Leave it to Iowa to tell our would-be emperor, Donald Trump that he has no clothes.
During his recent rally in Clive, Trump was slogging through his tired Las Vegas lounge act about how he inherited a failed economy from Sleepy Joe Biden but now inflation is solved and everything is cheaper and Americans are making more money than ever. And now “affordability” is a dead issue. Drug prices have come down “1,000 percent”. (I sympathize. Math is hard.) But when he announced that the price of gas in Iowa is $1.95 a gallon, one man in the audience shouted back, “No! $2.63!”
What?! Someone in the safe red state of Iowa, in a small conservative town dared to say what timid mainstream journalists, and groveling cabinet members fear to speak out loud. Although draped in the American flag and the finery of the world’s highest office, a gust of the honesty, instantly revealed Trump’s pale, pasty, naked truth. And it was not a pretty sight.
Trump’s cheering section standing behind him carrying pre-printed signs reading “Lower Prices” and “Higher Wages” tried to bury the hecklers, barking out “USA! USA!” But it was too late.
CNN pointed out that right outside the venue where Trump was speaking, gas was selling for $2.69 a gallon. According to AAA, the average price of gas across Iowa was $2.50, not $1.95.
Trump has probably never bought gas himself, but he ought to have realized that regular people do buy their own gas and know what it really costs. If Trump was hoping to bamboozle Iowans with fictionally low prices, he might have picked something unfamiliar to us. The price of a Philly cheese steak is now 35 cents less, because of me, he might have said. Iowans: what the heck is a Philly cheese steak?
Apparently imagining he was addressing a bunch of hayseeds, Trump tried to convince the crowd that he was the farmer’s best friend, (despite having destroyed the foreign soybean market). “We’re going to fix the tractors,” he promised, by removing complicated safety regulations. “Now you don’t have to be a Ph.D. to start your tractor!” Huh? Was this suppose to come as welcome relief to all those farmers whose tractors have been gathering dust in their barns because they can’t figure out how they work?
Trump further attempted mass hypnosis, claiming credit for the drop in egg prices. Unfortunately for the president, Iowa is America’s largest egg producer and we know that the decrease in egg prices has nothing to do with him and more to do with controlling the spread of bird flu.
As long as nobody was brave enough to fact-check Donald Trump, he might have continued spreading his ludicrous misinformation about how water destroys magnets and how windmills cause cancer and how shoppers have to show their ID to buy bread. He claimed he made groceries cheaper than ever and inflation is solved. We always knew better but we kept that truth to ourselves. But it just took one honest Iowan say the simple truth out loud. The emperor has no clothes. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.