This is the first in an occasional series about Donald Trump’s statements and language and what’s at stake in the election.
On Saturday, at a rally in Wisconsin, Donald Trump said some bizarre and potentially damaging stuff about economic policy. “So what?” you may say; it was, after all, a day ending in “y.” And to be honest, the most vile thing he said at that event wasn’t about economics; it was his declaration that his vision or plan for “getting them out” — deporting undocumented immigrants — “will be a bloody story.”
Still, his remarks about how he would use tariffs to preserve the dollar’s status as a reserve currency should worry anyone imagining that international economic policy during a second Trump term would be like policy in his first term — a lot of sound and fury signifying not much.
What did Trump say? Summaries of Trump’s statements often make them sound more coherent than they are — a process some have decried as sanewashing. So let me hand over the mic to Trump himself and reproduce his remarks verbatim.
First, he proclaimed his own infallibility: “Trump is always right. I hate to be right. I hate to be right. I’m always right.”
Really? In 2020, Trump predicted a stock market crash if Joe Biden was elected; as of Friday’s close, stocks are, in fact, up 40 percent since Biden took office. Now, everyone makes bad predictions; I’m more alarmed by the idea of handing power to a man who believes that he’s never wrong.
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