Lou Dobbs’s Trump interview is a masterpiece of sycophancy and nonsense

The last time President Donald Trump sat down with a nonpartisan journalist, he revealed to NBC News’s Lester Holt that his administration had been lying about why he fired FBI Director James Comey. The real reason, Trump revealed, was an effort to stymie the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election. That compelled the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller whose team has caused all sorts of trouble for Trump ever since. Consequently, Trump has spent the past few months sequestered with friendly journalists conducting softball interviews.

Yet precisely because the softball format leads to such easy questions, Trump’s frequent inability to answer them reveals the depths of his ignorance better than any tough grilling possibly could.

Perhaps as a result, during Wednesday night’s interview on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs took a different approach. His questions weren’t softballs, they were downright sycophantic and often featured the interviewer attempting to supply Trump with the answers.

Dobbs’s very first question, if you can call it a question, is this: “In nine months in office, you’ve already accomplished more in the way of job creation. The move in the equities markets has been extraordinary and record setting. All of the indexes, at or near record levels. You have accomplished so much in that nine months. And yet, as you say, we need tax reform. You’re meeting resistance from within your own party. You’re meeting resistance from the Democrats. How do you move from here?” And the interview concludes with Trump — the President of the United States — telling Dobbs that “it’s an honor” to be able to speak with him.

In between, of course, you get Trump’s usual mishmash of gibberish, lies, and misstatements.

Trump is impressed that China also has a president

One of the more remarkable exchanges in the interview starts when Dobbs decides that instead of asking a question, he’ll just editorialize that critics of Trump’s China policy are mistaken. Trump cuts in to explain that he has an excellent relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping because Xi also has the title of “president.”

DOBBS: Relationships — you were criticized for even trying to court, if you will, President Xi of China. Everyone, the so-called intelligentsia of this country’s foreign policy establishment, said you’re wasting your time, it just can’t be done. And obviously you’ve made significant progress with him and—

TRUMP: Just spoke to him a few minutes ago, just before I walked into the room. You know, something has been given to him that’s never been—

DOBBS: Right.

TRUMP: —it’s really virtually never happened in China. He’s been given powers that nobody’s—

DOBBS: —written into the constitution.

TRUMP: He’s a powerful man. I happen to think he’s a very good person. Now with that being said, he represents China, I represent the USA, so, you know, there’s going to always be conflict. But we have a very good relationship. People say we have the best relationship of any president-president, because he’s called president also.

Now some people might call him the king of China. But he’s called president. But we have a very good relationship and that’s a positive thing. And it would be good to have that relationship with Russia and other countries, too.

Trump is, obviously, hideously unpopular around the world. That makes it difficult for democratically elected leaders to engage in the same level of Trump flattery as a dictator (or Fox Business host), which may have given Trump a poor impression of the various prime ministers of Europe and the Commonwealth.

Trump then reveals that he’s not even sure what the itinerary is for his upcoming trip to China, “And we’re going to Beijing and other places, wherever he’d like to take me. And we’ll be spending two days there.”

Trump can’t maintain focus on anything

Trump is a famously meandering speaker but it’s striking that rather than returning time and again to his top priorities, he actually gets sidetracked from his own signature issues. Dobbs, who became an anti-immigration fanatic before it was cool, tries to get Trump to talk about GOP congressional leaders’ doubts about the border wall, asking “How in the world are we going to be able to deal with all of these issues if you — if you cannot bring the Republican party together?”

Trump responds with a long digression about prescription drug pricing:

TRUMP: I really think they’re coming along. I really do. I think they are coming along. One thing you didn’t mention which you will mention and I know you talk about it is the power of the pharmaceutical companies.

DOBBS: Oh, yes.

TRUMP: We pay so much more for the same pill, prescription drugs than other countries. You go to Canada — people go to Canada to buy prescriptions.

We pay for the exact same pill, made from same plant, the same company, we pay in many cases, many, many times more than they’re paying in other countries. So we’re subsidizing the world in terms of prescription drugs. It’s ridiculous. And it’s going to stop.

Trump has, of course, been complaining about this problem for years. But his administration has never endorsed any of the many pieces of legislation (mostly backed by Democrats) that would address it. Nor has he appointed people to health policy jobs who agree with him about drug pricing. Which is perhaps why Trump then takes a hard pivot to the unrelated issue of opioid addiction.

TRUMP: The problem I have is these companies give so much — I mean the contributions are massive, just massive, the amount. But we do have — there are a lot of good people that are seeing what’s going on. And I think we’ll be successful in that. Next week, I’m going to declaring an emergency, national emergency on drugs.

The opioid is a tremendous emergency, what’s going on there. The drugs pouring into the country have gotten — and I tell you what, we’ve made a big impact. But still, we need the wall. You know, part of the reason we need the wall is for drugs.

And if Trump is hazy on his personal policy priorities he manages to be, somehow, even more out to sea on the GOP legislative agenda.

Trump has no idea why his tax plan is good

On tax reform, Dobbs offers Trump a nice, lazy pitch right over the plate: “What do you expect the impact to be for working men and women, the middle class, those who aspire to be in the middle class?”

Now I don’t work in the Trump administration, but unlike Donald Trump I have taken the time to familiarize myself with the Trump administration’s briefing materials. So I can tell you the answer is supposed to be that the GOP tax plan will help the middle class in three big ways.

First there's a doubling of the standard deduction. Second there's an increase in the Child Tax Credit. And third, the corporate income tax cut is supposed to produce an inflow of global investment capital that spurs job creation and raises wages by an average of $4,000. Back during last weekend's interview with Maria Bartiromo, Trump at least remembered about the higher wages, though he forgot the number and said it was $5,000. With Dobbs, though, he's a mess.

TRUMP: You know, we’ve done so well. Pretty much record setting, certainly record setting for nine months in so many different ways. Nine months of a presidency. But you look at the market, how well it’s doing, so you’d say well why do you have to do anything. We can actually do better.

Trump actually forgets to sell his tax plan in any way, pivoting instead to Mexico.

And I think we will do better. We are going to have so many jobs created by what we’re doing. And you know, we’re going to have companies that aren’t going to be leaving our country anymore. You look at what’s happened over the last 25 years, you go down and take a look at Mexico—

DOBBS: Right.

TRUMP: —and see how many car companies have built these massive factories in Mexico. Not here. We want them built in Michigan, and Ohio, and our places. And they just leave, and they fire everybody, and they go and open up plants. That’s not going to be happening anymore, plus they’re going to be penalized in many different ways if they do it.

Trump, of course, has not proposed any policies that would enact any such penalties.

Trump can't discuss anything in policy terms

One of the odder things to ever happen in a presidential interview is Dobbs attempting to ask Trump a question about his choice to chair the Federal Reserve. Trump is so unable to either discuss this in policy terms or else demurely decline to speculate that he ends up reversing roles and asking Dobbs what he thinks. Then they get so buddy-buddy that Dobbs decides to crack a joke Trump doesn't seem to understand about how maybe he'll get the job himself.

DOBBS: You’re nearing a decision on who will chair the fed.

TRUMP: I am.

DOBBS: Any hints?

TRUMP: So I really have it down to two and maybe three people. And I think over the next very short period of time I’ll be announcing it. It won’t be a big shock. It was sort of interesting, the way it comes out. And you’ve been talking about the various people on your show, which I watch absolutely almost all the time, even if it means TiVo or whatever device you happen to be using at the time.

DOBBS: We appreciate it.

TRUMP: But no, your show is fantastic. So I’ll be announcing this role over the next pretty short period of time.

DOBBS: All right. And you—

TRUMP: Do you have a preference, out of curiosity?

DOBBS: I do, and—

TRUMP: Tell me who your preference is.

DOBBS: I think I — may I constrain myself?

TRUMP: Yes.

DOBBS: Because an ad hoc adviser to the president—

TRUMP: No, but I’d love to hear it. You could even cut it out if you want. You don’t have to — I would love to hear you. I only want that from people I respect.

DOBBS: I personally believe that Janet Yellen might be worth keeping.

TRUMP: I tell you what, she was in my office three days ago. She was very impressive. I liked her a lot. I mean, it’s somebody that I am thinking about. I would certainly think about it. In one way, I have to say—

DOBBS: I haven’t been utterly rejected—

TRUMP: No, no. In one way, I have to say you’d like to make your own mark.

DOBBS: Right.

TRUMP: You understand that.

DOBBS: Absolutely.

TRUMP: You like to make your own mark, which is maybe one of the things she’s got a little bit against her. But I think she’s terrific. We had a great talk. And we’re obviously doing very well together, you look at the markets.

From independent reporting, Trump seems genuinely torn between the idea of reappointing Yellen, tapping Jerome Powell (a Republican who's currently on the Fed board), and picking John Taylor, a monetary economist who a lot of back-bench Republican politicians are excited about.

Yet Trump is unable to process this in any kind of policy terms. Taylor and Yellen have a fundamental disagreement about how monetary policy should be conducted, while Powell's views are less clear but at least seem to be similar to Yellen's. Trump's only take is that Yellen must be good because the stock market is up, but maybe he'll fire her anyway in order to leave his own mark.

At his best, Trump echoes inaccurate industry talking points

At one point, Trump does actually break with habit and try to explain a policy idea of his in some detail — letting companies who've stashed profits in foreign tax havens bring the money back to the United States at a discount tax rate.

TRUMP: That number is much higher now, because it’s, you know, built up over the years. And I would be surprised if it weren’t close to $4 trillion. That money’s coming back. And nobody would bring it back now because the tax is so astronomical, they’d have to be desperate to bring it back.

I mean any company that would bring it back and pay the tax that they have to pay, which probably ends up being close to 40 percent, who’s going to pay that to bring money back in? So what they do is they leave their money in these other places and other countries and they spend it there and they create a lot of additional wealth there.

We want the money coming back here. But it could be $4 trillion. And what we’re doing is substantially lowering the tax. And we’re also getting rid of all the bureaucratic hurdles. It wasn’t just the tax. I have friends that want to bring money back. The amount of work they have to do to get the approval to bring the money back is absolutely ridiculous.

To Trump's credit, while none of this is true, it is a more or less accurate summary of the talking points used by the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups agitating for a tax cut. They would like you to believe that Apple and Microsoft have giant piles of cash sitting around in strongboxes in Ireland and the Cayman Islands and that a repatriation break will flood the United States with cash.

The reality, as Adam Looney, who used to run tax analysis at the Treasury Department, explains is that money owned by US companies' foreign subsidiaries isn't actually located in foreign countries. What they do with the money is buy dollar-denominated bonds of various kinds.

He examined big companies' financial statements and concluded that "of the 15 companies with the largest cash balances — companies that hold almost $1 trillion in cash — about 95 percent of the total cash was invested in the US." What a repatriation holiday would let these companies do is pay the cash out to their shareholders as dividends. Great news if you happen to own tons of stock, but nothing useful for the normal person.

All that said, Trump really is faithfully replicating industry talking points here, which is a lot better than he does on other issues.

Replacement-level Republicanism, minus competence

The truly striking thing about Trump, nine months in, is not the awe-inspiring scale of accomplishments that Dobbs claims to see.

It’s that after an extraordinarily contentious primary season in which Trump put forward many profoundly heterodox policy ideas, we have a president in the White House whose strongest performance comes when giving a decent rendition of Chamber of Commerce talking points on one aspect of a corporate income tax cut.

There’s no actual plan here to cut prescription drug prices. There isn’t even any talk any more of “terrific” health insurance programs that will “cover everyone.” Trump’s not pretending any more than he’s going to raise taxes on the rich, he’s not talking about $1 trillion infrastructure investments, and he’s certainly not burning the midnight oil coming up with a Trumpian policy agenda.

He’s just kind of bopping along with more vulgarity and corruption and less discipline and policy knowledge than a normal president.

Meanwhile, a Republican Party that’s no longer really divided on policy is tearing itself apart between a faction that can see the plain reality in front of them and a majority group that, like Dobbs, insists on pretending that their party’s unpopular and not-very-able leader is in fact a leader of world-historical proportions.