The political ascent of Donald Trump has forced me to adjust upward my estimation of the American public’s gullibility. That Trump is a fraud is something I would have been able to perceive when I was 7 years old. Yet Americans twice elected him president. If I possessed the ability at age 7 to see through Trump (and I was no kind of prodigy), then gullibility about Trump can’t logically be a matter of his base lacking a college education (“I love the poorly educated”). Rather, it reflects the public’s perverse attraction to promises it understands to be hollow. As the former TNR editor Michael Kinsley observed way back in 2008, “The routine acceptance of obvious lies now corrodes our politics as much as … money.”
Trump does Kinsley one better by attaching his obvious lies to promises of money. The most ludicrous example is Trump’s pledge, restated this week, to give every adult citizen $5,000 if Republicans keep their majorities in the House and Senate. Set aside that this is essentially a bribe for votes; it’s also never going to happen because doing so would cost $1.3 trillion. Trump has a history of pledging to send out money that never arrives. Last year he promised $2,000 rebates to compensate American families for his tariffs. That didn’t happen. Neither did his promise last year to share 20 percent of DOGE savings with U.S. citizens (possibly because DOGE saved no money at all, but rather added $244 billion to the federal deficit).
Now Trump is claiming fictional economic development projects to be underway in two states where Republicans are at risk of losing Senate seats. These are Iowa (where Republican Representative Ashley Hinson is in a dead heat with Democratic state Representative Josh Turek) and Alaska (where incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan is trailing Democratic former Representative Mary Peltola).
The make-believe project in Iowa is a $15 million Mesabi Metallics steel mill that will create 1,750 jobs (plus 6,000 temporary construction jobs) in Iowa’s Lee County, where Republican Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks may also lose her seat. A White House press release called it “the largest steel plant ever built in the United States” and posted a Des Moines Register front page with the headline “Steel Project Hailed As ‘Transformational.’” “This deal is done,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick assured reporters at an Oval Office ceremony that Hinson attended on September 28. “They’ve already worked it out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal.” Trump pitched in: “They’ve already started building.”
But Lutnick and Trump were lying (and shame on the Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel for not calling them on it). The deal was not done, and Mesabi Metallics certainly hasn’t already started building; it hasn’t even purchased the land, according to Matt Christensen of KWQC in Davenport, who reviewed Lee County land records after Trump’s announcement. (Iowa’s TV news reporters are beating the crap out of the Register on this story.) Lutnick’s “this deal is done” comment was in response to a question about whether the deal was contingent on the state granting tax breaks. But if the deal was not contingent on state tax breaks, why did Republican Governor Kim Reynolds scramble to call the legislature back into session four days later to provide up to $1.4 billion in tax incentives? Five Republicans voted against it, including Dan Dawson of Council Bluffs, who chairs the state Senate’s Ways and Means Committee. Dawson told CNN that the state would end up losing $880,000 in tax revenue for every job created.
Despite that dismal accounting, the bill passed, and Reynolds signed it into law Friday night. Still, that doesn’t mean Mesabi Metallics has yet secured the billion-dollar state tax break on which the deal pretty obviously is contingent. As Amanda Rooker of KCCI in Des Moines reported October 2:
The credit would be based on the project’s qualifying investment, which can include land, site preparation, infrastructure, construction and certain business assets. The Iowa Economic Development Authority would determine how much of the credit to authorize, up to the 10 percent limit.
The company would … have to meet certain requirements before receiving the credit. The project, or a designated portion of it, would have to be operating, and at least half of the jobs associated with that portion of the project would have to be added to the company’s payroll. Those jobs would have to pay at least 140 percent of the state’s qualifying wage threshold
No permit applications have yet been received at the county level, according to KWQC’s Christensen.
There’s also some question whether Mesabi Metallics will follow through. Lana Zak of CBS News reported October 4 that Mesabi and its Indian parent company, Essar Group, “have a long history of missed deadlines and unfulfilled job promises.” In 2008, Zak reported, Essar announced plans to build a $1.6 billion iron mine and steel mill in Minnesota that promised to create 700 jobs. It was never built. KCCI’s Rooker reported that as recently as July Mesabi was planning to build the Iowa steel mill in Kentucky, and it isn’t clear its talks with Kentucky state officials have entirely ended. Memories are still fresh of Trump’s 2017 promise that Foxconn would build a plant in Wisconsin that would create 13,000 jobs. Nine years later, a much scaled-back plant has created only about a thousand jobs.
For all the unacknowledged obstacles to “the largest steel plant ever built in the United States,” Iowa’s steel mill is a slam dunk compared to a $54 billion liquid natural gas pipeline Trump’s promised for Alaska that Trump announced at a separate Oval Office ceremony on September 30. The pipeline, Trump said, is to be paid for by South Korea in partial fulfillment of its 2025 pledge to spend $350 billion in the United States (in exchange for lower tariffs). A Commerce Department press release said the United States and South Korea had “agreed to commence working on the Alaska LNG project.”
Almost immediately, South Korea disputed this. “Putting figures or using definitive language goes far beyond what was agreed,” Kim Jung-kwan, South Korea’s minister of trade, industry, and resources, told the South Korea news agency Yonhap on October 2. Indeed, the veteran Alaska commentator Dermot Cole (he spent 37 years at the Fairbanks Daily News-Minor and four at the Anchorage Daily News) reported that there are no signed agreements. Seoul Broadcasting Service reported: “The South Korean government has never agreed to this.” Cole quoted “a leading official of Korea’s ruling party” saying, “The Alaska LNG project will be decided on the basis of sufficient review in accordance with our domestic legal procedures in accordance with the principle of commercial rationality.”
Trump also announced on Truth Social that South Korea had agreed to spending $8.4 billion on an enhanced oil recovery project, prompting the South Korean government to reply that it had no earthly idea what Trump was even talking about. Trump responded by threatening to double South Korean tariffs.
The South Koreans did, however, confirm that a separate Trump announcement on September 30, of a $22.3 billion gas-fired plant to power an AI data center in La Salle County, Texas, was truthful. Texas, of course, is another midterm trouble spot for Republicans, with Senate candidate James Talarico, a Democratic state senator, pulling ahead of Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton.
In this case, though, Trump’s announcement is unlikely to do Talarico much damage because Talarico is already campaigning against new data centers. “A lot of these giant data center companies are running over local communities,” Talarico said the day Trump announced the gas-fired plant, “and these giant data centers are popping up in people’s backyards and there’s no input.” Even Republicans are split on whether building data centers is a good idea, with 46 percent in favor and 44 percent opposed.
The irony is priceless. For once Trump tells the truth, and it bites him in the ass. Maybe he should stick to lying.
