Prominent conservative pundits are increasing their criticism of Trump’s leadership. Republican politicians are getting booed at their town halls because they voted for the terrible “big beautiful bill” and, even worse, without even reading it first. Wall Street is referring to tariffs as TACO - Trump Always Chickens Out. Major MAGA influencers who became popular by peddling conspiracies and disinformation are bluntly saying that the GOP lied to them. “We were played.”

The rest of the country is either angry that they're stuck dealing with the corruption and ineptitude that is unwinding America’s greatness, progress, and our rights, or have simply given up, tuned out, and see voting as pointless.

Everyone is frustrated. But is it enough to spark change?

Not unless we, the people, force it to change.🧵 Republicans are going to continue to lie and promote conspiracies because their agenda is to take from the working and middle class to funnel the money to their wealthy and corporate sponsors that keep them in power. It is an unpopular stance that requires fear-mongering and lies to gain control.

Those who say they care about the national debt continue to think Republicans are better with the economy, despite the debt coming from Republican presidents and growing faster now that Trump is back in office. The roaring economy switched to a shrinking GDP, and a recession may follow.

Donald Trump woke up this morning and demanded, through social media posts, that Apple move all manufacturing to the US or face a 25% tariff and recommended 50% tariffs on the EU. It isn’t clear who he recommended this to, since he has been randomly applying tariffs whenever he feels like it.

Stock markets still hadn’t recovered and took another dive after the announcement. But that may be the least troubling sign for America’s economy. Here are others:🧵 The stock markets get most of the attention because the bond market is not something most Americans are familiar with and is typically quiet, calm, and slow-moving. This past Wednesday's 20-year treasury bond auction was a disaster, with unusually low demand driving yields excessively high.

This came on the heels of Republicans signalling they would pass the “big beautiful bill,” which would explode the US debt and hurt the overall economy. The House passed that bill on Thursday morning.

Moody’s also downgraded America’s credit rating for the first time in history, citing the country’s climbing debt and Republicans' unwillingness to address it.

They tell you that we have a spending problem, that we must suffer some pain to get our economy on track, and that we need to raise the retirement age, cut Medicaid, and cut food assistance to address our deficit.

Those are lies.
🧵 1. We cannot cut our way out of debt.

The federal government brought in $4.9 trillion in revenue in 2024. It spent $6.75 trillion.

-Social Security cost $1.5 trillion in 2024. Since it doesn’t add to the national debt, cutting it will not reduce our deficit or debt.

-Interest on outstanding debt was $892 billion last year. We have to pay that, or we will default. We’ve already used up half of the revenue.

-Healthcare (2024) - $912 billion for Medicaid, $626 billion for Medicare and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, $125 billion for the ACA, for a total of $1.66 trillion. America has made it clear that we don't want our healthcare cut.

-Military - Congress refuses to cut or freeze the military budget, choosing to continually increase it instead. The 2024 defense budget was $841 billion. Trump has requested a $1 trillion defense budget, and Republicans want to deliver that.

Using the $1 trillion defense budget, we are at $5.05 trillion, exceeding the revenue and creating a deficit.

We still have $526 billion for veterans and federal retirees, $476 billion for economic security programs, and costs for education, transportation, law enforcement, research, and international programs.

President Trump announced his broad tariff plan, and almost no nation was safe, not even little islands inhabited by penguins. The excuses for these tariffs have varied, from immigration and drugs to fairness and unlocking American prosperity. These are all as false as Trump's lies about the size of foreign tariffs enacted against the US.

Before we discuss the real reason for the tariffs, let's look at the most common belief among supporters: the claim that these tariffs will unleash a new age of American manufacturing.

That will not happen. Here's why: Americans can't simply switch to buying products made in the US because there are many goods America doesn't produce. Televisions, utensils, and even household lightbulbs are no longer made in the US. There is no option to buy American versions of those products. So when 20% tariffs are put on those goods, the only option is for people to pay 20% more.

To that, tariff supporters will say that companies will build factories here in America to bypass the tariffs, creating jobs and prosperity for our country. That sounds nice, but it also doesn’t work that way.

President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. His reasoning has ranged from claiming America ranks dead last in education, that the Department of Education is indoctrinating children with liberal propaganda, that control of education should be returned to the states, and that America spends the most on education in the world.

The problem with all of those reasons is that they are false. America doesn’t rank dead last in education. We rank close to the top in some subjects. The Department of Education doesn’t determine the school curriculum because control is already in the hands of the states, and America isn’t the nation with the highest spending on education.

Let’s explore. International testing for education performance allows us to compare America's performance to other nations. One such test is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), administered by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 highly developed nations that work together to “build better policies for better lives” through data and policy examinations.

The test is administered every three years, the most recent being in 2022. The United States scored 5th in reading and 12th in science among OECD nations. However, America has consistently scored lower in mathematics, and this year was no exception, ranking 28th. The United States also ranked 8th in educational attainment, with 92% of adults having at least a high school diploma compared to the OECD average of 79%.

Clearly, America is not the worst nation for education, or even close to it, although there are areas for improvement. What about spending?

Trump came into office with a big show of force on immigration enforcement. He declared the border an emergency, embedded Fox News camera crews in ICE raids, sent troops to the border, threatened Canada and Mexico with broad tariffs, and used military flights to deport migrants. All of it was made to be one giant spectacle.

Less than a month into office, Trump’s administration talks little about immigration enforcement. They even stopped publishing their daily migrant arrest numbers. Why? Because they’re failing to meet their goals and are lagging behind the numbers Biden had achieved. Everything was smoke and mirrors, and mass deportations were simply a massive scam. Is the Southern Border a Problem?
The Southern border has seen high crossings for years. 2019 set a record for border crossings before the border cooled in early 2020. Then, for the final nine months of Trump’s presidency, crossings increased every month, ending at over 75,000 per month.

Crossings continued to increase under Biden’s presidency, with the largest monthly crossings occurring in December 2023. However, monthly crossings dropped rapidly throughout 2024. They were over 80% lower by December 2024, resulting in 47,000 crossings that month — 33% lower than when Trump left office and in line with the average monthly crossings of 2020.

If the border wasn’t a crisis or an “invasion” in 2020, when Trump was president, it wasn’t in the second half of 2024 either.

America voted for a fairy tale. People wanted to believe that we could force other countries to make us rich, cut waste to eliminate the deficit, and make prices go back in time. They wanted to think we could be a world leader while staying out of world affairs and that our problems weren’t created by ourselves but caused by migrants, foreign nations, and inclusivity.

America voted for promises that can never be kept.

-We can’t cut our way to a surplus
-We can’t tariff our way to prosperity
-We can’t reduce prices with a snap of our fingers

The fairy tale is a fable full of lessons. But will America learn from it?🧵 Elon Musk, co-leader of the fake Department of Government Efficiency, promised $2 trillion in cuts from the federal budget. This would more than eliminate the deficit and create a healthy surplus, allowing for more tax cuts aimed primarily at corporations and the wealthy. Many other Republicans promised similar feats. The idea is that our problems aren’t a lack of revenue but one of wasteful spending that could be easily tidied up.

Musk has admitted that the $2 trillion goal isn’t happening and would consider reaching even half of that an achievement. They won’t.

I didn't realize that a two-sentence tweet would get so much attention, so here is a longer explanation of why Social Security doesn't add to the national debt: 🧵 Americans pay a specific tax, known as a payroll tax, that funds Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. Social Security must use the funds it receives through the payroll tax to pay benefits and is prohibited from borrowing money. By law, Social Security can never increase the national debt.

So why do people claim that Social Security is increasing the debt?

The first reason is conflating a deficit with debt. Social Security has been paying out more than it has brought in in recent years. It has a deficit, but past years' surpluses have covered it. Social Security has not borrowed a penny to cover this deficit.

When people talk about how Social Security will run out of money at some point in the future, they mean that the past surpluses will be used up. At that point, Social Security still wouldn’t borrow money. Benefits would be reduced to what it can afford, about 80% of what they are today.

Reduced benefits would be a problem, so there is an urgency to solve the deficit before the surplus runs out, but Social Security would neither be out of money nor incurring debt.

Election Day is getting close. Here is what you need to know about the two candidates:

Economy

Trump:
-Lost millions of jobs, including hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs
-Awarded corporations who offshored 200,000 jobs over $420 billion in federal contracts
-Shot the unemployment rate up to 6.4%
-Debt-to-GDP ratio of 132%
-Said he would have an infrastructure week but never did anything
-Worked with Saudia Arabia and Russia to cut oil production, launching prices higher

Biden-Harris:
-Created over 16 million jobs, more than 600,000 of which are manufacturing jobs as factory investment boomed
-The unemployment rate has been continually near or below 4%. Currently 4.1%
-Debt-to-GDP ratio of 124%
-Infrastructure projects are happening nationwide
-Highest energy production in world history
-Real wages are higher now than before the pandemic Immigration/Border

Trump:
-Border crossings began rising in May 2020 and rose every month for nine months through the end of Trump’s term. His final month in office saw over 75,000
-Told Republican Senators to kill the conservative bipartisan border bill
-Signed an order barring any deportation of Venezuelan migrants on his way out of office. Venezuelan migrant encounters climbed to almost 200,000 by 2022
-Terrorist attacks happened inside the US

Biden-Harris:
-Border crossings have dropped massively since December 2023. July, August, and September have seen the lowest number of border crossings since September 2020: ~54,000 per month.
-Biden was ready to sign the bipartisan border bill. Harris also said she would sign it.
-Reduced sanctions on Venezuela and addressed other root causes to reduce migration substantially
-No terrorist attacks have happened inside the US

The FBI just released its annual crime statistics report for the United States. The report was filled with good news:

-Murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased 11.6%
-Rape saw a 9.4% decrease
-Aggravated assault decreased 2.8%
-Robbery decreased 0.3%
-Hate Crimes decreased 0.6%
-Overall, violent crime decreased 3%

That is on top of the good news from the 2022 report, which found:

-Murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased 6.1%
-Rape decreased 5.4%
-Aggravated assault decreased 1.1%
-Overall, violent crime decreased 1.7%
-Robbery did increase 1.3% in 2022

The US has reached the lowest violent crime rate in 50 years, and crime continues to decrease significantly in 2024.

This should be a cause for celebration, but it isn’t for some. Republicans have dismissed these reductions in crime during the entire Biden-Harris administration. They don’t want to see a Democratic administration succeeding because that increases the chances that Democrats will win in the upcoming election.

This has caused many in the Republican party, including Donald Trump, to believe the lie that crime is rising, not falling and that major cities aren’t reporting their crime data to the FBI.

It is surprising how long this lie has lasted, given how easy it is for anyone with an internet connection to disprove. It is difficult to be sure where this lie originated, but one website, The Marshall Project, is routinely referenced to defend this falsehood.

At its core, The Marshall Project is a professional-looking site of a non-profit focused on criminal justice. There are likely plenty of factual articles and reports throughout their site. However, a key one isn’t: their claims that police data is missing from the FBI database.

They’ve written about it multiple times, and it has been picked up by newspapers and the media across the country, including trusted names like Newsweek. The issue is that none of these outlets fact-checked The Marshall Project’s data despite it being publicly available.

It doesn’t take much to debunk their claims, such as their claim that over 30% of police agencies didn’t report their data to the FBI in 2022 or 2023.

A simple look at the FBI data shows a report rate of 83.3% of agencies in 2022 and 85.2% in 2023, which covered 93.5% and 94.3% of the US population, respectively.

That is very much in line with the report rate for 2020, which saw 85.4% of agencies report their data, covering 95.2% of the population.