For some reason—possibly because USA Today is trying to get into the good graces of the president, or maybe they just wanted some press—USA Today allowed the Donald J. Trump to publish an op-ed that is full of mistruths that only become apparent when you’re done reading the lies.
In short, USA Today published fake news.
On October 10, the newspaper ran a piece titled: “‘Medicare for All’ plan will demolish promises to seniors” that surely was not penned by the president of the United States.
Seriously, why would USA Today publish a piece under Donald Trump’s name that he surely didn’t write? I know that every senior official does this. I remember when I was trying to get recommendation letters for an internship; it was quite common for folks to just say, “You write it and I’ll sign it.” But they could have at least given the illusion that the president had something to do with this.
One of the benefits of having a president that tweets all the time is we know his work. We know he can’t spell; we know he doesn’t understand the rules of capitalization or the appropriate use of exclamation points. We know that he struggles with basic comprehension and has difficulty understanding remotely complex subjects likes Medicare. Hell, he has trouble understanding non-complex subjects like consent, so I have a hard time believing that he understands anything remotely related to a single-payer health fund.
They could have at least included some run-on sentences or made up some kind of scary scenario in which some friend of Trump’s told him that he was doing well until he lost his Medicare benefits thanks to cuts in the program by those pesky Democrats!
It didn’t take long for real news organizations to rip Trump’s op-ed to shreds. The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post debunk the entire article point by point.
The Los Angles Times notes:
Now, to the details. The target of the op-ed is the Medicare for All Act, a Sanders proposal to replace almost all private health insurance and public programs with government-funded health coverage modeled on Medicare. Sanders’ plan would eliminate private and public premiums, deductibles and other co-pays. It would provide universal coverage, including dental, vision and hearing care for everyone. The op-ed calls this “socialism.”
And from The Washington Post:
President Trump wrote an opinion article for USA Today on Oct. 10 regarding proposals to expand Medicare to all Americans — known as Medicare-for-All — in which almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood.
It’s embarrassing that the president of the United States can’t fool readers with a self-authored op-ed because we all know that he struggles with big words and uses a fat pencil with no eraser even when he tweets. His thought process isn’t much beyond caveman sensibilities and his presidential acumen is limited to bashing survivors of sexual assault and talking about grabbing women by the pussy.
He needs to stick to those topics, or rallies in general, and leave the real president-ing to Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller, whose 3rd grade teacher confirmed our suspicion that he was, in fact, a glue-eater and who most likely authored this piece of “the barn is burning!” bullshit that we’ve come to know from this administration.