The Great American Grift: Trump’s Luxury Lemon for the Commoner

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Once upon a time an honest American could buy a modest car without mortgaging his or her soul.

That time has long-since passed, driven off a cliff by the blundering baby hands of Donald J. Trump, carnival barker turned President.

A greasy used car-salesman. And one who somehow convinced millions a gold-plated con man from Queens gave a damn about their grocery bills or gas tanks.

Trump came to office in his 2^nd term on a flaming chariot of bluster and bullshit.

He promised economic and financial salvation to the commoner; the auto worker, the truck driver, the small business owner still paying off a 2015 Chevy with balding tires and a cracked windshield.

Inflation, Trump said, would be slashed, crushed, obliterated under the boot of Trump’s magnificent genius. We know where this promise ended up, right?

In the same place as any RFK Jr. health announcement. In other words, Trump’s magical cure turned out to be snake oil.

According to the Kelley Blue Book, the average new car transaction price in the United States in September topped $50,000 for the first time ever.

That’s 4 percent more expensive than the average new car transaction exactly a year ago under President Joe Biden. A sum that, for most Americans, might as well be a ticket to Mars

(Not with Elon though, because they don’t want to get blown up).

Want a pickup truck? That will average of $66,000. An SUV? Cough up $76,000 and sell a kidney while you’re at it.

These are not exotic imports. These are Fords and Chevys — the machines that once defined American muscle and mobility, the very foundation of America’s economic prowess.

They’re now priced as if they come with a private chef and diplomatic immunity.

What sorcery has produced such absurd figures? None.

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Just the familiar mix of incompetence, greed, and economic sadism that characterizes every Trump endeavor. Tariffs—that proud, blunt instrument of the economically illiterate—have jacked up the costs of steel, aluminum, copper, and parts.

Trump imposed tariffs that benefitted from the same intellectual rigor he applies to windmills and bleach injections, so now working-class Americans are paying the price.

But tariffs are just the warm-up act. The real horror is systemic.

Under Trump’s “leadership”—a word that will always require quotation marks when applied to a man who couldn’t lead a parade of farm animals—the affordable car has become a relic.

The $20,000 sedan is extinct. Dead. Buried.

Rolled into the same shallow grave as common sense, international allies, and affordable health care.

Car makers, like all predators, have adapted. They’ve abandoned middle-and-lower-class Americans. The very saps who bought the MAGA hats and showed up at his never-ending rallies.

Now, the automakers cater almost exclusively to the wealthy. The well-heeled. The country club caste that always wins in a rigged casino economy.

And that’s what we we have now under Trump. Nothing more than a con game.

We are, as the analysts put it, living in a “K-shaped” recovery. It’s a term so sterile and abstract it could’ve been coined by your average lying lunatic at the right-wing Heritage foundation.

But in plain English, it means this: The rich get richer and the poor don’t even get a car to sleep in.

This is the great irony of the Trump era.

The man who built his brand on the illusion of luxury—golden toilets, gaudy, eye-sore towers, steaks tougher than his tax returns—has as President, extended this illusion to tens of millions of gullible Americans.

That same illusion now animates a nation where the basic building blocks of middle-class life have now become luxuries themselves.

The automobile, once a symbol of freedom, self-reliance, and dignity, has become a badge of class division.

It’s no longer an emblem of the open road, but of all the American opportunities Trump has repossessed.

It’s a luxury item reserved for hedge funders, ass-kissers and crypto grifters, including inbred Trump family members.

So here we are, in the broken showroom in Trump’s America. The economy is a gleaming Cadillac Escalade for the rich, and a busted bicycle is reserved for everyone else.

The man who promised to fight for the “forgotten men and women” of America has, predictably, forgotten them. Though, in his defense, if the Secret Service weren’t there he’d probably forget to put on pants most days.

But!..When he needs a crowd to cheer his latest demented tantrum or distract from the Epstein files, his memory magically returns.

Of course, many of the poor souls who attempt to attend a Trump MAGA rally (or drive anywhere else) must worry about their old clunker catching fire while driving on the freeway.

Because they were sold a bill of goods by the rear-ended Ford Pinto of political con artists Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines…if you can afford one.

The rest of you can walk.

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