We Need to Talk About Donald Trump's Cognitive Failings

The economic portions of his nomination acceptance speech made no sense, Like, at all.

Photo by Max Letek on Unsplash

A few months ago I wrote the following about how the New York Times should be covering Donald Trump if he’s the 2024 frontrunner:

If Trump is leading now, shouldn’t the Gray Lady be taking a harder look at Trump’s proposed policies and personnel choices? If the Times really wants to talk about inflation, shouldn’t its business and political reporters provide more in-depth reporting about how Trump’s proposed policies — tax cuts, protectionist barriers, forced expulsion of migrants, eroding the independence of the Fed — would cause a massive spike in inflation?

Since then, there has been a lot of (justified) attention put on Joe Biden’s cognitive failings. And yet, even though Trump is even more of a favorite now than he was two months ago. the MSM focus on his economic policies has been wanting. This remains true despite the fact that there is near-universal consensus among economists and economic policymakers that Trump’s second-term policies would be far more likely to simultaneously explode the deficit and the inflation rate.

And now we come to Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. The speech was a lot of things — long, rambling, boring, tendentious, a tell for which reporters pre-wrote their stories, etc.

The economics contained within Trump’s speech, however, was worse than tendentious. It was nonsensical.

Think I am exaggerating? Let’s just take a look at the transcript of Trump’s acceptance speech and excerpt the economic policy portions of it verbatim:

I will end the devastating inflation crisis immediately, bring down interest rates and lower the cost of energy . We will drill, baby, drill. Can you believe what they’re doing?

But by doing that, we will lead a large-scale decline in prices. Prices will start to come down.

Energy… Raised it, they took our energy policies and destroyed them. Then they immediately went back to them, but by that time, so much was lost. But we will do it at levels that nobody’s ever seen before, and we’ll end lots of different things. We’ll start paying off debt and start lowering taxes even further. We gave you the largest tax cut. We’ll do it more.

Now, people don’t realize, I brought taxes way down, way, way down. And yet we took in more revenues the following year than we did when the tax rate was much higher. Most people said, how did you do that? Because it was incentive. Everybody was coming to the country, they were bringing back billions and billions of dollars into our country. The companies made it impossible to bring it back. The tax rate was too high and the legal complications were far too great. I changed both of them, and hundreds of billions of dollars by Apple and so many other companies would work back into our nation, and we had an economy the likes of which nobody, no nation had ever seen. China, we were beating them at levels that were incredible. And they know it. They know it. We’ll do it again, but we’ll do it even better….

First, we must get economic relief to our citizens. Starting on Day 1, we will drive down prices and make America affordable again. We have to make it affordable. It’s not affordable. People can’t live like this.

Under this administration, our current administration, groceries are up 57 percent, gasoline is up 60 and 70 percent, mortgage rates have quadrupled, and the fact is it doesn’t matter what they are because you can’t get the money anyway. Can’t buy houses. Young people can’t get any financing to buy a house. The total household costs have increased an average of $28,000 per family under this administration.

Republicans have a plan to bring down prices, and bring them down very, very rapidly. By slashing energy costs, we will in turn reduce the cost of transportation, manufacturing and all household goods. So much starts with energy. And remember, we have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country by far. We are a nation that has the opportunity to make an absolute fortune with its energy. We have it and China doesn’t. Under the Trump administration just three and a half years ago, we were energy independent. But soon we will actually be better than that. We will be energy dominant and supply not only ourselves, but we will supply the rest of the world.

With numbers that nobody has ever seen and we will reduce our debt, $36 trillion. We will start reducing that. And we will also reduce your taxes still further….

And next, we will end the ridiculous and actually incredible waste of taxpayer dollars that is fueling the inflation crisis. They’ve spent trillions of dollars of things having to do with the Green New Scam. It’s a scam. And that has caused tremendous inflationary pressures in addition to the cost of energy.

And all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams and we will not allow it to be spent on the meaningless Green New scam ideas.

And I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one. Thereby saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now and saving U.S. customers thousands and thousands of dollars per car….

Plants will be built in the United States and our people are going to man those plants. And if they don’t agree with us, we’ll put a tariff of approximately 100 to 200 percent on each car and they will be unsellable in the United States….

Remember, U.S.M.C.A. I got rid of NAFTA the worst trade deal ever made and replaced it with U.S.M.C.A. which is, they say, the best trade deal ever made. Actually, probably the best trade deal was the deal I made with China where they buy $50 billion of our product. They were buying nothing. They buy $50 billion worth. They had to but I don’t even talk about it because of Covid. I don’t even mention it frankly because of what happened with the China virus.

We will not let countries come in, take our jobs, and plunder our nation. They come and do that. They plunder our nation.

The way they will sell their product in America is to build it in America, very simple. Build it in America and only in America. And this very simple formula, and congress has to go along with us and they will. This very simple formula will create massive numbers of jobs. We will take over the auto industry again and many many, hundreds of thousands of jobs, we lost so many jobs over the years. If you go back 20, 25 years they’ve stolen, going to China and Mexico, about 68 percent of our auto industry. Manufacturing jobs. We’re going to get them all back. We’re going to get them all back, every single one of them.

At the center of our plan for economic relief are massive tax cuts for workers that include something else that stood out to be very popular actually. Here it’s very popular. In this building and all those hotels that are so nice, I’m staying in a nice one. It’s called no tax on tips. No tax on tips. No tax on tips….

I am going to protect Social Security and Medicare. Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare because all of these people, by the millions, they’re coming in. They’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare and other things and you’re not able to afford it. They are destroying your Social Security and your Medicare.

Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before and we’re going to do it very rapidly….

From an economic development standpoint, I’m going to make it all right here. No more sending it out to other countries in order to help. It’s America first, America first.

We will unleash the power of American innovation, and as we do, we will soon be on the verge of finding the cures to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and many other diseases. We’re going to get to the bottom of it.

So a few things:

1. I didn’t hear Trump’s speech live, but the transcript reads as borderline incoherent. Sure, Biden often trails off in his sentences, and that’s not great. The quoted sections above? Even reading the speech it’s easy to detect when he was reading from the teleprompter and when he was just babbling.

2. Trump is promising that prices will fall once he is president again. Inflation is bad, and I get why Trump is running on it, but deflation is way, way worse. Promising that your goal is to generate an effect that hasn’t been seen in the U.S. economy since the Great Depression is a weird campaign promise.¹

3. To the extent that Trump has a theory for how he’s going to lower prices, it seems to be through cheaper energy through greater domestic production. To be fair, a significant drop in energy prices would be the kind of positive supply shock that could boost growth while reducing inflation. The thing is, U.S. energy supply has already increased significantly under Biden. As Vox’s Nicole Narea reported earlier this year, “The US is the largest crude oil producer in the world, pumping out nearly 13 million barrels on average every day in 2023, an all-time record, according to new data from the US Energy Information Administration…. For the last six years, America has outstripped Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other OPEC countries in crude oil production. And it has picked up the pace under Biden, who had approved more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands by last October than former President Donald Trump had by the same point in his presidency.” Electricity prices have still gone up, mostly due to exiting the pandemic and extreme weather. So I don’t see how Trump would do much better in this area.

4. It is striking that in the fact checks of Trump’s speech, it is his economic claims that come up the most frequently — almost as if Trump is economically illiterate or something.

5. Trump blasting the “incredible waste of taxpayer dollars that is fueling the inflation crisis” was peak economic illiteracy. I think he was trying to claim that the Green New Deal was jacking up energy prices, triggering inflation. But taxes do not increase inflation. That’s just nonsense.

6. Every claim that Trump made about trade policy was unmitigated horseshit.

So what I read is a presidential candidate proposing a set of economic policies that range from incoherent to disastrous. And it would be great if the media paid as much attention to Trump’s cognitive failings on economics as they did with respect to Biden’s debate failings.

1. I suppose it is entirely in keeping with Trump and Vance’s efforts to bring GOP economic policies back to the interwar period.