Yesterday at the Economic Club on New York, Donald Trump gave a lengthy non-response to a question about the cost of childcare. The non-response is incoherent enough when you watch and listen. But I wanted to see it, and I think the incoherence deepens with print, or with pixels. The questioner was Reshma Saujani, the CEO of Girls Who Code. My transcription, and I’m even giving Trump the benefit of paragraphs:
“If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make childcare affordable, and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”By the way, in case you missed it, Project 2025 calls for the elimination of Head Start (page 482) and for an emphasis on funding home-based childcare, not daycare (page 486).
“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It's a very important issue.
“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, childcare is childcare, it couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it, in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they'll get used to it very quickly, and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.
“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with childcare, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.
“We're gonna make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we'll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It's about make America great again. We have to do it. Because right now we are a failing nation. [Applause.] So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.”
comments: 2
it's nice that you've been to university and so forth.
I wonder how much coherence is possible from, or expected to be heard by, regular Americans. I have noticed that when the sorts of folks who wear MAGA hats talk to each other they don't speak in paragraphs, nor connect three dots in a row.
I come from several generations of people who had high school educations or less and who could speak clearly and coherently in all sorts of circumstances. I know people who have voted for Trump who speak clearly and coherently too.(Not my relations!) I think Trump‘s splatter can be explained in several ways: it’s partly a matter of the freedom timid journalists and acolytes give him to speak unchallenged, and partly a matter of his own disordered, slowly dementing brain. It’s also a matter of his lack of interest in thinking about or presenting any clear policy proposals. Doing that work would require an ability to focus that seems beyond him.
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