The Patriot Post® · Trump Wows the Economic Club of Chicago
It’s been said that if you give a chimp a keyboard and enough time, he’ll eventually bang you out a Shakespearean sonnet. Still, given all the sand in God’s hourglass, Kamala Harris could never have done what Donald Trump did yesterday afternoon at the Economic Club of Chicago.
There, for more than 100 minutes, with no notes and no teleprompters, Trump held court before the Second City’s oldest and most esteemed economic organization. It was an engaging and often funny back-and-forth with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, an anti-tariff globalist, and they talked about everything from trade to tariffs to monetary policy to geopolitics to domestic politics to immigration to Supreme Court justices to the age of presidential aspirants.
Trump was, to say the least, in his element. If you think you’ve seen him on his game — really in command, and for an extended period of time — you need to set aside 104 minutes and watch this.
Micklethwait, the former editor-in-chief of The Economist, continually asked tough questions, and Trump continually fielded them with ease. Indeed, the once and perhaps future president merrily mopped the floor with his interlocutor. It was very civil, very friendly, but Trump absolutely owned the event. And his command of the issues — and the numbers and the details — was really stunning, really revelatory. As the Associated Press reports: “Donald Trump seized Tuesday on an opening to sound his frequent argument that imposing huge tariffs on foreign goods would amount to an economic elixir — one that he claims would raise enormous sums for the government, protect U.S. firms from overseas competition and prod foreign companies to open factories in the United States.”
Almost immediately, Micklethwait challenged Trump on perhaps the signature of his economic philosophy: tariffs. “To me,” Trump said, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. It’s my favorite word. It needs a public relations firm.”
“Critics,” began Micklethwait, “say your tariffs will end up being like a national sales tax. America, at the moment, has $3 trillion worth of imports. You’re going to add tariffs to every single one of them. That is going to push up the cost for all those people who want to buy foreign goods. Isn’t that simple mathematics, President Trump?”
To which Trump calmly replied, “Yeah, it is, but not the way you’ve figured. I was always very good at mathematics.”
Trump continued: “You know, there’s another theory. The tariff, you make it so high, so horrible, so obnoxious, that they’ll come right away. The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States and build a factory in the United States so it doesn’t have to pay the tariff.”
And then, to hearty laughs, he told Micklethwait this: “It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.”
There wasn’t a question that Trump didn’t seem prepared to answer. What, for example, does Trump think of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell? “I think it’s the greatest job in government,” he said. “You show up to the office once a month, and you say, ‘Let’s see.’ You flip a coin. And everybody talks about you like you’re a god.”
At the close of the event, Micklethwait challenged Trump on his age: “You own and run businesses. Would you appoint a CEO who is 78?”
It was a clever question, but Trump didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah, I would. … People like Biden, who’s in bad shape, I wouldn’t appoint him.” He continued:
Some of the smartest people I know. I know a man that made all of his money from the time he was 80 to 90. And he was a failure all his life. … Bernie Marcus is 95, the founder of Home Depot. You have that conversation with him. He’s just as sharp, mentally, he’s just as sharp as he ever was. … I know many people in their 80s, I know guys in their 80s that won’t leave the company — like family companies, where they don’t want the kids to take over — because they’re much more competent than their kids. I know them both. … And if you look throughout history, some of our greatest world leaders were in their 80s.
Trump went on to suggest that cognitive tests are a good idea regardless of age. “Now, here’s the problem: They say it’s unconstitutional. But I would love to see cognitive tests. I don’t think [Kamala Harris] could pass a cognitive test.”
The American people have repeatedly said that the economy is their number-one issue this election cycle, just as it usually is. And after watching Trump’s performance in Chicago yesterday, it’s impossible not to see the yawning gap between his economic expertise and Kamala Harris’s economic ignorance. The very prospect of the Democrats’ nominee doing the same thing, so effortlessly and engagingly, on any topic, much less economic topics, is preposterous. (Harris has been invited by the ECC to appear in the same setting as Trump did yesterday, and she’s declined. Is there any wonder why?)
If the American people ultimately vote their wallets and pocketbooks on November 5, they’ll choose Donald Trump, and they’ll choose him resoundingly.