The Golden Age of Lies: Trump’s Pittsburgh Delusions and the Collapse of Reality

From fake trillion-dollar deals to imaginary Coke negotiations, Trump’s Pennsylvania ramblings reveal a crumbling presidency while real heroes fight for democracy abroad.

Good morning! The US, a country where the president’s mind is rotting faster than a head of lettuce left on a dashboard in Death Valley. Donald Trump, America’s most unstable game show host turned dictator, has gifted us another masterpiece of delusion, this time live from Pennsylvania, where he stood in front of some confused executives and declared himself the architect of the greatest economic miracle in human history. None of it was true, but it didn’t stop him from rolling out a speech so packed with fabrications, fever dreams, and incoherent rambling, it could serve as a case study in advanced cognitive decay.

Let’s start with the basics: Trump descended upon Pittsburgh to announce what he called the largest investment package in Pennsylvania history, a staggering, impossible-to-trace $92 billion supposedly flowing from unnamed tech and energy companies straight into the rust belt. Not to be outdone by his own lies, he quickly inflated that figure into the multi-trillion range, claiming he secured $5.1 trillion from the Middle East, which, surprise, turned into $16 trillion after a few more minutes of babbling. The only thing actually on display in Pittsburgh was Trump’s extraordinary ability to pull fake numbers out of his shapewear and serve them up as economic gospel.

And then came the self-mythologizing greatest hits: his routine about Uncle John, the long-deceased MIT professor who apparently mentored the Unabomber, yes, that was an actual claim made by the sitting President of the United States. Never mind that Ted Kaczynski never went to MIT, he went to Harvard and the University of Michigan, never studied under John Trump, and John died in 1985 while Kaczynski was busy terrorizing America. It didn’t matter. In Trump’s brain, which runs on expired Adderall and Diet Coke, facts are optional. He even invented academic credentials for his uncle, claiming degrees in nuclear, chemical, and mathematical sciences. In reality, John Trump held degrees in electrical engineering and physics. Meanwhile, Kaczynski’s actual academic record was a PhD in mathematics from Michigan. As always, Trump replaces reality with whatever imaginary storyline makes him look like a cross between Einstein and Captain America, never mind that none of it survives even the mildest Google search.

And speaking of Diet Coke, the man who once installed a button in the Oval Office for instant soda delivery now wants you to believe he single-handedly changed the Coke recipe. Trump announced that Coca-Cola had “agreed” to switch from high-fructose corn syrup to real cane sugar in the U.S. Coke, wisely, didn’t outright call him a liar but released a corporate translation of “lol no” thanking him for his “enthusiasm.” This, from a man who couldn’t be bothered to learn basic science but wants you to believe he’s now your personal nutritionist, tasked with making America’s soft drinks great again.

While Trump was wandering around the rhetorical desert hallucinating multi-trillion-dollar deals and rewriting Coke’s ingredient list, actual courage was playing out on the other side of the world. In Ukraine, a lone special forces soldier held off five Russian attackers, survived banned chemical weapons, drone strikes, and mortar fire, and was finally evacuated alive despite being poisoned and wounded. A single human being doing more for democracy and decency in one morning than Donald Trump has managed in his entire gilded life. But don’t expect Trump to acknowledge it after all, he’s been too busy trying to gift Ghislaine Maxwell a retrial by firing Epstein prosecutors and blaming James Comey for the Epstein files. If you feel like you’ve entered a psych ward, that’s because you have, this is America’s presidency now.

Back on the home front, the Senate, operating as Trump’s ATM, passed $9 billion in cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting. That’s your kids’ PBS programming on the chopping block, your local radio stations in rural America at risk, all while Trump fabricates budget surpluses and imaginary Saudi investments. Don’t worry though, they left just enough money to keep a few radio stations on life support in tribal areas, an accidental act of decency because even Republicans couldn’t stomach the whole package.

In case you were wondering whether voters are lapping this up, they’re not. New polling shows Trump has hit a record-high disapproval rating of 55%, climbing every week as his second term limps along. Independents are abandoning him, Democrats have nearly flatlined in approval, and even his own base is fracturing, especially after his Epstein denials. Sixty percent of his 2024 voters think the Epstein files are being covered up, and they’re not wrong, but they’re looking at the wrong culprit. Trump’s attempts to pin Epstein on Obama and Comey while literally decorating his office to look like Epstein’s den are the type of projection you usually need therapy for, not public office.

And just to really seal the image of a collapsing empire, markets are buckling under Trump’s unstable regime. His threat to fire Jerome Powell over building renovations, because obviously inflation has nothing to do with interest rates and everything to do with asbestos removal, sent stocks tumbling and bond yields rising. Then Trump flip-flopped on the firing, then flip-flopped back again, because we’re ruled by the mood swings of a man who doesn’t understand how monetary policy works but thinks threatening to blow up the Federal Reserve will somehow make gas cheaper.

All the while, Trump’s enablers in Congress are out there, from Maria Salazar selling fairy tales to immigrant families before voting for mass deportations, to Marjorie Taylor Greene flip-flopping between calling America a golden age paradise or a hellhole depending on the hour and the audience. But Trump tells them it’s the golden age, and if by golden he means golden showers in high school speeches, then sure, he’s delivering exactly what he promised.

This is America in 2025: a lonely Ukrainian soldier fighting actual fascism while the leader of the free world spins drunken fairy tales about Diet Coke, sugar imports, and fake multi-trillion-dollar deals, all while dismantling civil rights and crushing the very people who elected him.

And it’s only Thursday.