So full of shit..

Trump’s latest interview shows he’s not really the president

He’s holding the office but not doing the job.

By Matthew Yglesias

President Donald Trump’s first non-Fox television interview in a long time, conducted with CNBC’s Joe Kernen from Davos, Switzerland, is in many respects weirdly devoid of substance. And much of the substance that’s there consists of misstatements of fact.

But lurking in that is an important insight: Trump is holding the office of president, but he’s not doing the job of president. He seems to have no real idea what’s going on, even with his own signature policy moves.

Some of his misstatements have the color of propaganda, but often he seems to be caught up in other people’s propaganda or even to have misunderstood his own talking points. He’s disengaged from the details of big questions like NAFTA — “I may terminate NAFTA, I may not,” he says profoundly. He can’t even describe his own negotiating positions in the immigration standoff accurately.

Listening to him talk is interesting from an entertainment perspective (he did once host a popular television show), but it conveys no information about the world, the American government, or the Trump administration’s policies. If Kernen wanted to help his viewers understand what’s going on, he’d have been better off interviewing someone else.

Trump keeps getting facts wrong

In a fairly typically Trumpian gesture, one of the president’s first remarks explains that most people don’t appreciate the significance of Apple’s commitment to invest $350 billion in US manufacturing facilities. Most people probably don’t appreciate this because it isn’t true.

Kernen asks about whether Trump’s decision to come to Davos doesn’t contrast with his faux-populist branding, and Trump responds:

So when I decided to come to Davos, I didn’t think in terms of elitists or globalists. I think I thought in terms of lots of people that want to invest lots of money, and they’re all coming back to the United States, they’re coming back to America. And I thought of it much more in those terms. After I said that I was going, there were massive stories about the elite, and the globalists, and the planes flying in, and everything else. It’s not about that. It’s about coming to America, investing your money, creating jobs, companies coming in.

We’re setting records every week; every day we’re setting records. You see what’s going on. Apple now with $350 billion. Most people thought they meant $350 million, which would build a nice plant. But I spoke with Tim Cook, and I was very honored. But you remember my campaign, I used to say, “I won’t consider this great unless Apple starts coming in and really investing big money doing the plants.” They’re gonna do a lot.

What Apple actually promised was to make $30 billion in domestic capital investments, most of which will be data centers, offices, and Apple Store real estate upgrades rather than actual manufacturing facilities. The $350 billion measure is a rough five-year estimate of Apple’s total “contribution” to the American economy. If you’re playing Infinite Golf on your iPhone and make an in-app purchase, that contributes to GDP. Since the contribution is routed through Apple, your spending becomes part of the Apple contribution to the American economy. It’s a semi-fake measure that’s basically a long-winded way of saying that Apple is a very big company.

At any rate, $30 billion is a large number, but it’s both much smaller than $350 billion and not clearly any bigger than the amount of capital investment Apple has been making over the past few years anyway. The company’s whole press release about this is part of a larger trend of corporate America putting out Trump-friendly propaganda to reward the White House for a lucrative corporate tax cut.

One’s hope with this stuff is always that Trump is lying. The more disturbing explanation is that he’s actually confused — that Apple’s pro-Trump propaganda has tricked the president himself.

He also says the trade deficit with Mexico is $71 billion a year (it was $55.6 billion last year) and that the deficit with Canada is $17 billion (the real number is $12 billion). The exact details here don’t really matter, but it’s hard to renegotiate NAFTA effectively, as Trump claims to be doing, when you don’t know anything about it.

Trump doesn’t know he canceled DACA

One of the more striking moments in the interview comes when Kernen asks Trump about negotiations over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and the status of talks over border security funding.

The entire legislative standoff over this was precipitated by Trump’s decision to cancel the Obama-era DACA program, meaning that unauthorized immigrants protected from deportation would lose those protections beginning in March. Except Trump doesn’t seem to realize this!

“And by the way, the court — it wasn’t me,” Trump says. “The courts were not upholding that executive order.”

This just didn’t happen. President Obama launched DACA in 2012, and there was no legal controversy about it. Then in late 2014, he promulgated a broader program of immigration protections that a bunch of Republican attorneys general sued over. They got a lower court to stay the broader program, the White House appealed, and after the election, Trump quit defending the White House position.

Then in summer 2017, a group of Republican attorneys general in favor of immigration restrictions threatened to sue over DACA if the Trump administration didn’t get rid of the program by September 5, and just as that deadline was about to hit, Trump announced that the program would end in March.

No actual litigation took place.

Trump doesn’t know what the DACA negotiations are about

Then, still answering the same question about negotiations, Trump gets confused as to whether he needs a border wall because the southern border is in a state of chaos, or whether he’s already fixed the southern border:

We’re going to solve the DACA problem. But we also want to solve a tremendous problem on the southern border, which is crime. We need a wall, we need the drugs to stop flowing in. They are coming in like ... well, they’re coming in less now than they were because we have a very strong — we have great Border Patrol agents, great ICE — we have great people, and they are really doing a good job. And you see what’s happening at the border, it’s much better.

Democrats are, for better or worse, prepared to cough up a lot of border security money in exchange for DACA protections. The sticking point is that Trump’s White House keeps putting forward a lot of other demands — including, notably, a 50 percent cut in legal immigration.

But Trump, amazingly, does not mention these demands at any point in the interview. The president is completely out to sea on the main policy debate of the moment, even though he’s also completely central to it.

Trump is excessively impressed by his own economic record

The central pillar of the Trump presidency is the American economy, which grew faster in 2017 than it did in 2016 and which has continued the steady job growth of the Obama years to deliver what’s now a very low unemployment rate.

This is a pretty good record — especially relative to fears Democrats raised during the 2016 campaign that Trump would wreck the economy with a series of destructive trade wars — but Trump is clearly much more impressed with himself than the data supports:

Because you know, if you look at the real numbers, had I not won, had the Democrat won — I’m going to be nice — the Democrat, I say, won — I would consider their last quarter my first quarter. Because you know, I just got there. So let’s say the first quarter of ’17 you had a 1.2 GDP. Okay? 1.2. In the fourth quarter, which is the Obama quarter, you had a 1.8. Before that, you had a 2.8, a 2.2. You had — weren’t doing very well. And it was the worst recovery — I guess do they say ever, or since the Great Depression? But it was the worst recovery.

Okay. Now, in my first quarter, which I consider to be the second quarter because I was there now long enough to have made an impact, and don’t kid yourself, regulations are just as big as the tax cuts. I’ve cut more regulations than any president in history, and I’ve been here for one year. You can take their term, whether it’s eight years or 16 years in one instance — but you can take anybody you want, in one year, we’ve cut more regulations. And by the way, there’s going to be regulation, but they’re good, solid, sane regulations.

But in quarter two, we had 3.1, and in quarter three, as you know, we had 3.2. But in quarter one, which is the Obama quarter — really the last, I would say, Obama quarter, you had 1.2. We were going in the wrong direction.

Talking about quarterly GDP numbers is tedious, so here’s a convenient summary chart of what’s been going on.

Trump’s three quarters really have been pretty good. But they’re just not meaningfully different from the Obama-era economic performance. Indeed, under Obama, growth exceeded Trump’s best quarterly number six times. And as Trump says, Obama-era growth was nothing to write home about.

Actual growth performance under Trump has been better than his skeptics feared but also worse than the 3 percent he promised. That’s no great shame — his promise was unrealistic — but it’s useful for the president to have a handle on what’s really going on in the world.

Trump isn’t really the president

The two big Republican policy pushes of 2018 — the failed drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the successful push to enact a large corporate tax cut — were led primarily by Congress rather than by the executive branch. That’s natural given Trump’s hazy level of interest in policy detail and the intense interest of the GOP caucus in these matters.

What’s become clear over the past few weeks as immigration has taken center stage, however, is that even in a process that is very much driven by the executive branch, it’s not driven by Donald Trump. Trump has stronger feelings about immigration and a stronger political profile on it than either Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell. But he simply lacks the disposition and intellectual capacity to do the job of president of the United States as it’s conventionally defined. He doesn’t have a handle on the contours of the NAFTA negotiations, the state of the economy, or even “his own” immigration policy.

He seems unaware of both the origins of the current standoff and the main subjects of disagreement between the parties. He’s the one who installed the team of anti-immigration hardliners — Chief of Staff John Kelly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and senior adviser Stephen Miller — who appear to be actually driving the process, so he’s responsible for what’s going on. But he’s not actually doing the work and, indeed, seems to have much less familiarity with his own policies and negotiating stances than a typical journalist or member of Congress.