GOP nominee Donald Trump was supposed to detail his economic plan at a conference for the National Association of Home Builders in Miami on Thursday.
Sans teleprompters, it took Trump more than 20 minutes to mention any real economic proposal, telling the crowd of home builders he'd cut taxes and loosen regulations.
"We're gonna have a massive cut in regulations," he promised. "That includes banking regulations for you people, because it's impossible for you people to go get mortgages. It's so hard for people to get mortgages today."
Trump — describing himself as "into the world of charts" — held up a line graph detailing the sharp decline of homeownership during President Obama's tenure. "That's the American dream right there."
"We will eliminate the carried interest deduction, end corporate inversions, and [close] other special interest loopholes," he continued, reading from a sheet of paper. "And we're going to repeal the death tax — the estate tax."
"I know so many families that have been destroyed by the death tax," he said. (According to most recent IRS rules, the estate tax applies to "estates with combined gross assets and prior taxable gifts exceeding ... $5,450,000 in 2016.")
With respect to foreign economic policy, Trump joked, "I could take ninety percent of the people in this room, maybe higher ... [and] put them in charge of some of these trade deals that we make with these different countries and our country would be flush."
"We'd be rolling in dough," he added.
Trump padded his relatively short forty minutes-long "policy" speech with continuations of recent attacks on his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, and her one-time boss President Obama for their supposedly bolstering ISIS in the Middle East.
"ISIS will hand [Clinton] the most valuable player award," Trump said. "Her only competition is Barack Obama." He called both Clinton and Obama "the founders of ISIS."
Clinton adviser Jakes Sullivan issued the following statement in response to the above comment — which Trump has made almost daily in recent weeks — calling it "another example of Donald Trump trash-talking the United States":
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