Much like giving Arthur Laffer the Medal of Freedom because he “studied the Laffer Curve at Wharton”, Trump spun a fantasy about debt and tariffs. Daniel Dale does a fact-check on yet another piece of revisionist history that will undoubtedly get repeated at a campaign rally. At least in an interview, the media needs to not let the lies persist.
Let's go through Trump's tweet step by step.
"No debt": The US has been debt-free just once, in the mid-1830s, when then-president Andrew Jackson had it paid off. "There has been almost no period in US history when the federal government has been completely free of debt," said Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economics professor and a prominent expert on US economic and trade history.
Trump did not say what highways he was talking about, but the US was nowhere near debt-free when the federal government approved the construction of the Interstate Highway System in 1956. The ratio of debt to Gross Domestic Product
hit an all-time record, more than 100%, just after the end of World War II in 1945. Though the debt-to-GDP ratio fell in the 1950s as the economy boomed, the total debt load was
about $273 billion in 1956, about $2.5 trillion in today's dollars.
"A big system of tariffs": "Big" is subjective, and the US had numerous tariffs in place as it was building its highways. But during the era when the Interstate system was founded, tariffs were being reduced, not increased: the US and its international partners in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the World Trade Organization, agreed to shrink or eliminate thousands of tariffs during their negotiations in the late 1940s and early-to-mid-1950s. By the 1950s, Irwin said, "tariffs were relatively low" in historical terms, in the 10% range overall, "and at that time raised a trivial amount of revenue for the government."
The fundamental vulnerability in the way everyone tries to interview Trump is that they cave into two antiquated concepts.
- The first is that the president of the United States must be treated with extreme respect.
- The second is that, because it happens so rarely, their network’s interview must cover a large number of very diverse topics.
Right there, if the interview is a 100-yard dash, Trump is already 50 yards ahead before the starting gun has been even fired. Trump knows that all he has to do is lie, deflect, obfuscate, and change the subject (maybe even by telling a new bald-faced lie) and the interviewer will soon move on to another question, fearful that they will be seen as badgering the president, while also not being able to provide enough varied content to feed their network’s news monster.
To be clear, this is not an easy challenge, but one for which there is a potential solution. In short, when it comes to interviewing Trump, the news media is playing the arcade game “whack-a-mole,” when instead they should be digging for oil.
In this version of “whack-a-mole,” Trump sticks his head out of one subject where he has lied and then, before the news media can get a good shot at him, he has moved on to a new hole. This process continually repeats itself, which is why what should be massive scandals (like, for instance, the Trump Tower Moscow project), are so quickly forgotten that most of the public doesn’t even realize they exist.
If, instead of playing this game they cannot win, the news media was disciplined and patient enough (it would help a lot of they could work in tandem on this) to drill on just one subject with him until they finally struck pay-dirt, Trump would be in real trouble. The media needs to create new “Trump Rules,” where when the president tells a clear lie the interview does NOT move on until either he is forced to admit to that lie, or he walks out of the interview like the immature man-child that he is.
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