Trump’s Christmas gifts

If my memory serves me correctly, it was on Christmas Eve in 1992 that I found out there was no Santa Claus.

I was a 10-year-old elementary school student in Austin, Texas, and although I had already debunked the existence of the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny, I had held onto Santa for as long as possible, apparently unready to relinquish my youth.

When I caught my parents in the act of delivering the gifts that had supposedly arrived from the North Pole, I cried.

Fast forward more than three decades, and many Americans are feeling similarly deceived this holiday season by another man in red – MAGA red to be precise.

As United States President Donald Trump nears the end of his first year back in office, he has neglected to deliver on pretty much all of his key promises aside from manic deportations, which have helped convert the country into a holly, jolly police state.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll put Trump’s approval rating at just 39 percent as Americans battle a staggering cost of living, including soaring prices for fruits, vegetables and meat as well as rising rents and electricity fees.

This year’s federal government shutdown saw millions of people facing the distinct possibility of starvation, an arrangement that was rather irreconcilable with the whole plan to “make America great again”.

Job losses as a result of the shutdown drove up the unemployment rate, which reached 4.6 percent, the highest in nearly five years. According to Reuters, “many economists think employers have pulled back on hiring because of what some described as shock from Trump’s tariffs on imports.”

From the perspective of reality, then, Trump has failed decisively in his pledge to fix the US economy. But in the president’s own personal world of hyperbolic make-believe, he has awarded the current economy a grade of “A+++++” while declaring the country’s alleged “affordability” crisis a Democratic “hoax” to taint his image.