Yesterday Trump outlined a policy to help black Americans. Here’s his speech on the subject.
Too bad few people are listening. And, as I’ve said before, they’re not listening because Trump is not trusted. And not just not trusted by black Americans—not trusted by a broad swathe of people in this country.
You might say that Hillary Clinton isn’t trusted, either. And why should she be? However, she is certainly trusted in one sense: to continue the liberal/left policies of the Democratic Party.
And a great many people are quite happy indeed with those policies. Trump needed to win the trust of most of those who aren’t happy with them, and so far he hasn’t. And he has pretty much run out of time.
Also, for small government conservatives, this sort of statement of Trump’s doesn’t sit well at all (from his speech yesterday):
If I’m President, and the executives at Ford Motor Company announce they are moving their plants and jobs to Mexico, I will pick up the phone and make a simple call. I will tell those executives that if they move their factories to Mexico, I will put a 35% tax on their product before they ship it back into the United States. We won’t let your jobs be stolen from you anymore.
As a capitalist and businessman, Trump certainly knows why those jobs have been “stolen” (which of course is the demagogic word for it). He also knows—or should know—that he can’t just make a “simple call” and pass a tariff like that, although presidents are given a lot of tariff power:
When it comes to aggressively raising tariffs, however, his proposals appear to be unique within the 2016 field in either party.
There’s not a lot of detail to Trump’s suggestions, making them hard to fully evaluate, but trade experts from across the political spectrum warn that most of his threatened tariffs would violate decades of binding trade deals negotiated by previous administrations and agreed to by previous Congresses.
“That 20% tax would be an absolutely straightforward violation of probably every trade law the United States has with any other country,” Joshua Meltzer, a fellow in global economy and development at the Brookings Institution, told msnbc.
“All of our existing agreements lock us into lower tariffs,” Claude Barfield, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who supports lowered trade barriers, told msnbc.
“Absolutely illegal,” Robert E. Scott, director of trade and manufacturing research at the Economic Policy Institute and a strong critic of past trade agreements like NAFTA, told msnbc when asked about Trump’s 20% import tax.
Trump’s tariff obsession harkens back to the partisan politics of the 19th and early 20th century, when Republicans championed high tariffs in order to protect business from competition while Democrats argued the tariffs punished the working class by raising prices. This split was one of the fundamental divides between the parties until after World War II, when the U.S. led international talks to lower tariffs around the world that had been widely blamed for worsening the Great Depression.
When Trump described something similar in an interview last July, here’s how it went:
Todd asked Trump to elaborate on his promise to punish US companies that move factories to countries like Mexico. Trump used one of his favorite examples: Carrier, the air-conditioner manufacturer that moved a plant from Indiana to Mexico.
“There will be a tax to be paid. If they’re going to fire all their people, move their plant to Mexico, build air conditioners, and think they’re going to sell those air conditioners to the United States, there’s going to be a tax.”
“What kind of tax are you thinking?” Todd asked.
“It could be 25 percent. It could be 35 percent. It could be 15 percent. I haven’t determined. And it could be different for different companies. We have been working on trying to stop this…because we don’t know what we’re doing.”
Todd did not raise the objection that selective application of taxes to products sold by different businesses opens the door wide to abusive enforcement. However, he did point out that the targeting of individual companies wouldn’t make it through the World Trade Organization. But Trump waved him off. “It doesn’t matter. Then we’re going to renegotiate or we’re going to pull out. These trade deals are a disaster, Chuck. World Trade Organization is a disaster.”
This is the problem that a person who tries to seriously evaluate many of Trump’s proposals faces: Trump doesn’t sound as though he’s really thought things through or is aware of the details. Sometimes I think it doesn’t sound as though he even cares about whether things he proposes will work or not. Mexico paying for the wall was the first thing that got attention in that respect, but there have been many many others.
All of that, in turn, keep driving the conversation back to “character.” Who is this Trump person, and why is he running for president, and what might he actually do, and is there any reality to the promises he makes?
Many people who cannot stand Hillary Clinton are voting for Trump in desperation (I may even end up being one of them, but I really don’t know). But many people are not willing to roll the dice that wildly, and all the arguments to tell them they should do so ring hollow to them.
Here’s the sort of thing I’m talking about:
When Luntz’s focus-group participants are asked what they think is wrong with the country, he said they always have an answer, and it’s usually a “very deep, very emotional, very personal” one. “Often, we’ll have women and men almost in tears” when talking about issues like the depletion of manufacturing jobs and unemployment in general, their feelings of a lost sense of security or their concerns about police.”
“Trump spoke to those people,” he said. “This candidate tapped into something unique [but] has absolutely lost his focus.”
The problem with Trump’s campaign, Luntz argued, “is that it’s become too much about him and not about the people he represents.”…
Trump has proceeded to alienate the people who helped him get the nomination by spending time attacking the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, decades-old allegations against former President Bill Clinton and the opening of his new hotel in Washington, D.C.
“Every day there’s another batch of emails, and every day we learn more about what she has done,” Luntz said. “No one knows about it because he speaks so loudly that all the cameras are on him, removing the oxygen in the room that should also be about her,” he added.
“It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear,” he said. “It’s not how loudly you speak ”” and he speaks way too loudly ”” but what people learn from what you say. And people don’t learn anything from Donald Trump.”
To test this theory, Luntz said he recently presented news reports on Clinton’s emails to a focus group, “and it changed an entire room of undecided voters.” But once he showed the group Trump’s own attacks against Clinton over her emails, Luntz said, “They all went back to being undecided.”
He added, “Not only did he not win them over, he actually turned them off because his language is wrong, his presentation is wrong.”
You can complain all you want about how the discussion lately has been too much about character rather than policy. But there’s a reason for that. To care what a candidate says about policy, you have to trust that the candidate means what he or she says and is not just conning you. You have to trust in the candidate’s basic stability and seriousness.
Right or wrong, too many people don’t trust that about Trump, and he has done little or nothing to convince them otherwise. And that’s true of many people who would otherwise be inclined to agree with many of his policy recommendations. For those who agree with Clinton’s policies, they certainly do trust her—to be ruthless in implementing them, and to have a full grasp of the details of them.
Therein lies one big difference, and that difference helps give Clinton her edge in this election.
