tax cuts failed to materialize.
Today, the much of the area is still struggling to recover from the shutting of steel plants in the 1980s that sent unemployment to nearly 30%. Former mill towns like Aliquippa have seen their population shrink, though Pittsburgh has lured major tech companies like Google and Uber, fueling an economic renaissance in a city that reliably votes Democratic.
Trump wasn’t done; he also claimed that his steel and aluminum foreign-trade tariffs not only saved the industry but have created “thriving” industries, which is total bullshit as AP notes that the steel and aluminum economic growth is following trend. Trump also took credit for some 600,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, which the Labor Department notes is closer to 500,000.
But, as the Trump administration has shown time and time again, why even bother with the truth when a lie is working so well?
