Ooph

Trump chooses to bluff and blunder on his wide-ranging ignorance. To an extent, Trump makes his rambling, digressive mode of talking work for him. He displays such ridiculous ignorance on such a wide range of things that it’s hard to squarely accuse him of lying about something like his tax plan. Oftentimes, it’s hard to know what he’s even talking about.

He claimed to have coined a hundred year old phrase "prime the pimp." Where has he been?

“Great president,” Trump said Tuesday night at a fundraising dinner for House Republicans. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican. Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that. We have to build that up a little more.” Trump then suggested using a political action committee to run advertisements letting people know that Lincoln was a member of his party, "The Party of Lincoln."

"Why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out? I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later, you wouldn't have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. And he was really angry that he saw what was happening, with regard to the Civil War. He said, there's no reason for this." Trump continued, "People don't realize, the Civil War -- you think about it, why? People don't ask that question. But why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?" (Trump has been frequently compared to Jackson, hence the appreciation of one our worst presidents, and the question why was there a Civil War has been address for over 150 years in thousands of books and essays.)

1. Trump himself, meanwhile, has spent years as a top executive at a business that provides health insurance to its employees. So you would think that even if he were completely ignorant of every single topic of public policy, he would at least be aware that to provide a person with health insurance is expensive. It is, after all, an expense that his businesses incur:

TRUMP: But what it does, Maggie, it means it gets tougher and tougher. As they get something, it gets tougher. Because politically, you can’t give it away. So pre-existing conditions are a tough deal. Because you are basically saying from the moment the insurance, you’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan. Here’s something where you walk up and say, “I want my insurance.” It’s a very tough deal, but it is something that we’re doing a good job of.

(No, this is not an SNL skit.)

2. On a wildly different subject, Trump reveals that he is unaware Napoleon I and his nephew Napoleon III were two different people:

TRUMP: Yeah. It was beautiful. We toured the museum, we went to Napoleon’s tomb …

TRUMP: Well, Napoleon finished a little bit bad. But I asked that. So I asked the president, so what about Napoleon? He said: “No, no, no. What he did was incredible. He designed Paris.” [garbled] The street grid, the way they work, you know, the spokes. He did so many things even beyond. And his one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death. How many times has Russia been saved by the weather?

(No, this is not an SNL skit.)

3. Trump misdescribes his tax plan

Back on the policy front, Trump says of his tax plan that “if you add what the people are going to save in the middle income brackets, if you add that to what they’re saving with health care, this is like a windfall for the country, for the people.”

Trump’s actual tax plan would raise taxes on millions of Americans while delivering a windfall to the rich.

According to the Tax Policy Center, the average American family would see its after-tax income rise by about $760, while families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution would see their incomes rise by about $175,000 — more than triple the total household income of the median American. Trump’s plan also features a big corporate tax cut.

To be fair to Trump, however, given how unpopular the idea of tax cuts for the rich and big companies is, it’s entirely possible that he is simply lying about this.

4. Trump doesn’t know American political history

Early in the interview, as a way of explaining how tough health care is as an issue, Trump observes that “Hillary Clinton worked eight years in the White House with her husband as president and having majorities and couldn’t get it done.”

Bill Clinton, of course, had congressional majorities for two years, not eight. And while it’s true that the 1993 drive for comprehensive health insurance reform failed, it’s simply not the case that Clinton got nothing done on health care. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, for example, is critical to the functioning of the job-based insurance market. It guarantees, among other things, that if you get sick while working one job and then later switch jobs, your new insurance plan can’t charge you a penalty rate for your preexisting health condition. The Clinton administration also created the State Children Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which covered millions of children.

Trump also believes that “for the time in office, five months and couple of weeks, I think I’ve done more than anyone else.” And he clarifies that he means “not just executive orders” but bills passed by Congress.

By this time in his presidency, Bill Clinton had signed the Family and Medical Leave Act and the motor voter bill. George W. Bush had signed his first big round of tax cuts. Barack Obama did a major economic stimulus bill, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, and a significant SCHIP expansion. LBJ signed a big tax cut.

5. Trump makes lots of weird, trivial errors

In the course of the interview, Trump also makes a lot of random little factual errors:

He says Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wife doesn’t speak any English, but she seems to speak English fine.
He says Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is from Baltimore, when he grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and has lived for years in Bethesda, just outside of DC.
He says the FBI director “reports directly to the president of the United States,” which also isn’t true. In fact, the FBI director reports to the director of national intelligence.
He says the Russia investigation is “not an investigation” (whatever that means) and also that “it’s not on me” (it is).
He says James Comey wrote a letter to him, when he actually wrote a letter to his former colleagues at the FBI.
He says 51 Republican senators came to his health care meeting at the White House, when in fact Susan Collins and Rand Paul didn’t attend and John McCain was sick, so the number was 49.

Anyone can make mistakes, of course, but the sheer quantity of these kinds of mistakes is odd. The headcount issue is particularly puzzling, because one crucial difference between 51 and 49 is that if you can get 51 senators to agree to something, you can pass a bill, but 49 isn’t good enough.