While speaking at Harvard’s Institute of Politics on Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, took shots at the media for taking all of Trump’s promises “literally,” saying:
“This is the problem with the media. You took everything that Donald Trump said so literally… The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes – when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table at a bar – you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
Wow, so true. I know that I hold my drunk friends at a bar to the same factual standards as a potential presidential candidate, now President-elect. In fact, whenever I hear Donald Trump making proposals for new legislation and policies, I just assume he’s at least eight shots of bourbon deep. His incoherent ramblings and insane promises make a lot more sense when you think about it that way.
Promises Trump Can’t Keep
During the first stop of his victory tour, Trump went to the Carrier plant in Indianapolis. A place where he had previously promised to use the threat of stiff tariffs in order to bring back jobs to the plant. In his speech Thursday, he essentially admitted he forgot about that promise and didn’t think people would take it seriously:
“I’m saying to myself, man. And then they played my statement, and I said, ‘Carrier will never leave.’ But that was a euphemism… When they played that I said I did make it but I didn’t mean it quite that way.”
Let’s blast past the fact that Trump clearly doesn’t know what “euphemism” actually means, and instead look at what he’s trying to say. In order to secure votes, he promised to save the jobs of thousands of people, and then was shocked to later realize that they actually took him seriously. It’s almost like they believed him to be a man of his word and not a pompous jackass who only cares about himself.
America’s Gradual Realization
For the past month, it’s felt like this entire country is having a common learning experience. Many of us who knew before the election that Donald Trump could not be trusted are now holding back from screaming “I told you so!” at every former Trump supporter-turned-realist.
Shockingly, Kellyanne Conway might have summed this up best when she spoke at the same event as Lewandowski, saying:
“Everybody wants to go back in a time machine and do things differently so this result that nobody saw coming won’t come somehow.”
Yep. But now it’s too late.
Watch the video below to see Donald Trump’s speech at Carrier on Thursday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHBgb9DhYh4
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons/CC-2.0
