The Delusions of the Donald
We knew Trump’s economic policy proposals were unhinged. Until yesterday, we didn’t know he was barely able even to talk about them.
We’ll see you tomorrow, Philadelphia! Happy Wednesday.
Uh, What Was That?
by Andrew Egger
Back in January, the great McKay Coppins wrote a piece for the Atlantic titled “You Should Go to a Trump Rally.” The idea was that secondhand media accounts don’t really do justice to the perverse spectacle of lies, threats, and grievances. You’ve got to experience one for yourself to truly appreciate it.
Here’s a corollary suggestion: You should watch the interview Trump did yesterday at the Economic Club of Chicago. You might think you’ve got a pretty good idea of the big guy’s solipsism, his buffoonish overconfidence, his utter inability to engage on matters of policy. Watch a few answers, and you’ll be forced to conclude: It’s way worse than you thought.
Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait began by asking Trump simple questions, like how he plans to pay for the $7 trillion hole his proposals would blow in the federal deficit. Trump responded with his ordinary magical thinking about making that sum back through a combination of growth and tariffs. “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff,’” he said. “It’s my favorite word . . . the most beautiful word.”
Micklethwait asked how Trump planned to follow through on his promises of trimming the fat of wasteful spending. Trump responded with a lengthy story about him personally spending months negotiating with Boeing over a contract for new planes to serve as Air Force One, which ultimately saved the government more than a billion dollars. A cool story—until you remember the federal government spends an average of nearly $17 billion a day.
It takes a certain amount of ego and delusion to run for president. Trump has those characteristics in excess. But what stood out at the talk yesterday was the degree to which these are now the only elements undergirding his vision. Gone is the talk about surrounding himself with the best people. Dropped is the pretense that his answers are coherent. (Trump has started referring to his meandering logorrhea as “the weave.”) The pitch instead is that some sort of mad genius remains within him: Trust me, I’m the deals guy! I’ll get the best deals!
But there’s a lot more to guiding the economy than dealmaking, and even the most capable, hard-nosed, mano-a-mano negotiating with individual vendors can only take you so far.
Consider another question he got on antitrust policy. Permit me to quote verbatim. I want you to get the full effect.
MICKLETHWAIT: The U.S. Justice Department is thinking about breaking up Alphabet, as Google likes to be known now. Should Google be broken up?
TRUMP: [heavy sigh] 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 over that. A lot of people have seen that. They can’t even believe it.
MICKLETHWAIT: But the question is about Google, President Trump.
TRUMP: Yeah. Look, Google’s got a lot of power. They’re very bad to me. Very, very bad to me. I mean, I can speak from that standpoint. They only have bad stories. In other words, if I have 20 good stories and 20 bad stories—and everyone’s entitled to that—you’ll only see the 20 bad stories. And I called the head of Google the other day, and I said, I’m getting a lot of good stories lately. But you don’t find them in Google. I think it’s a whole rigged deal. I think Google’s rigged, just like our government is rigged, all over the place.
MICKLETHWAIT: You would break them up, in other words?
TRUMP: I’d do something. You have to have—look, I give a lot of credit. They’ve become such a power. It’s such a power. And you gotta give ‘em credit for that. How they became a power is really the discussion. At the same time, it’s a very dangerous thing, because we wanna have great companies. We don’t want China to have these companies. You know, China is a very powerful, very smart group of people . . .
This talk of China led to a brief, equally unintelligible exchange on Trump’s flip-flops on whether the government should force a sale of the Chinese-owned app TikTok. A few minutes later, Trump abruptly resumed his rant about Google’s coverage of him:
TRUMP: I think [TikTok] is a threat. I frankly think everything’s a threat. But sometimes you have to fight through these threats. You know, you can’t—just like Google. I’m not a fan of Google. They treat me badly. But are you gonna destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, are you gonna destroy the company? What you can do without breaking it up is make sure that it’s more fair. They do treat me very badly. Oh, and he told me, “No way. You’re the number one person on all of Google for stories.” Which probably makes sense, to be honest with you. I actually believe most of ‘em are bad stories. But these are minor details. And it’s only bad because of the fake news. ‘Cause the news is really fake. That’s the one we really have to straighten. We have to straighten out our press, because we have a corrupt press.
The state of antitrust policy is in major flux in America right now, in large part because Trump began a break from a heap of old GOP orthodoxies. And yet it’s painfully clear that he is wholly incapable, not only of sharing his opinion on that matter, but even of forming thoughts about it. He hears “Justice Department,” and his brain short-circuits to a screed about voter rolls. He hears “Google,” and his mind scuttles over to the nearby topic he actually cares about: the jerks at the company who (supposedly) keep suppressing all the good stories about him.
Trump considers himself an elite negotiator who thinks the best solution to every policy problem is to get the people responsible into the Oval Office so he can give ‘em the old Art of the Deal treatment. But he’s also an egomaniacal buffoon who is hilariously vulnerable to being buttered up by anybody he’s negotiating with. He’s already pledged to hand over huge swaths of the government to Elon Musk. He’s changed multiple positions based on meetings with donors. He may be one of the world’s easiest marks.
And that’s what makes him dangerous too. Micklethwait seemed to be getting there when he noted that business people like certainty and the rule of law. Would Trump commit, this year, to respecting and encouraging a peaceful transfer of power?
“Well, you had a peaceful transfer of power,” Trump replied.
“A peaceful transfer of power compared with Venezuela,” Micklethwait said. “But it was by far the worst transfer of power in a long time.”
Here Trump said, in effect: What, nobody’s allowed to protest anymore? “You take a look at the Democrats, they protested 2016. They’re still protesting it. Nobody talks about them. But if we protest, we want to have honest elections.” He both minimized his crowd’s violence and vilified the officer who shot a rioter at the vanguard of the mob:
Not one of those people had a gun. Nobody was killed except for Ashley Babbitt. She was killed. She was killed. She was shot in the head by a policeman that had no—what he did was horrible. So I think we should be allowed to disagree on that. And obviously you see, by the reaction in this room, there’s a lot of other people that feel . . .
It’s plain Trump hasn’t budged an inch from his initial reaction to the insurrection, that the rioters were virtuous and patriotic. But note that last bit: “the reaction in this room.” Routinely in his questions, Micklethwait appealed to the hard-minded business sensibilities of those in the audience. Recall, after all, the venue: the Economic Club of Chicago, where business leaders had assembled to hear Trump speak. Micklethwait plainly thought what the group wanted was what he wanted: sensible, penetrating discussion of Trump’s economic policy thought.
But what the audience really wanted was Trump. They hooted along to his grievance mongering. They applauded his standard nonsense about other countries loading their convicts and mental patients onto buses and shipping them to the United States. They dug all that garbage about the election.
Listening to it, it was hard to miss: The rot that’s infected GOP voters goes all the way to the top.
An Old Dog
by William Kristol
When Andrew told me yesterday afternoon about Trump’s Economic Club of Chicago speech (I believe the technical term Andrew used to characterize it was “wackadoodle”), I figured I’d take his advice above and look at the video. It’s of course every bit as bad as Andrew said.
But I was curious how much worse Trump was than at previous such events. So I went back to take a look at videos from 2015 and 2019. It’s obvious when you do this: Trump’s much worse now.
Trump’s always been willful and self-indulgent and incoherent. But it turns out that age matters. Trump at age 78 is more willful and self-indulgent and incoherent than he was four or eight years ago.
So leaving aside all the other reasons Trump shouldn’t be our next president, I’ll add this obvious one that perhaps hasn’t been discussed as much as it might be: Trump is too old. He was erratic and unstable in his first term, in his early 70s. He’s more erratic and unstable at age 78. What will he be like at age 82? It’s a scary prospect.
As Peter Wehner wrote yesterday in the Atlantic, “Trump has never been well, but he has never been this unwell. The prospect of his again possessing the enormous power of the presidency, this time with far fewer restraints, is frightening.”
So it is. The White House is no place for an erratic, unstable, and angry old man.
Quick Hits
DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: “With less than a month to go before the 2024 election, fear among election workers is palpable,” Kim Wehle writes in a bracing piece for the site today. “Statistics show that threats to local election workers are surging, up 73 percent since the same time in 2022. Election officials are preparing with things like panic buttons, bulletproof glass, and sheriff’s deputies at every polling place, while election-worker turnover has reached historic highs.”
Wehle goes on:
In September, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, told CBS News: “We’re daily receiving threats, whether it’s through voicemails, emails, social media or in person,” including to her personally, “and it’s escalating. . . . They’re all rooted in lies and misinformation, which is always disappointing and sad, but at the same time, it’s real.” CBS also interviewed Kim Wyman, a top election official at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security (CISA), who said that she’s received threats like “we’re going to hang you” and “I hope somebody puts a bullet in your head.” Another CISA elections official, Cait Conley, told VOA that the set of security concerns surrounding this year’s election represent the “most complex threat landscape yet.”
Our entire system of government rests on the backs of election workers who spend their time and energy to enable the people to make their voices heard. Many are volunteers who receive no benefit but the satisfaction of giving back to their communities. A healthy society would appreciate and applaud their work. Right now, ours puts targets on their backs.
WE’RE SURE IT’S FINE: Some Pennsylvania Democrats are getting a little nervous about Kamala Harris’s state operation, Politico reports:
They say some Harris aides lack relationships with key party figures, particularly in Philadelphia and its suburbs. They complain they have been left out of events and surrogates haven’t been deployed effectively. And they’ve urged Harris staff in private meetings to do more to turn out voters of color. . .
For some Pennsylvania Democratic elected officials, party leaders and allies, 20 of whom POLITICO spoke to for this article, they’re anxious the in-state operation has set them back.
Hey, not like it’s a particularly important state, right? Meanwhile, Elon Musk announced on his platform that he is going to be hosting a series of talks across the commonwealth, in which folks would have to show that they “have voted in this election”—in Pennsylvania—if they wanted to attend. Rick Hassen, Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, suggested that could be illegal.
BULWARK v. ALL-IN: While we’re talking about the business fellas who have been seduced by Trump’s siren song of tax cuts and cultural grievance, you’ve got to listen to yesterday’s episode of The Bulwark Podcast, which featured lots of great discussion and debate between Tim and angel investor Jason Calacanis of the All-In Podcast:
“What do you think explains the change in attitude toward Trump—about your cohosts specifically, but I guess maybe Silicon Valley broadly?” Tim asked. “That’s hard for me to wrap my head around.”
Calacanis replied: “I think the Democratic party and that elite machine kind of made them feel like, even though they were donating money, that they were hated. Does that make sense?”
“I mean, no,” Tim said. “Yes, it makes sense that they think that, but the argument doesn’t make sense.”
Calacanis isn’t a Trump supporter—he remains undecided—but he hangs around with lots of Silicon Valley types that are, so his perspective is fascinating. Go watch the whole thing (or listen wherever fine podcasts are sold):
Cheap Shots
I sent an email to the Economic Club of Chicago after suffering through trump's interview on Bloomberg: "I just finished watching the Bloomberg interview with Trump. The audience was reportedly composed of members of The Economic Club of Chicago. While Trump rambled on, paid no attention to the moderator and even insulted him, told lies about Aurora CO and Springfield OH which have been repeatedly debunked by local officials, and failed to actually respond directly to any question, the audience clapped, cheered, and laughed. They obviously were thoroughly entertained. If the audience was indeed composed of members of your organization, I fear for the economic future of Chicago. " No response yet.
Re: Politico report. Understand from those of us in PA: it is hard to coordinate everything all at once. There are so many events, so many surrogates, voting is already in second week. We are all dancing as fast as we can and it literally is impossible to coordinate everything. Will some surrogates be used less optimally? Perhaps. But we have folks pouring in from out of state. PA folks are working hard to preserve the Democratic Republic.