There’s a qualitative difference between commentary that’s wrong and commentary that betrays illiteracy about its subject matter. If someone who claimed to be a baseball fan, for example, said the Mets are having a great season, you could safely say that person is mistaken. If that same observer, however, argued that a grand slam is worth 17 runs, it would reflect more than simple misjudgment: It’s the sort of comment someone might make if they don’t know anything about baseball.
As this relates to national politics, Donald Trump frequently makes comments about the economy, the vast majority of which are plainly wrong. But the president also occasionally makes economic assertions that expose his economic illiteracy.
At an Oval Office event on Friday afternoon, for example, the Republican argued that the United States could “save” money by “just not trading” with other countries.
After falsely claiming the U.S. “loses” $195 billion a year to Mexico, the president added, “They have nothing that we have to have. I mean, hot tamales? Tomatoes? A couple of things? Basically, they have nothing we need.”
Even putting aside the obvious fact that Mexico is the United States’ single-largest trading partner and the absurdity of the “hot tamales” comment, a full decade into his political career, Trump still doesn’t understand that a trade deficit does not reflect a loss. For example, my family has a deficit with our local grocery store — we buy its products, and it does not buy ours — but that’s not a bad thing.
Sure, I could “save” plenty of money by just not buying groceries, but — and this is the important part — then I’d be hungry. This really isn’t that complicated.
On the same day, the president threatened to curtail all trade with a wide swath of U.S. trading partners unless the Federal Reserve agreed to slash interest rates, adding that he wants the Fed to reduce borrowing costs to “the LOWEST RATE of any country in the World.”
This was a mess for all sorts of reasons. The Fed functions as an independent entity, which is not supposed to raise or lower interest rates in response to White House extortion schemes. But Trump made things worse by arguing that economic growth is wholly unrelated to inflation, and that we’re entitled to lower interest rates, not because of economic conditions, but because he thinks we’re awesome.
They are the observations of someone who only pretends to have a basic familiarity with monetary policy.
In case this weren’t quite enough, the president later celebrated good monthly job growth in August by pointing to what he described as “the Trump Boom.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”