Speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, an unfocused and irritable Donald Trump botched answers to basic questions about how his agenda would impact American businesses and consumers while not denying that he has been having phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s meandering replies consisted of the usual grab-bag of tangential anecdotes and endless grievances, his interviewer repeatedly forced to keep him on track by reminding him of the topic he was supposed to be discussing.
The performance, coming a day after a Trump “town hall” devolved into the Republican nominee meandering on stage for 39 awkward and alarming minutes as his fans listened to his favorite songs, did not reassure critics who say the former president’s recent behavior is a sign of cognitive decline. The Republican nominee was never one for specifics, or staying on message, but his claimed “weave” — rambling about something else before returning to the topic at hand — appears less intentional and more like a man experiencing the inevitable effects of aging.
“Should Google be broken up?” interviewer John Micklethwait, editor in chief of Bloomberg News, asked Trump on Tuesday.
Trump’s immediate response, in full:
"I just haven’t gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes. And the Justice Department sued them, that they should be allowed to put those bad votes and illegal votes back in and let the people vote. So I haven’t — I haven’t gotten, I haven’t gotten over that. A lot of people have seen that and they can’t even believe it."
Readers, like Trump’s interviewer on Tuesday, will try and fail to find anything about a search engine in that answer.
“The question is about Google, President Trump,” Micklethwait reminded the 78-year-old Republican (as for the Justice Department: It is indeed suing Virginia after it said the state, ostensibly targeting immigrants, illegally purged scores of U.S. citizens from its voter database).
Given a second chance, Trump talked not about Google parent company Alphabet and its hold over online advertising, for example, but how he personally had been wronged.
“They’re very bad to me,” Trump said. “I’m getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find them in Google. I think it’s a rigged deal. I think Google’s rigged, just like our government is rigged all over the place.”
Trump was also asked about his core economic agenda, which is basically taxes: lowering them for corporations and hiking them on all imported goods, the 78-year-old Republican promising to rebuild domestic manufacturing with tariffs that he wrongly claims would be paid by foreign countries.
“I’m going to put the highest tariff in history,” Trump boasted Tuesday.
In reality, businesses tend to pass on their costs to consumers — a 20% tariff on goods from China would be experienced as a 20% rise in prices at Best Buy — a fact that Micklethwait brought up during Tuesday’s discussion. Earlier this summer, 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists warned that Trump’s tariff plan would “reignite” inflation. The Committee for a Responsible Budget earlier this month also said Trump’s tax-and-spending plans would widen budget deficits by at least $7.5 trillion over the next decade, double the estimate for Vice President Kamala Harris’ proposal to boost social spending and cut middle-class taxes, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Confronted with these criticisms, Trump grew petulant.
“What does the Wall Street Journal know? I’m meeting with them tomorrow, what does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way. You’ve been wrong about everything,” the former president replied.
This, in the words of the Trump campaign, was the Republican nominee putting on a “master class.” To others, it looked an awful lot like a man in decline, devoid of any intellectual curiosity or ability to accept good-faith criticism, resorting to petty insults to obscure his own fundamental lack of understanding.
But that’s also Trump’s appeal: What looks to some like a weak man lashing out and whining to others looks like a tough guy putting one of those pompous reporters in their place.
“Trump Schools Bloomberg Editor on Tariffs,” the right-wing outlet Breitbart assured its readers, citing the exchange where Trump called his interviewer, The Wall Street Journal and over a dozen Nobel laureates “wrong” but at no point explained why.
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When one’s appeal is emotional, it does not matter if there is no substance. Trump can be as incoherent as President Joe Biden on a very bad day and it does not matter so long as the billionaire from television put some “elites” in their place (economists and some guy from Bloomberg in this case; liberals and immigrants in others).
Bullying as overcompensation for obvious insecurity and resentment that the world does not view their mediocrity as excellence? There are millions of American men who either do the same or who now live vicariously through one who does. So long as Trump is promising to hurt their shared enemies — intellectuals, minorities, women — he can say whatever; his base doesn’t know how “tariffs” work either and it’s actually suspicious if you do.
Grasping that emotional appeal is the key to unlocking Trump’s power. If that appeal isn’t there, then one is freed to judge the three-time Republican candidate for president as one would any other politician with a record to examine. Trump saying it would be “a smart thing” to talk to Putin from Mar-a-Lago, where he stashed some of the nation’s most sensitive national security documents, or insisting there was a “peaceful” transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021, as he did Tuesday — it starts to look like lies or far worse.
“His brain is completely out of commission,” conservative attorney George Conway posted on social media regarding Trump’s scattered responses. But former Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., a Tea Party activist turned critic of MAGA, went a step further, channeling what would have been the conservative response to any other politician keeping in constant contact with an adversary after having tried go overthrow the republic: “He’s a traitor to this country.”
Unfortunately for Trump’s conservative critics, the movement they built has become a cult of personality willing to embrace anything, up to and including treason, so long as it means pain is inflicted on everyone else. The Republican candidate can say whatever he likes about tariffs, or say nothing at all; that the right people are mad about it is more than half of the attraction.
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