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Last Thursday, during a visit to the Detroit Economic Club in the swing state of Michigan, Donald Trump stood awkwardly onstage for a few minutes, gently rocking on his heels as “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood blared through the speakers. Staring back was a roomful of quiet and dour-faced businesspeople hoping to hear more details about Trump’s economic plans. It was a scene out of kilter with Trump’s typical events, delivered at rallies to his screaming fandom. And when he started speaking, the event moved from incongruous to confused. Trump repeated his flawed belief that import duties would benefit all Americans (“I’m gonna hit you with tariffs that you’ve never seen before,” he warned foreign manufacturers); plugged tax cuts that would benefit the rich; and offered a muddled nod to the high cost of living, which has become a core election issue. “Well,” the chair said as Trump wrapped almost two hours later, “that was a tremendous amount of, uh, information that you’ve given to us.”
It’s worth noting the sheer incoherence of Trump’s economic proposals. He suggests imposing tariffs of up to 20 percent on all imported goods, and 60 percent or more for Chinese goods. Trump claims “it’s going to make us wealthy again,” and that “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the world.” A tariff, of course, is a regressive tax that hits low- and middle-income households the hardest. Tariffs are inflationary—and when inflation runs hot, as we know, the Fed raises interest rates to cool demand, increasing the price of borrowing costs like mortgages. The Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz has observed that Trump’s economic plans could spark a “triple whammy” of sluggish growth, rising inflation, and higher unemployment. Yet Trump’s tariff plans have become the sun around which his rambling speeches orbit. His economic policy has taken on the logic of the clickbait medical ad: Just vote for me and I’ll reveal the secret economists won’t tell you. As Philip Bump wrote in the Washington Post last month, “He’s going to fix our problems with One Simple Trick.”
Then there’s Trump’s tax policies. Among other things, he wants to renew and deepen his 2017 tax cut for corporations and billionaires, despite its failure to spark significant investment last time around. On this front, Trump’s approach is typical Reaganite trickle-down economics, a belief in “the magical power of tax cuts for the rich,” the economist Paul Krugman writes. That’s despite research—based on data from eighteen OECD nations over fifty years—that slashing tax rates for the rich doesn’t spark growth and cut joblessness; it only widens inequality. Overall, Trump’s funfair economic proposals would amount to, on average, a tax increase for every income group except the top 5 percent of earners, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
So how is the media communicating what Trump’s economic policies would mean for the country? As I see it, it’s going wrong in two ways. First, journalists are “sanewashing” Trump’s senselessness, as Parker Molloy has written in the New Republic and Jon Allsop expanded on in this newsletter. Take his Detroit economic speech. Trump rambled on tariffs, crowd size, Elon Musk’s rockets, North Korea, immigration, the cost of living, and the word “grocery,” of which he said: “It’s a sort of simple word; it sort of means, like, everything you eat. The stomach is speaking; it always does. And I have more complaints about that―bacon and things—going up, double, triple, quadruple.” He spoke for almost ninety minutes before announcing a new policy—making car loan interest fully tax-deductible—which was planned as the speech’s set piece. But here was the Reuters headline about the event: “Trump courts auto workers with car loan tax break, China crackdown.” And the Wall Street Journal’s: “Donald Trump Calls for Making Car-Loan Interest Tax Deductible.” These feel like objectivity as seen through a distorted carnival mirror.
The second media mistake is wrapping economic issues into the political horse race. The line we hear time and again, much more than policy impact on America’s working and middle classes, is “Trump polls better on the economy.” That’s true—he’s up 54 to 45 percent over Kamala Harris on the perceived ability to handle it, according to a recent Gallup survey—but how much does that tell us? A press corps that focuses solely on perception, not policy, risks floating far away from the kitchen table concerns of families. And then there’s the rather arrogant narrative circulating recently that voters—who are consistently telling pollsters they’re not yet feeling the impact of a steadier economy—should snap out of their “vibe-cession” and thank the Biden administration for delivering low inflation, low unemployment, and healthy growth. Of course, these are all positive trends. But it’s no surprise people aren’t celebrating the GDP rate in the streets when the US has historically high housing costs, the highest health-expenditure-to-GDP ratio in the OECD, average childcare and eldercare costs in the tens of thousands per year, and 1.75 trillion dollars in total student loan debt.
Alissa Quart, the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and author of Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, told me that journalistic conventions are constraining coverage: false balance; a “both sides” approach that treats fiscal policies roughly the same as off-script rants; the media’s reluctance to project potential impacts into the future. “And you have to be careful not to sound like an advocate,” Quart said, especially when scrutinizing ideological theories like “trickle down” wealth creation. There are “all these kinds of social norms” within journalism, Quart said, that can roadblock accurate coverage—and that need to be challenged. If we don’t get our reporting focus right and dispense with outdated notions of “objectivity,” it’s those at the sharp end of society who will suffer. Official figures show that food insecurity climbed again last year, now affecting 13.5 percent of households. These are the sorts of figures we should be seeing again and again in economic election coverage, not the daily up-and-down of who’s “winning” on the economy.
Last week, vice-presidential hopeful J.D. Vance was also in Detroit, flanked by more than a dozen crowd members wearing bright red T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “AUTOWORKERS FOR TRUMP.” They clapped and cheered and laughed at Vance’s jokes. But when asked by a Detroit News reporter who they were, six revealed that they weren’t autoworkers at all; they said they’d been given the shirts. Trump’s tariff policies, like his autoworker fans, are not credible—a new form of “voodoo economics,” as John Cassidy puts it in The New Yorker. As reporters, we need to ditch the horse-race coverage and outline the stark economic choice voters face on November 5.
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