It was October 13, 2018, just 24 days before the midterm election, and then-President Trump held a rally in Richmond, Kentucky for Republican candidates. He told the crowd:
“Thanks to our strong trade and economic policies, Braidy Industries recently broke ground on a new billion-dollar aluminum mill that will create up to 1,500 jobs right next to Ashland, Kentucky.”
Kentucky Republicans thanked him effusively and built the promise of a new Russian-financed Russian-oligarch-owned aluminum plant into their remaining campaign ads, getting a big boost from the announcement. And then, of course, after the election the whole scheme collapsed.
Fast-forward to yesterday, when Trump asked American media to give him live broadcast time for a “major announcement.”
On my radio/TV program we speculated about what his announcement could be: An October Surprise? If so, what? Peace with Iran? He’d discovered a Mexican who’d voted illegally in Georgia and was using that to confiscate ballots? That a backroom AI deal with China that started during Xi’s visit just bore fruit?
Turns out it was just Trump pulling the oldest con in the book: he announced — without any meaningful details — that a company based in India was going to build a giant steel plant in Iowa, a state where Democrats have a strong shot at both the US Senate and even the governor’s race. And he bragged that if Republicans get elected, everybody gets a $5,000 check.
I’ve seen this movie before.
In December of 1993 I was in Kaliningrad, Russia and watched Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the rightwing nationalist running in the parliamentary election that year (Yeltsin was President) — go on TV and promise that everybody who voted for him would get a liter of vodka and a turkey. The news commentators who followed his speech were debating where he’d get all those turkeys, as if it was the most natural promise for a politician to make.
I got a déjà vu feeling yesterday watching Fox “News” cover Trump’s equivalent message to the good citizens of Iowa. If they’d looked up the website for the State Historical Society of Iowa, they’d have found an advertisement for Republican Herber Hoover that ran in October of 1928 titled “A Chicken for Every Pot.”
Just 11 months before the Black Tuesday crash that threw the entire world into the depths of the Republican Great Depression and set up World War II, Hoover’s ad proudly proclaimed:
“Under higher tariff and lower taxation, America has stabilized output, employment and dividend rates. … Republican prosperity has reduced hours and increased earning capacity, silenced discontent, put the proverbial ‘chicken in every pot.’”
If the stakes weren’t so high and the human suffering so deep, these decades of Republican scams would be funny.
Yesterday, I pointed out how Republican politicians intentionally invited millions of immigrants from south of our border to show up and ask for asylum, then screamed about the “caravans” that they, themselves, had created.
But that’s just one of many of these scams the GOP has been running on working people in the years since the Reagan Revolution kicked itself off by slashing tax rates on the morbidly rich while destroying working people’s ability to form or join a union for the second time in the 20th century.
Yep, they’ve run this scam before. There’s just nobody alive who remembers it.
In the election of 1920, Republican Warren Harding convinced Americans to abandon the trust-busting, high tax, progressive policies of Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson in favor of that generation’s version of what we today call Reaganomics.
Harding referred to it as “Horse and Sparrow Economics” — it was just the early 20th century version of what Reagan later repackaged as “trickle-down economics.”
If the horses (rich people) were fed more oats (through tax cuts), more of those oats would pass undigested into the horse manure that then littered the streets of American cities. The sparrows (working class Americans) could then pick the extra oats out of the manure.
In 1920, Warren Harding won the presidency on his campaign slogans of “more industry in government, less government in industry” — privatize and deregulate — and “a return to normality,” his promise to drop the top tax bracket on the morbidly rich from its then-91 percent rate down to 25 percent.
Harding kept both promises, putting the nation into a sugar-high spin called the Roaring ’20s, where the rich got fabulously rich and working-class people were being beaten and murdered by industrialists when they tried to unionize. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover (the three Republican presidents from 1920 to 1932) all cheered on the assaults, using phrases like “the right to work” to describe a union-free nation.
In the end, the result of the “horses and sparrows” economics advocated by Harding was the Republican Great Depression (yes, they called it that until after World War II).
Reagan’s version of that “trickle down” and “supply side economics” — and the massive tax cuts he, Bush, and Trump gave to their billionaire friends — has gifted us a $40 trillion national debt that’s now starting to freak out the bond market, the foundation of our economic stability.
Reagan, Bush, and Trump all claimed they were for the average working person, but all three put anti-union ideologues in charge of the Labor Department and froze the minimum wage as long as possible. Republicans today — who’ve fought against giving American workers a raise for a century — are trying to campaign on “affordability” and promising that when Trump’s stupid war on Iran ends prices will normalize.
If you believe that, I have some Russian turkeys I can get you at a discount.
Similarly, Republicans claim they’re working to solve America’s energy crisis by expanding federal subsidies and liability limitations on the oil, coal, and natural gas industries while killing off billions in wind and solar projects that would actually produce energy that’s cheaper than anything fossil fuels can generate. The scam is so obvious it’s startling.
They claim to be champions of Social Security and Medicare: remember when Biden said, during a state of the Union speech, that “Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset” and Republicans stood and booed as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene shouted “Liar!”
Since then, Trump, Musk, and the GOP have fired or laid off thousands of Social Security workers making it harder and harder for people to get their benefits while gutting Medicaid and putting pre-authorization requirements into Medicare in a six-state “experiment” scam to replace real Medicare with profitized Medicare Advantage plans from the giant insurance companies.
For almost fifty years, freaking out about the national debt has been a favorite Republican pastime. But only when a Democrat is in the White House. Americans are figuring out that scam, too, as Trump himself has been responsible for about a quarter of our entire national debt.
Republicans claim to be pro-consumer, but they’ve gutted the federal agencies that protect consumers and consistently vote against any sort of pro-consumer legislation. In 2025 they tried to eliminate funding for, and thus shut down altogether, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency created after Bush’s 2008 crash to police abuses by banks, credit-card companies, payday lenders, and other financial firms; the proposal was blocked on procedural grounds in the Senate.
At the same time, Republican regulators have gutted CFPB enforcement, including closing roughly 40 percent of pending investigations and ending public access to consumer complaints.
Then there’s our planet’s environment which Republicans claim to love as they’re promoting fossil fuel use while gutting pollution protections. Trump just lowered our automobile fuel efficiency standards, while dialing back hundreds of EPA and similar types of enforcement actions. All to keep their fossil fuel donors happy, to hell with the next generation.
Even the safety of our food supply and easy access to disease-preventing vaccinations are under assault by the sex- and heroin-addicted Republican lawyer Trump put in charge of our public health agencies. And, weirdly, Kennedy polls higher than anybody of the other billionaires in Trump’s cabinet.
And let’s not forget their efforts to pretend the Founders didn’t want an absolute wall between church and state. From posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms to tracking women’s periods and miscarriages to their efforts to outlaw abortion and mifepristone, Republicans daily suck up to rightwing religious fanatics, trashing the hard-fought and hard-won rights of women and non-Christians, all while pretending to honor American traditions.
Republicans don’t want any more brown people coming into America — with three Afghan exceptions, every single person granted asylum in America since Trump was sworn in has been a white South African — and funded billions to ICE to carry out a nationwide terror campaign using Kavanaugh-stop racial profiling and deadly violence.
Billionaire-owned media has helped the GOP carry out these scams ever since Reagan fast-tracked Murdoch’s citizenship and killed the Fairness Doctrine, and today’s crop of billionaires are funneling literally billions into both public donations and dark money campaigns on behalf of Republicans or attacking Democrats.
How much longer will these frauds and ruses work for Republican politicians? We’ll find out in about five weeks. Vote!
Louise’s Daily Song: “A Chicken in Every Pot Scam”
Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:
The Republican Playbook: Break America, Blame Democrats, Then Promise to Save It
All of us woke, aware, Dems KNOW this; the problem is how do we effectively convey these facts o the unwoke, cult tied, so called republicans to see how they’ve been conned? Key word: EFFECTIVELY.
~ Jan Feeler
Dems need to get a plan! List a few things we mutually have: Medicare for All --- means back to the original not privatized. Can they do that? How about free child care for those who must work to pay the bills. End for war and Trump to the ICC for war crimes.
~ Dolores Williams
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Oh come now, Mr. Hartmann. You well know that Smitty is Making Amerika Great Again. How do I know, you muse? Ha! I just went to fill up (mind you I had a quarter tank already) my ancient Audi Quattro 2.0 T. Now, I had to take a trip a couple of days ago and filled up. The price: $6.49 per gallon (89 octane). Today, two days later, it was $6.79.9 per gallon ( I just love that "point nine" thingy). My circuitous route notwithstanding, I found chicken on sale for $1.99 cents per pound and sang spirituals. No small feat for a heretic hoping to Make Amerika Great...
For Once.
Don't look good.
The capitalists would like to repeal the Constitution, and democracy along with it; but the trick is that they have to go through the democratic process to do it. So obviously, it is necessary to lie, cheat, and steal. They are ceaseless and relentless in their desire for power, and this is why we have to be ever vigilant, and build a wall of separation between business and state.