Following Trump’s train of thought as it derails on a child care question

There are a few things that are particularly useful to remember about former president Donald Trump.

One is that he operates under the assumption that he can simply talk his way out of any situation. It’s likely that this stems from his career as a salesperson: that he learned to say whatever he needed to close a deal — and then to say whatever he needed to clean up the mess from the promises he made at the outset.

Another is that he internalizes sales pitches that work. Like many salespeople, he develops a patter, a series of phrases and pitches. Those lines come out spontaneously and effortlessly, to the point that he has often winnowed them down to just their most basic elements. Instead of saying that President Joe Biden’s administration was unsuccessful for various reasons, he just says things like, “America is a failing country.”

A third thing to remember about Trump is that the sell he’s working on now isn’t focused on votes. That’s ancillary, the way that securing agreements to use the name “Trump” for marketing was ancillary. What he’s aiming for instead is applause and approval. During his speeches, that’s what he’s trying to achieve. That’s what his riffs are aimed at. He’s building a voter base the way he built a market, by getting people to approve of him. This is why he tracks crowd size so closely.

On Thursday, his push to be elected for a second term as president brought him to the Economic Club of New York. The organization prides itself on its sober, informed assessments of the economic and political worlds, meaning that Trump was already somewhat disadvantaged. His politics are not predicated on his grasp of policy but on appeals to the politically disaffected. His descriptions of how things are working are much more effective with people who don’t know how things work.

But the question that tripped him up, the one that launched a thousand criticisms and not a few memes, was one focused on something that he should theoretically have had a grasp on: child care.

“If you win in November,” a panelist asked, “can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

Here is Trump’s entire answer, verbatim.

Particularly when removed from the context of the rest of his comments, the response reads like gibberish. A few days after his running mate mocked Vice President Kamala Harris by comparing her to the fumbling, desperate answer of a pageant contestant back in 2007, Trump offered a much more convincing re-creation.

The media does admittedly often polish Trump’s claims in a way that obscures the circuity of the route he took to get there. In this case, though, it’s useful to establish at the outset what he was trying to say, in part because it helps explain how he ended up taking this particular path and in part because it doesn’t serve as much more of an endorsement.

This was the last question Trump answered at the event, one in which he was focused centrally on making the case for his economic policies. Those policies were delineated during his prepared remarks and focused heavily on the use of tariffs. So what he ended up saying, in essence, was that he was going to generate so much money from policies like tariffs — price increases that disproportionately came out of Americans’ pockets — that paying for child care would be easy.

But, at the outset, he clearly didn’t know what he was going to say. He had suddenly been thrust into a dark, smoke-filled room and had to find the exit.

He started a few times.

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down,” he began, likely preparing to claim (as he so often does) that a specific policy was being prepared and would be produced within a few weeks (as he so rarely does).

But then he appears to have remembered that this was something he had actually talked about with people (or seen people talking about it on TV). Like his daughter and, perhaps, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who introduced legislation on child care earlier this year.

“You know,” he transitioned, “I was, uh, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so, uh, impactful on that issue.”

It wasn’t going well. And when Trump is scrambling for an exit, his instinct is to find one from which he can hear the muffled sounds of applause emanating.

“It’s a very important issue,” he told the questioner. He was starting over, looking to build a rapport. He continued down that path, fumbling through the dark.

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care,” he said. ‘It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.”

You can see him figuring out what he’s going to say even as he is patting the questioner on the head.

“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,” he continued. “And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”

This is the patter kicking in. He’s going to tax the foreign manufacturers at levels they’ve never seen before! He’s going to fix our problems with One Simple Trick.

But then, it seems, he realized that he was drifting away from the actual question, which asked for a specific policy. So he wound back to that.

“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time,” he said. “Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country—”

This is a reference to his earlier promise to put Elon Musk in charge of a commission that would find the places where the government was wasting at least a third of the money it spent. This is … an overestimate of how much spending is wasted. But Trump was looping back to more comfortable, better-worn terrain closer to the overall thrust of his speech.

“Because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with child care,” he continued, “but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.” He riffed on this a little more.

That was the answer, though: that this unrealistic promise of eliminating the deficit by increasing tariffs (and, by extension, costs for Americans) and uprooting trillions of dollars in wasteful or fraudulent spending would leave the country’s coffers so flush that he would pay for child care. Which is certainly what his party would want to prioritize over tax cuts, right?

Anyway, Trump finally found the door, closing out his answer the way he likes to conclude his rallies.

“We’re going to 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,” he said. “This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again.”

The audience applauded.

“We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation,” Trump concluded, with almost palpable relief. “So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”

And that was that. Sale made — if only in the room and only for a moment.