I’ve sort of promised myself not to write about Donald Trump, but (a) it’s a weekend, and (b) David Fahrenthold has a pretty entertaining piece about Trump in the Washington Post today. Here’s a brief excerpt of some of the reactions Fahrenthold got to a variety of Trump’s blatherings:
Mark Krikorian, a foe of illegal immigration, on Trump’s immigration ideas: “Trump is like your Uncle George at Thanksgiving dinner, saying he knows how to solve all the problems. It’s not that he’s always wrong. It’s just that he’s an auto mechanic, not a policy guy.”
David Goldwyn, a former State Department official in the Obama administration, on Trump’s plan to fight ISIS by simply bombing them and then taking all their oil: “That is sheer lunacy on so many counts, it’s hard to start.”
Some anonymous sources on the same idea: “Oil-industry experts expressed skepticism about this plan. Skepticism, in fact, may not be a strong-enough word.”
Michael Tanner of Cato, on Trump’s endless vision of new building projects combined with his insistence on lowering taxes: “You can’t spend more and collect less. That’s kind of basic math. You can argue about how the math adds up in the other people’s plans. But there’s math there. This, there’s just no math.”
Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute on Trump’s plan to jack up tariffs on countries he doesn’t like: “If you thought this had a ghost of a chance — which it doesn’t — you would sell all your stocks,” because of the damage that a trade war would do to the U.S. economy.
You know, when Mark Krikorian is critical of your anti-immigration ideas; Michael Tanner is skeptical of your tax-cutting ideas; and oil companies want no part of your oil-stealing ideas, you just know there’s something wrong.
Anyway, Fahrenthold’s piece is worth a weekend click. And you might as well do it while you can. We won’t have Trump to kick around forever.
