Trump devours Bloomberg editor for lunch

Kamala Harris has been criticizing Donald Trump for ducking interviews. Today, however, she avoided a sit-down with the Economic Club of Chicago. Trump, by contrast, showed up and spent an hour facing difficult questions from Bloomberg News’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.

It was, like all the best Trump appearances, a magnificently weird occasion. Who needs LSD when you can watch him as a presidential candidate, eight years in, still melting reality live on YouTube?

Micklethwait is a brilliant man: polished, Ampleforth and Oxford, highly successful. His hair is coiffed and his loafers look expensive. For the benefit of the affluent audience, he endeavored to have a serious conversation as to the concerns rich people have about a second Trump term. He asked about tariffs, growth, China, Putin, monopolies, immigration and January 6.

But Trump is a rude seventy-eight-year-old force of nature, an economic populist who says the Wall Street Journal has been “wrong about everything” — and the Wall Street Journal-reading crowd seem to love him for it.

He entered to a standing ovation, abused Micklethwait for asking perfectly reasonable questions, boasted ad nauseam and wandered wildly off-topic whenever challenged. Yet he left the stage to even louder whoops and cheers.

On tariffs, Micklethwait gently tried to confront Trump with the possible problems his second administration might cause if it pursues an even harder protectionist line. “It must be hard for you to spend twenty-five years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re wrong,” said Trump. Again, the crowd erupted approvingly.

Micklethwait pointed to “bipartisan” studies and tried to argue that American consumers and jobs would ultimately suffer if Trump froze out global trade. Trump just ignored him. Boring! Instead, he rattled through his favorite anecdotes and conversations with his hugely successful business friends. “I’ll give you an example,” he said, repeatedly, only to give yet another instance how marvelous he is.  

When Micklethwait asked if he had spoken to Vladimir Putin since leaving office. Trump snapped back: “If I did, it’s a smart thing. If I’m friendly with people, if I have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.” That, funnily enough, was about the straightest answer he gave. 

The rest of the time, whenever Micklethwait tried to pin him, Trump would just veer off bogglingly.

When asked about whether or not he would tackle the power of Google, Trump sighed and replied: “I just haven’t gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes, and the Justice Department sued them to get the bad votes put back on.”

In fairness, Trump did eventually imply that, while Google has been “very bad to me,” he would be reluctant to break it up as a monopoly.

But when Micklethwait asked the wasteful government spending he might ax, Trump started up: “Let me give you an example, when I came into government, I was…”

“An example going forward,” interjected Micklethwait.

‘Well this is going forward because it’s the same thing,” replied Trump, firmly. He then recounted one of his hoarier tales — “some of you have heard this” — about the time he shaved a couple of billion off the cost of Air Force One.   

Moving on, Micklethwait pointed out that, while Trump might make exceptions for giant corporations such as Apple, smaller companies might suffer from his tariffs.

“We gave exceptions, no no… I gave Apple an exception,” said Trump. 

Micklethwait bravely insisted that Apple was not a small company, but Trump rumbled on — “we had great people, we had central casting…”

Pressed again to come up with instance in which he helped a less profitable business, Trump spoke of a man he met who ran a “pretty big” kitchen cabinet business and who benefited from the Trump tariffs on his Asian competitors. “I saw the guy two three days ago,” he said. “He said you saved my company… and he started to cry, this isn’t a guy who cries too much, I can tell ya.”

Is that true? Does anyone care? If Kamala Harris speaks in confusing word salads, Trump can speak in even more baffling fruit jellies — even as he insists he’s all about “common sense.” The effect is hypnotic.

He is also curiously candid about his evasiveness, which makes him disarming. At one point, while not giving an answer, he explained: “I call it the ‘weave’… You have the weave as long as you end up in the right location at the end.” That was funny. 

Towards the end, Trump referred to “Gavin Newscum,” the governor of California. “Newsom,” Micklethwait corrected him.

“NewSCUM, I call him,” Trump answered. The crowd laughed.  

Micklethwait suggested that a regular CEO could be fired for using such language. 

“They don’t know how to survive like me,” Trump concluded. “They don’t have to go through what I have to go through. There has never been a president that has been treated like me so I have to fight my own way.”

He’s not wrong.