Why Trump’s Child Care Policy Incoherence Matters
By now, most of us who pay attention to politics have grown accustomed to tuning out the word-salad responses that former President Donald Trump frequently offers when asked a specific, policy-oriented question.
But even by Trump’s standards, the answer he gave on Thursday when asked to explain how he’d propose to lower child care costs was a doozy.
“It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about—that, because, look, child care is child care—you know, there’s something you have to have it in this country. You have to have it,” Trump began. “But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us.”
It goes on from there. Read the whole thing here or watch it here.
If you’re being very generous to Trump, you might conclude that he’s proposing to use tariff revenue to cover child care costs—though it’s not clear how much he’d spend or what the mechanism for redistributing that money would be. In short, what it seems Trump is promising here is a huge expansion of taxes on Americans to somehow pay for child care costs: growing government on the revenue side to pay for an expansion of government on the spending side.
Of course, it’s hard to tell exactly what he was saying there, so let’s not get bogged down in the specifics. Trump certainty isn’t.
It may be tempting to simply write this off as “Trump being Trump” and move on. But the Republican presidential nominee’s consistent inattention to the details of policymaking does matter—even if it has no bearing on the election—and the child care issue is a perfect example of why.
This sort of issue is a liability for Trump because he can’t just bluster or pander his way through it. Trump excels when he can turn complex policies into simple, partisan us-vs.-them arguments that allow him to avoid any attention on the specifics. On issues like taxes and immigration, this technique works because one party broadly wants the policy to shift in one direction, so Trump can simply promise to do the opposite—never mind the details.
But no one wants higher child care costs. Both sides want to reduce them. The argument, th
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