Trump Crumbles When Pressed on Economic Policy in Bloomberg Interview

Donald Trump continued his preelection economic event tour on Tuesday with a lengthy interview with Bloomberg at the Economic Club of Chicago. It was a total mess.

Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait did not take it easy on Trump, and it quickly became clear that the former president has no conception of the mechanics of or the potential ramifications of the economic platform he’s running on. Bluntly, the former president was incoherent when pressed with real questions about his policies.

Micklethwait spent most of the interview attempting to break Trump out of what the former president repeatedly referred to as “the weave,” his term for his rambling digressions — with ever-decreasing intelligibility — and general inability to focus on a given topic for more than a few seconds during his rallies and interviews.

Micklethwait didn’t weave along with Trump, however, repeatedly working to bring him back on topic and answer the actual questions. The grilling exposed Trump’s total cluelessness with regard to his own economic policy, and led Trump to attack Micklethwait as biased.

Here are the most notable moments from the most rigorous round of policy questioning Trump has been subjected to in recent memory.

The central pillar of Trump’s economic plan is widespread tariffs on all imported goods, with penalties appearing to increase depending on how much he dislikes the country. Economists have warned that such a policy could have devastating effects on American consumers, who would be saddled with increased costs for all imported goods.

When questioned about the specifics of his plan, and if he was aware of its pitfalls, Trump seemed ignorant of basic economic principles, insisting that other countries, not American consumers, would pay for the tariffs.

Micklethwait tried to explain the actual impact. “Three-trillion worth of imports and you will add tariffs to every single one of them, and push up the cost for all of these people to buy foreign goods,” he said. “That is just simple mathematics.”

Trump countered that he was “always good at mathematics,” and that high tariffs — and thus costs — would force companies to move production into the United States.

“That will take many, many, many years,” Micklethwait said, to which Trump replied that high enough penalties would make the move immediate, as if companies could simply wand wave production plants, orchards, wineries, factories, and the like into existence.

The former president also insisted that his tariff proposal would not result in the loss of jobs that are dependent on trade, because companies that moved to the U.S. would not be subject to the tax. “All you have to do is build your plant in the United States and you don’t have any tariffs,” he said.

Micklethwait’s attempts to keep Trump on topic earned him no grace from the former president, who hates few things more than being contradicted.

When Micklethwait asked Trump to address a report by The Wall Street Journal estimating that his economic proposals would raise the national debt by upward of $7 trillion, Trump fell back on his standard playbook: bashing the interviewer.

“What does The Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything, and so have you by the way, you’ve been wrong,” Trump replied, crossing his arms and curling into his seat.

“You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff,” he added.

One theme of the interview was Trump totally avoiding giving straight answers to the questions Micklethwait asked him. The most egregious example came when Micklethwait asked Trump if he believes the Justice Department should break up Google.

Trump responded by sighing and ranting about Virginia’s voter rolls. “The question is about Google, President Trump,” Micklethwait replied. Trump then went on a spiel about how Google is unfair to him and doesn’t show users any positive stories about him.

When Micklethwait noted that Trump’s plan to deport 11 million undocumented workers would have a large impact on the American economy — as many undocumented migrants participate in the labor force — Trump immediately pivoted to crime.

“It came out last week that 125,000 people are horrible criminals at the highest level,” Trump said and repeated a false claim that more than 13,000 undocumented migrants convicted of murder had been released into the country by the Biden administration. “We’ve had the best numbers, but now we have the worst numbers and here is the problem: We have some of the worst criminals in the world coming in,” he added.

“The issue I asked you about was the idea if you reduce immigration — every economist will tell you — if you have fewer people, there is a smaller economy,” Micklethwait interjected after Trump ranted about murderous migrants for several minutes. Trump continued and at one point singled out a member of the audience, calling her a “beautiful woman.”

“They will look at you — down [there] a beautiful woman — they’ll look at you and they will kill you,” he said.

An exasperated Micklethwait noted that the crime rate has actually gone down under Biden.

At one point in the conversation, Trump, after speaking at length about rockets, reiterated his past assertion that he would nominate billionaire Elon Musk to his government and put him in charge of cutting wasteful spending and regulations. When asked by Micklethwait to give an example of how he would cut waste, Trump pointed to the remodeling of Air Force One.

Trump’s tariff proposal could be a disaster for small businesses that rely on imports. Micklethwait noted that when Trump imposed a tariff on Chinese imports while he was in office — one that is smaller that what he is proposing for a second term — he helped Apple deal with the ramifications, giving them a deal. Micklethwait then asked Trump how he would help companies that aren’t so big. Trump was unable to provide a response, repeatedly bringing up how he helped Apple despite Micklethwait’s efforts to get him to address small businesses.

Journalist Bob Woodward reports in his new book War that Trump has spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin multiple times since leaving office. Trump’s team denied this, but Trump declined to do so himself on Tuesday, telling Micklethwait that he won’t comment on it, but that if he did talk to Putin it would “be a smart thing.”

Trump argued that his tariffs will lead Mercedes-Benz to start building in the U.S., arguing that now they build everything in Germany and their cars are only assembled in the U.S. He doesn’t seem to have much respect for the autoworkers at these “assembly” plants. “They take them out of a box and they assemble them,” Trump said. “We could have a child do it.”

Trump tried yet again to rewrite history about Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. He said on Tuesday that it was a “peaceful transfer of power,” accused Micklethwait of being biased against him for asking the questions, and reiterated that he believes the 2020 election was “crooked.”

“It was love and peace,” Trump said of Jan. 6. “Some people went to the Capitol and a lot of strange things happened there, with people being waved into the Capitol by police,” he added, nodding to conspiracy theories that the federal government helped orchestrate the riot to make Trump and his supporters look bad.

At one point, after Trump spent minutes meandering through multiple trains of thought in response to a question about the American dollar’s status as an international reserve currency, Micklethwait attempted to interject into his rambling. Trump wasn’t happy.

“You have got to be able to finish a thought because it is very important,” Trump said.

“You’ve gone from the dollar to [Emmanuel Macron],” Micklethwait countered.

The former president claimed that his speaking style was “called the weave” and that “it’s all these different things happening.”

OK then.