Donald Trump brought some props with him to his speech Wednesday, promoted as an opportunity to hear about the Republican presidential nominee’s economic agenda: Tic Tacs.
About halfway through his remarks, he held up two containers of the mints, one large, one small.
“I just happened to have — somebody gave me this one today,” he said, referring to the small one. “I said, I think we’ll put it up as an example of inflation.”
The point, it seemed, was to show (as he did last year) how Tic Tac container sizes had shrunk while remaining the same price. (His assertion that his use of the mints was “the greatest commercial [Tic Tacs] ever had” would therefore seem not to be true.) But he didn’t actually make that point. He just held up the Tic Tacs.
Never mind the irony of Donald Trump criticizing someone for making a promise to consumers that was misleading. It’s also remarkable that Trump would emphasize that he carries around Tic Tacs, given that the mints were revealed as his breath-freshener of choice in the “Access Hollywood” tape.
But the broader issue here is that Trump’s “economy” speech was not a speech on the economy. It was a standard Trump campaign speech, with a few more lines about economic proposals slotted in on occasion.
Over the course of the nearly 12,000 words spoken from the stage, about 2,000 actually detailed the economy. And even those were generally a mishmash of robotic teleprompter pledges and off-the-cuff riffs about whatever happened to be on Trump’s mind.
This is not what he promised beforehand or even as the speech got underway.
“We’re doing this as a intellectual speech,” he promised the raucous audience. “You’re all intellectuals today. Today we’re doing it, and we’re doing it, right now. And it’s very important. They say it’s the most important subject.” Later, he added that “I’m not sure it is. But they say it’s the most important. Inflation is the most important. But that’s part of economy.”
Immediately after deciding that inflation counted as “economy,” Trump got started … by disparaging Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“Kamala Harris wants to be in charge of the entire U.S. economy, but neither she nor her running mate — he’s a beauty, isn’t he?” Trump said. “He signed a bill. He wants tampons in boys’ bathrooms.”
What actually happened is that Walz signed a number of bills related to the state budget, one of which dealt with schools and included new funding for menstrual products that would be placed in school bathrooms. But here we are, already not talking about the economy.
When he did talk about the economy, it generally went the way it did when he was talking about energy prices.
“I’m announcing today that under my leadership, the United States will commit to the ambitious goal of slashing energy and electricity prices by half,” he said, reading from the teleprompter. Then, he turned to the audience. “At least. Half.” This is how Trump operates: He reads his prepared remarks and, almost invariably, has to juice them up. Cut them in half? Nah, at least half! Probably more!
Back to the prompter: “We intend to slash prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.” And then off-prompter again: “And if it doesn’t work out, you say, oh, well, I voted for him. I still got it down a lot, but we’re looking to do it. We’re looking to cut them in half, and we think we’ll be able to do better. And every single thing that I promised, I produced. Every single thing. You will never have had energy so low as you will under a certain gentleman known as Donald J. Trump. Have you heard of him? So we think your energy bills will be down by 50 to 70 percent. How good would that be for a thing called inflation?”
Okay, sure. So how? Eventually he suggested it would be by increasing oil production, which has already hit record highs under President Joe Biden. But not before asides on how even doughnut shops need energy and about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
His central criticism of Biden’s handling of the economy, which he blamed mostly on Harris for obvious reasons, is that bad things in the economy are functionally downstream from — wait for it — immigration. No wonder he began the speech by arguing that maybe the border is actually the most important subject.
Harris, Trump said, had a “three-step plan to destroy Medicare and to destroy Social Security.” Not cutting funding for those programs (which Trump’s proposed budgets as president consistently endorsed). But, instead, because she “has thrown open our borders,” allowing immigrants to access those programs. Of course, unauthorized immigrants are generally not eligible for those programs, though portions of pay earned by many of those immigrants is withheld to help fund Social Security and Medicare. The other two steps of the three-step plan, incidentally, were in the same vein: misrepresenting both Harris’s approach to immigration and the extent to which immigration strains government programs.
After fearmongering about the purported threat of violence by immigrants, he summarized his argument: “The Kamala migrant invasion is also a major factor in crushing your wages and driving up the cost of health care and the cost of all of your goods.” Wages are up significantly since 2021.
Trump offered various other eyebrow-raising comments in the guise of discussing the economy. For the most part, though, he couldn’t help but simply revert to campaign mode, despite telling the intellectuals in the audience that the speech would not be a political rally.
He spent 21 words talking about how he wants to lower prescription drug prices (without going into detail), hours before the Biden administration announced billions in savings from allowing the government to negotiate purchase prices. Trump also spent 90 words insulting Harris’s laugh. And that contrast, perhaps better than anything, encapsulates his speech.
