Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said yesterday that he’s going to introduce legislation in the next Congress to fulfill one of RePresident-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises.
We pause now for a routine reminder that not everything Trump says is bad. Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled newsfucking.
Sanders said he was referring to Trump’s promise to cap your credit-card interest rates at 10%:
This is an especially pertinent issue at the moment, as Americans burdened by predatory Wall Street debt are defaulting on their credit-card debts at rates unseen since the last economic crisis.
The Financial Times reports that Wall Street credit-card companies wrote off $46 billion in unpaid debts during the first nine months of this year. That’s up 50% from the same period in 2023.
(It’s worth noting that any industry capable of writing off $46 billion needs to be regulated into a prison cell.)
As Raw Story reports, there’s understandable skepticism about Trump’s sincerity on the issue of saving consumers from Wall Street by capping their interest rates. But, of course, that’s no reason to drop it!
If Trump’s promise was genuine, do it. If it’s not genuine, why let him get away with breaking it? Let him kill the thing he promised.
But Sanders is doing something other than just rolling the dice for a win on policy or politics. Because he left something out from what Trump actually said on the campaign trail. And it’s really important!
And I only found it because your transcript-checking TFN actually checked the transcript. Here’s what Trump said in full, emphasis added for gotcha-ness:
“While working Americans catch up [from inflation], we’re going to put a temporary cap on credit card interest rates at 10%. It’s too much. They’re paying 25%, 28%. It’s too much.”
Got that? Sanders left out Trump’s caveat that it’s temporary. Once working families have recovered from the inflation Trump won’t fix, then Trump will reattach them to the feeding tubes so Wall Street can resume extracting their precious bodily fluids forever.
Trump’s vision for America is that we — debtors — be given just enough breathing room to “catch up.” Then it’s back onto the fucking treadmill, serf boys and girls.
Leaving that out — as most media have — is terrific judo. When Trump acknowledges a shitty element of our system with a half-assed proposal to mitigate it, Democrats should run with it and extend it. Tough for Trump to reject a full-ass fix when he’s already on record acknowledging the problem.
This way, Sanders potentially boxes Trump in either to permanently cap rates or to make the politically disastrous argument that, yep, Wall Street should be allowed to charge people 25%, 28% in perpetuity. Once people “catch up.”
And it should be popular on the right! Because Jesus hates interest rates, Trump’s massive Christian base will be all in to cap them, right? Right?!?
Republished with permission from The Fucking News.
