WASHINGTON — If a year from now, prices at Walmart and Target have soared 15% and a serious recession is suddenly on the horizon, it’s because of Mark Burnett.
Donald Trump has mismanaged hundreds of millions of dollars left to him by his father for decades, most famously bankrupting casinos and, to this day, fundamentally misunderstanding basic economics, such as arguing that consumers wouldn’t pay any of his proposed massive tariffs. And yet, when asked who could better manage the economy, the former president still leads voters over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, thanks in large part to reality TV impresario Burnett’s decision to cast Trump as the genius businessman hero on “The Apprentice.”
“When he ran, people were convinced he was a businessman who could make deals,” said Ryan Cummings of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a former economist in President Joe Biden’s White House.
Cummings said that same confidence in Trump’s insight later allowed him to claim that the economy had improved dramatically under his administration compared with that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, when in fact the economy was essentially the same. “When Trump said the economy was doing well, people tended to believe it,” he said.
And in his bid to return to power, President Trump has made tariffs of up to 20% on all foreign goods and as much as 60% on Chinese goods a central pillar of his economic policy, but experts warn that this could lead to a return of high inflation and a major economic downturn.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the tariffs would boost inflation, reduce gross domestic product and lead to higher unemployment. “How much tariffs will hurt the economy will depend on how other countries react to higher U.S. tariffs on their goods,” he said.
Cummings put it more bluntly: “It would be a massive disaster. Entire supply chains would have to be rebuilt and every other country would immediately retaliate, either cutting off goods directly to consumers or making goods so expensive that they are effectively cut off.”
Republican candidate Donald Trump answered questions at a campaign event at the Economic Club of New York on September 5.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions from HuffPost. During his debate with Harris on September 10, the former coup attempter repeated a decades-old but obviously false claim about Trump’s business acumen after Harris said Trump had received $400 million from his father.
“I was given a tiny fraction of it and I turned it into billions of dollars. Billions of dollars. People look at it and they’re amazed,” Trump said.
Apparently, Americans still largely believe him.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released last week found that voters believe Trump could manage the U.S. economy better than his vice president by a 54-41 margin. Other polls have smaller margins, but virtually all show Trump leading on the issue.
Playing a smart businessman on TV
As Trump himself once told fellow NBC television star Billy Bush, his secret in life is to say things repeatedly and confidently, whether they’re true or not.
“People just believe,” he said. “You just tell them and they believe you.”
During his time as a New York City developer, he told reporters and gossip columnists all sorts of things, not just to inflate his own status but to disparage his competitors. He once leaked a completely fabricated story to a tabloid about Prince Charles buying an apartment in Trump Tower. When he bought Eastern Airlines shuttles from Boston and New York to Washington, DC in 1989, he told a reporter (without fact) that the competing airlines on those routes were flying unsafe planes and that his was the only safe one. Just two months later, one of his “Trump Shuttle” 727s broke its nose gear on landing.
While Trump’s creation myth is mostly known to New Yorkers, it reached a national audience when “The Apprentice” first aired in 2004. The game show portrayed Trump as a brilliant chief executive, a gimmick that allowed him to “fire” contestants each week.
What most viewers didn’t realize then, and what many voters don’t realize today, is that Trump’s actual business record belies the image of the Midas touch the writers had created.
While he has repeatedly claimed that he built his financial empire with only $1 million borrowed from his father, in reality, he took over Fred Trump’s homebuilding empire at the age of 32, and his business decisions have underperformed the overall market ever since.
National Journal calculated that if Trump had put all of his money into an S&P 500 index fund in 2015, the year he first ran for president, he would have been worth $8 billion, rather than the $4 billion that Forbes estimated at the time.
More recently, New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Suzanne Craig, using thousands of pages of family legal documents provided by Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, estimated that the former president received more than $413 million in total from his father, and their new book, “Lucky Loser,” shows that The Apprentice brought in an additional $427 million into Trump’s pockets at a time when other business ventures were bleeding money.
By the time he won the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s list of failed businesses included casinos, airlines, and a variety of branded ventures, including Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump Bottled Water. Trump University was the subject of investigations by multiple attorneys general, and Trump ultimately settled the lawsuits for $25 million.
More recently, his efforts to start a social media company, Truth Social, have stalled since going public, with the company’s shares falling from a high of $79.38 after listing in March to $12.79 at the close of trading on Tuesday.
And over the past few years, Trump, while still claiming to be a billionaire, has lent his name to ads for a variety of collectibles, from a Trump Bible ($60) to Trump sneakers ($399) to Trump digital trading cards ($99) to Trump commemorative coins ($100).
Lying is effective
Trump continues to use his tried-and-true tactic of lying about the economy in general and specifically as he tries to get his old job back.
Trump claims that his 2017 tax cuts were the largest in American history. He also claims that he has presided over the “greatest economy” in history. Neither claim is true at all. In fact, the economy has performed better at some earlier times, and the tax cuts of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were larger than Trump’s.
In fact, the economy under Trump has been roughly the same or slightly worse than that under his predecessor, Barack Obama, whom Trump and Republicans collectively condemned as a disaster.
And while Trump blames Biden and Harris (his Democratic opponent in November) for higher inflation in 2022 and 2023, he neglected to mention that two-thirds of the $5.7 trillion aimed at preventing the economy from collapsing during the coronavirus pandemic was signed into law by Trump, not Biden. Economists blame that spending and ongoing supply chain issues for higher inflation as the economy emerges from the pandemic.
Along with lies and exaggerations about her record, there have also been apocalyptic warnings about what would happen if Harris wins the presidential election, claiming that her election would bring about a “1929-style recession,” just as she did when she ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
“Under Kamala Harris, we will not have an auto industry, we will not have a steel industry, we will not have manufacturing of any kind,” he said Tuesday in Georgia. “If we don’t win this election, we will not have a country anymore.”
Meanwhile, his policy proposals for a return to the presidency boil down to tactics such as eliminating taxes on the various voting blocs he is trying to win over, “no tax on tips,” “no tax on Social Security,” “no tax on overtime,” and capping credit card interest rates at 10%. He has also expressed the belief that high tariffs and increased oil drilling will solve all of the country’s problems.
When asked how he would reduce the cost of child care, Trump responded with a lengthy 374-word answer, claiming that tariffs would raise “trillions of dollars” and that somehow it would get done. The response repeated the long-held but still erroneous notion that it is exporters, not American importers or consumers, who pay U.S. tariffs. When asked how he would reduce the cost of everything else, Trump repeatedly replied, “Drill, dig, dig,” and claimed to cut energy costs in half within a year.
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Energy industry experts have scoffed at the pledge, noting that oil and natural gas are bought and sold on a global market and the only way prices could fall that low would be an economic crisis accompanied by a full-scale recession or worse.
“This may be one of the stupidest things Donald Trump has ever said,” oil industry veteran Matt Randolph said in a video he produced mocking Trump’s promise.
To Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster, Trump’s message on the economy is much like the rest of his message: “Trump has invented a new rule of politics: shamelessly taking credit for other people’s successes that he had nothing to do with, while ignoring his own dismal failures and blaming them on his opponents,” he said.
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