The saying goes: time flies when you’re having fun. As of 20 January this year, each day in the USA seems like a week. Time is not flying and many Americans are not having fun.
Donald Trump – aka PINO (President in Name Only) – is a bully, a bigot, a buffoon and a bamboozler. He is also a grand master of ‘obversification’: what he claims is the opposite of reality. He says he’s a “stable genius”. William T Kelley, his professor at the Wharton School reputedly said, “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had”.
Trump’s obversifications
Trump’s motto is ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA). In fact, he, Elon Musk and his Musk Rats in DOGE (Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency) are tearing the country apart. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote: “a world that you knew for 80 years [is] being unraveled by the most powerful player – who doesn’t know what he is doing and is surrounded by bobbleheads”.
PINO’s obversifications were tracked during his first term by the Washington Post. They documented 30,573 lies or misleading claims, an average of 21 per day. He’s now on course to break his own record. On his first half day back in office, he obversificated 20 times.
PINO’s worst obversifications spilled out during the Covid pandemic. On 5 May 2020 he said: “We did everything right…” At that point the US had 1,237,633 confirmed cases, 72,271 deaths. In total the country suffered 1,219,487 deaths. The Lancet estimates 140,000 Americans died needlessly due to Trump’s bungling.
Trump’s immigration plan
Trump’s bungling continues apace in 2025. In an April 2024 interview with Time magazine, PINO stated he would deport “probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million” illegals. Very interesting since the American Immigration Council estimates the total number of people in the US without permanent legal status at around 13 million. Removing all 13 million would cost at least $315bn. The current budget of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is about $8bn. LOL (lots of luck).
To kick start the kicking-out operation, PINO ordered a 30,000-bed detention facility be put up at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) in Cuba for “the worst of the worst”, with a security staff of 1,000. He made a big show of deporting men in chains on giant Air Force C131 and C19 transport planes which cost six times more to operate than passenger planes.
A grand total of 291 wound up in Gitmo – only 23 were considered ‘high threat’. The courts ordered ICE to bring all of them back to the US. The Gitmo facility now lies empty, still guarded by those 1,000 security agents. The Trump Gitmo fiasco cost the American public purse $16mn. Does this fall under the DOGE mandate to identify waste, fraud and abuse?
Waste, fraud and abuse
And on the subject of waste, fraud and abuse, since reoccupying the White House, The Guardian reports PINO has flown to Mar-a-Lago on Air Force One seven times to play golf, at an estimated cost to the public purse of $23mn. FYI: during his first term Trump made 328 visits to his golf courses, averaging golf once every four days.
Trump’s victory in November 2025 was called “a landslide”; another obversification. In fact, the popular-vote margin was 1.5%, the narrowest in American history. Just 0.25% of all voters gave Trump his victory. And as usual, the victor obversificated: this is “a political victory that our country has never seen before. America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”.
Is that so? After two months of chaos, confusion and blundering, what do the American people think of Trump’s job performance? A recent CNN poll found:
- Trump’s overall performance – disapprove by nine points
- JD Vance’s performance – disapprove by 11 points
- Elon Musk’s performance – disapprove by 18 points
- Trump’s handling of the economy – disapprove by 12 points
- Trump’s tariffs – disapprove by 22 points
- Trump/Musk job cuts – disapprove by 10 points
- Trump is too erratic – yes by 14 points
- Trump is too extreme – yes by 18 points
Going by the polls, it seems a good number of those 77.3 million who ticked the Trump box in November 2024 are having voter remorse in March 2025. A Reuters/Ipsos March poll found one out of five Trump voters disapprove of his performance. It could get worse, much worse. You will note that those polls did not ask about Trump’s handling of social security.
Trump’s handling of social security
Social security ranks second in popularity after national parks among Americans. Messing with it has been considered as what is called “the third rail of American politics”. When George W Bush hinted at privatising social security, such a furore arose that he dropped it like a really hot hot tamale.
PINO has stated over and over he would not touch social security. But in his address to Congress, he said, “We found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” [in social security payments]. “We’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty.”
Musk agreed, saying social security is “the greatest Ponzi scheme of all time” and there’s possibly $500bn to $700bn in potential cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid.
A 2024 report by the inspector general of the Social Security Administration (SSA) found the agency made nearly $72bn in improper payments over eight years from fiscal 2015 through fiscal 2022 – less than 1% of benefits paid out during that period, mainly due to overpayments, not fraud. All but $23bn were recovered.
The fact is that SSA is one of the most efficient and cost-effective agencies in the US, if not THE most. In 2024, the SSA reports its administrative expenses came to $2.5bn, or 1.6% of total costs. Can any private insurer match that? Can the Trump Organization, Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX or X (formerly Twitter) match that?
Musk Rats and chainsaws
Regardless, within a month of Trump reinhabiting the White House, Musk sent his Musk Rats into SSA with their chain saws. Former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley said the recent cuts made by DOGE could result in the “collapse” of the social security system “within the next 30 to 90 days”.
If that happens, the 73 million Americans who receive social security benefits will become sorely vexed. For around 40%, monthly checks are their only source of income. And those 73 million have children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends and neighbours. They can make a helluva lot of noise. Their message to Trump and Musk: LOCK ’EM UP! LOCK ’EM UP!
