A New Level of Incoherence From Trump

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/09/a-new-level-of-incoherence-from-trump/679742/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/fJWeR

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It was a good question, particularly for a ticket that has claimed to be staunchly pro-family. As my colleague David Graham wrote this morning, “The GOP insists that it has become a pro-worker party in addition to a pro-family party, but when its policies are subjected to even minimal scrutiny, they seem to offer little to no benefits for working families.” (J. D. Vance, for his part, answered a similar question on Wednesday with the unrealistic assumption that all Americans can rely on family members for help with child care: “Maybe, like, Grandma or Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more.”)

The lack of clear policy commitments in Trump’s response is a problem; so is the fact that the tariff plan he has been hawking is likely to raise prices for American consumers by billions of dollars. But the biggest problem, the problem that all journalistic analysis of Trump’s response ought to lead with, is that his answer makes absolutely no sense. Earlier this summer, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, warned about “one of the most pernicious biases in journalism, the bias toward coherence.” Journalists “feel, understandably, that it is our job to make things make sense,” he wrote. “But what if the actual story is that politics today makes no sense?”

Reading through some media outlets’ attempts to report on Trump’s comments yesterday, one can witness in real time the process of trying to impose sense where there is none. An Associated Press headline reads: “Trump Suggests Tariffs Can Help Solve Rising Child Care Costs in a Major Economic Speech”; the article gives ample space—and the implication of seriousness—to Trump’s unspecified tariff plan. A CNN headline reads: “Trump Claims Boosting Tariffs Will Pay for Child Care but Doesn’t Explain How.” The story acknowledges that Trump “dodged” the question asked, but it still tries to parse a policy point from his answer, discussing economists’ concerns with Trump’s tariff idea and Harris’s own proposals to lower the cost of child care for Americans.

A Newsweek article rounded up some social-media comments about Trump’s incoherent response but then went on to say: “However, not all social media users were critical, with a number praising Trump for answering questions, pointing out that Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris has largely avoided unscripted interviews during her campaign.” This point will hopefully be obvious to most readers, but one can both believe that Harris’s campaign should have more sit-down interviews with reporters and hold Trump to a bar higher than he answered a question with words that did not make sense.

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