Newsweek has published an opinion piece with at least 22 false claims. That piece, “Next Year Will Be the Best America’s Had in a Long Time,” reads as though it came straight from a Trump rally with no fact checkers present.
The author, Paul du Quenoy, is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. In 859 words, he manages to touch on virtually every conspiracy theory put forth by the Trump campaign.
Your immediate response, like mine, might be, “Why the hell did Newsweek publish this?”
Rodney Kennedy
The once-venerable newsmagazine is now owned by Dev Pragad and Johnathan Davis, two men with ties to a cult called Olivet World Assembly and Olivet University. Pragad is a millionaire who is credited both with saving the magazine and enriching himself at the same time.
Du Quenoy’s Palm Beach Freedom Institute has a glossy internet presence: “The Palm Beach Freedom Institute promotes education and public policy defending the principles of the American Founding, the exceptionalism of the American experience, and the free exercise of civil rights and civil liberties as protected by the Constitution of the United States.”
The key is in the phrase “the exceptionalism of the American experience.” Read a bit more and you discover the institute is an ardent opponent of wokeness and cancel culture.
The chairman of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute is Robert Allen. He’s an elite lawyer who played a role in the Bush v. Gore case that decided the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. His bio says he is “one of the best yacht lawyers in the world.” This is part of Trump’s crowd.
The Newsweek piece fails, for starters, by accepting Donald Trump’s campaign hyperbole that the United States is a sad and failing county. Thus du Quenoy begins: “America stands on the threshold of a new era of prosperity at home and peace abroad.”
No evidence is offered for this audacious claim. It is all emotion.
The facts and the feelings do not match. MAGA doesn’t believe the economists, the scientists, the historians, the scholars or the experts on anything else. No amount of evidence will suffice. This is all about feelings.
MAGA sounds like fundamentalist Christians crying out, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”
Their mantra: “Trump says it. I believe it. That settles it.”
“In faith, whatever Trump describes as reality becomes real to them.”
In faith, whatever Trump describes as reality becomes real to them. According to historian Robert McElvaine, “in the reckoning of believers, ‘in fact’ is a phrase as weightless as an astronaut in space. Evidence that goes against received truth thereby proves itself to be false. Blind faith wouldn’t be blind if it could see facts.”
Paul du Quenoy
The author declares 2025 will be “the best year” for America because he buys Trump’s dark vision of America today.
Peter Baker, writing for The New York Times, explains this well: “To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship.”
He counters: “But by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time … is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.”
Here are the facts:
- There are no American troops at war.
- Murders are down
- Illegal immigration is down.
- The stock market has finished its best two years in a quarter century.
- Employment is up.
- Wages are rising.
- The economy is growing.
- Domestic energy production is higher than ever.
- Overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years.
- Even inflation has returned to close to normal.
The distance between facts and feelings never has divided Americans as much as now. People feel the country is not doing well because Trump has been telling them that for 10 years.
Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, says, “Trump’s followers are living in a dark fantasy.”
“The distance between facts and feelings never has divided Americans as much as now.”
Here is a cursory review of the false claims made by du Quenoy in his prediction for impending American greatness.
First, he claims Kamala Harris was a “disastrously unqualified candidate who offered more decay, decline and disorder masquerading as ‘joy.’”
The facts clearly contradict the harsh judgment. Harris graduated from Howard University. She earned a law degree from the University of California Law School. In her career, she has been the district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of California, a United States Senator and vice president of the United States.
Donald Trump has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He had no political experience before becoming president. He has been variously identified as a businessman, a really rich man, an entertainer, a creature of television, and a negotiator. Trump’s qualifications are meager compared to those of Harris.
Oh, and he’s a convicted felon; she is not.
The claim that Harris was unqualified is an unqualified lie.
Second, du Quenoy claims, “Trump’s return … will also represent a rare break with rule by Washington’s corrupt and discredited administrative-managerial caste in favor of an administration determined to demolish its structures, banish its values and prevent its return.”
The fact: The rare, unheard of break with tradition occurred on January 6, 2021. Trump attempted to incite his followers to overthrow the government of the United States. Thomas Friedman reminds us the election-denying Trumpian Republicans were violating the Constitutional rules and pushing the U.S. “into the abyss.” He wrote, “The peaceful, legitimate transfer of power is the keystone of American democracy. Break it, and none of our institutions will work for long, and we will be thrust into political and financial chaos.”
Third, du Quenoy offers an array of false claims about economic issues. He brags on Trump’s tax cuts, reducing the federal budget by one-third and restoring “hard-earned capital to the American people and significantly lessen irresponsible public spending and debt liability.”
He adds, “Meanwhile, protections for American jobs and manufacturing will reverse decades of economically harmful and strategically short-sighted decline and strike a blow against middle American poverty, the national addiction epidemic, and ‘deaths of despair’ that have kept much of the population from prosperity. Pro-growth policies in the energy sector will restore the economically and strategically essential goal of American energy independence, a major achievement that Biden recklessly abandoned.”
“It is hard to know where to begin with this cascade of falsehoods.”
It is hard to know where to begin with this cascade of falsehoods. The tax cuts for the wealthy have no impact on the lower and middle class. There is no trickle down benefit. Only Trump’s crony capitalism will profit. There’s no way to cut the federal budget in such a draconian manner without cutting the social safety net. This will, of course, negatively hurt the already slim pocketbooks of the poor who depend on food stamps, Medicaid and welfare for basic survival.
Paul Krugman gives the lie to du Quenoy’s economic claims. Trump “wants Smoot-Hawley-level tariffs. He wants mass deportations. He wants to take away the independence of the Federal Reserve. How do you justify all of that when we’re pretty much a Goldilocks economy? Inflation is very close to the target. We basically have full employment. By normal standards, this is about as good as it gets.”
Fourth, In du Quenoy’s mind, Trump’s election has made other world leaders giddy with delight. “The powerful legacy of Trump’s first administration has already attracted impressive pledges of foreign investment as well as a near-immediate willingness to talk peace from all sides in the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. It has even prompted unexpected Mexican resolve to work productively on controlling the United States’ southern border and drug trafficking.”
Mexico and Canada have not expressed any love for Trump. His arrogant imperialistic rhetoric has suggested Canada becoming part of the U.S. and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
In the real world, other nations are fearful of what Trump will do with trade agreements, tariffs and NATO. Maybe Trump and Viktor Orban are delighted. And Saudi Arabia is surely poised to give billions more dollars to Trump’s son-in-law.
Du Quenoy also gleefully takes Trump’s word that he will end the war in Ukraine on his first day back in office. He will end the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Trump has threatened Hamas with destruction if they don’t release all the hostages by Trump’s first day in office.
I hope 2025 will be a good year. But that hope is chastened by the reality that the leaders of Project 2025 will be driving the Trump engine in ways that will not make 2025 a good year for Trump’s enemies, immigrants, women, federal workers, senior citizens, the poor and African Americans. I can’t imagine it being a good year for the needy.
Facts rather than feelings need a new hearing in America. We are better served by facts than we are by the fantasy spin of a Palm Beach MAGA crony.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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