More Bonkers Than It Already Was
They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. And now, they’re banning the cows.
Or so says Donald Trump. No bull!
“Kamala even wants to pass laws to outlaw red meat to stop climate change,” Donald Trump told supporters in North Carolina. “That means no more cows. You know, this is serious.”
Ruminate on that.
“She wants to get rid of your cows. No more cows,” Trump warned an audience in Georgia.
The steaks could not be higher in this election.
If you are alarmed by Trump’s portrait of bovine abolition under a President Kamala Harris, the good news is you probably won’t have to look at it much if it happens. This is because, according to Trump, Harris is also planning to ban windows.
“They want buildings taken down and new buildings built without windows,” Trump informed his followers in Wisconsin.
He explained at another stop that Harris will see to it that “new buildings are built without windows because, you see, a window is environmentally unfriendly, having to do with the heat, the gases and the sunlight.”
On Saturday in Nevada, Trump put the two grave menaces together in a single, apocalyptic sentence: “They want to do things like no more cows and no windows in buildings.”
Under the stress of the final weeks of the campaign, Trump has somehow become ever more bonkers than he already was. Over the past week, he proposed using the National Guard or the military against “radical left lunatics” on Election Day, and he called the United States an “occupied country.” He stood onstage at what was supposed to be a “town hall meeting” and swayed and danced to his campaign playlist for 39 minutes. He bickered with an interviewer at the Economic Club of Chicago and slurred words at a rally in Georgia. He threatened to impose 2,000 percent tariffs on cars. He called his opponents the “enemy from within” and made up stories about migrant gangs taking over buildings in Colorado. He held a Fox News event with women and proclaimed himself “the father of IVF,” then acknowledged he asked a female Republican senator to “explain IVF” to him.
And his doomsaying has gotten even more outlandish. Under Harris, “America will be condemned to a fate of decline, desperation and despair,” Trump said at one stop. “Your family finances will be permanently destroyed. Your borders will be gone forever. Tens of millions more illegal aliens will invade our cities and towns. ... Medicare and Social Security will buckle and collapse.” He went on to say that businesses would be “worthless” and that Harris “would crash the stock market like in 1929, annihilate the pensions, 401(k)s and all of the retirement accounts” and cause “your income to plummet, your net worth to collapse, your tax bills to soar and your jobs to totally disappear.” But none of this will matter, because, in Trump’s telling, she’ll also start World War III.
Perhaps the weirdest part of these prophesies of doom is that they aren’t even original. In the closing weeks of the 2020 campaign, Trump issued similarly cataclysmic visions — in some cases, word for word the same — about a Joe Biden presidency. They apparently didn’t come true. (We’re still here, after all, and so are the cows and windows.) Yet Trump is repeating the same loony forecasts this time around, as if 2020 didn’t happen. Not for the first time, he seems to think Americans have very short memories and don’t know how to Google stuff.
“Cows are out,” Trump said in September 2020. “They don’t want cattle.” Also: “We’re not going to have windows anymore.” And one month later: “You, too, can have no windows in your buildings.”
Four years later, there are still 87 million head of cattle on U.S. farms. And the multibillion-dollar U.S. window market is growing steadily. Yet it didn’t occur to Trump to defenestrate these wacky claims.
Over and over, Trump has predicted that “Kamala will deliver a 1929-style depression” and crash the stock market, thus eviscerating retirement savings. Back in 2020, Trump predicted that “on the chance that Biden got in, you will have a stock market go down like you wouldn’t believe.” He warned that “if Biden and Harris and the radical left gain power, they will collapse our economy and send our nation into a very steep depression.” It would be “a crippling depression, the likes of which you’ve never seen.”
Instead, Biden has presided over a three-year bull market, with stocks gaining more than 50 percent overall and setting records dozens of times this year. The economy grew at a substantially higher clip under Biden than under Trump and added more than 16 million jobs — compared with the 2.7 million lost under Trump.
Trump is claiming on the trail that “if I’m not elected, you will have no auto industry” and that, under Harris, “the auto industry would be nonexistent or dead. It will be dead. It will never be able to survive.”
Sound familiar? In 2020, Trump said that “a vote for Biden is a vote to eradicate your auto industry” — and that Biden would “close down manufacturing” in general.
Yet, miraculously, the United States continues to produce about 10 million new cars per year, second only to China in the world. Manufacturing output overall is up more than 20 percent since Biden took office, and American manufacturers have added more than 700,000 jobs.
Trump is lately calling Harris “the tax queen” who will increase your tax burden by varying amounts. Sometimes he claims “they want to raise your taxes by five times.” Other times, “she’s going to double and quadruple your taxes.” Yet other times she will hike taxes by only 72 percent. “I’ve never seen somebody that openly campaigns on the fact that they’re going to raise taxes,” he said this month.
Trump likewise claimed in 2020 that “Biden will raise your taxes $4 trillion” and was “the only guy I’ve ever seen who runs by saying ... ‘We will raise your taxes.’”
But his crystal ball failed him again. Federal tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product have remained largely unchanged under Biden.
In the current campaign, Trump warns that Harris “wants to ban fracking. ... She wants to ban anything having to do with fossil fuel.” Furthermore, “Kamala will crush the electrical grid of the United States of America,” and “your costs will go up and your lights will go out.”
And here is a Trump tweet from 2020: “Sleepy Joe Biden has vowed to ABOLISH the American oil and natural gas industries, and BAN fracking.”
For the record, the United States produced more crude oil than any nation in history over the past several years and is on course to do so again this year. It has also been producing natural gas at record levels.
On crime, Trump claims that Harris “was one of the founders of ‘Defund the Police,’ and she still believes that.” In his telling, she “supports abolishing cash bail” so that murder suspects can be released without posting bond. Harris “destroyed San Francisco” with crime, “then she destroyed California, and now she wants to destroy the United States.”
And back in 2020? “Biden wants to defund the police,” Trump alleged. “He’s going to defund the police. He’s going to cut it way down,” he said at another point. Biden, too, would “end cash bail, releasing dangerous criminals onto our streets.” Because of Biden’s policies that would “destroy America,” Trump said: “If Joe Biden is elected president, the chaos and bloodshed will spread to every community in our land.”
Biden did not end cash bail. Funds for police have generally risen. And violent crime, after increasing during the pandemic, has been falling for three years and is now below where it was during Trump’s final year in office.
Trump now prophesies the entire nation coming to resemble a “migrant camp” under Harris, in which borders are “gone forever.” He explains: “She wants mass amnesty for people that have literally looked to destroy our country. ... It’s going to bankrupt your Medicare, bankrupt your Social Security.”
In 2020, Trump similarly alleged that Biden would “dissolve your borders.” Biden’s “plan to provide government health care to illegal immigrants would bankrupt our health-care system, collapse our hospitals and destroy Medicare.” Seniors would “lose the benefits they paid into” so that Biden could finance “open borders.”
After a big post-pandemic surge, illegal crossings are down sharply on the supposedly “open” border. And the latest solvency reports for Social Security and Medicare show improvement.
Trump’s prediction that World War III “is going to happen” if he isn’t returned to the White House is better understood in the context of his statement that there “would have been a nuclear war” if he were not elected in 2016. His claim that Harris “wants to confiscate your guns” should be seen alongside his 2020 claim that Biden would “shred your Second Amendment, confiscate your guns.” (There were nearly 17 million guns sold in the United States last year alone.) His nonsensical idea that Harris “wants to abolish the suburbs” (when she’s finished with the cows and windows?) has to be seen alongside Trump’s 2020 prediction that Biden would “destroy our suburbs.” He says Harris “wants to take away your private health care.” In 2020, Biden wanted to “eliminate private health care.” And yet, the percentage of Americans with private health insurance has somehow remained stable at about 65 percent.
He can’t even bring himself to trot a new metaphor out of the stable. In 2020, Biden was a “Trojan horse for socialism,” as NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald pointed out. Now “Kamala Harris is a Trojan horse for nation-destroying spending, communist price controls and open borders.”
The Oracle at Mar-a-Lago prophesied with all-caps confidence in 2020 that if Biden won, “Our Country would COLLAPSE!” He foretold that, “Under Biden, there will be no school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgivings, no Easters, no Christmases, and no Fourth of July. Other than that, you’re going to have a wonderful life.” If Biden won, Trump said, “China will own the United States. You’re going to have to learn to speak Chinese.”
Bet you a banned beefsteak that you won’t be sitting in your windowless home this Thanksgiving practicing Mandarin. But, by all means, let’s take him seriously when he says that, if Harris wins, “you won’t have a country left” and “our country is finished.”
The problem with this particular false prophet is that he tries to prove his auguries true even when they invariably fail to materialize. In 2020, he predicted that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged” — then fomented an insurrection in support of his lie. Now he’s saying that his opponents are “professional thieves” and that cheating is “the only way they’re going to win.”
You don’t need to be clairvoyant to see where this is going.
Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His latest book, "Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theories and Dunces who Burned Down the House" (Little, Brown) is out September 24.
