”I Can't Read This Damn Teleprompter,“ Trump Complains
Plus, why Steve Levitt is leaving the University of Chicago; What Richard Haass got wrong.
President Trump was in Dayton, Ohio, Saturday March 16, 2024, for a rally on behalf of his preferred candidate in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, Bernie Moreno. The teleprompter wasn’t stable—“I can’t read this damn teleprompter,” Trump announced at one point—and, perhaps as a result, Trump gave a speech that was one of the worst I’ve seen him deliver.
One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of Trump relates to the coarsening of the culture. The candidate’s habit of dropping profanity into his public remarks, as he did repeatedly yesterday—“I don’t give a shit,” “People don’t want to hear bullshit,” “He’s just a bullshit artist”—is unpresidential.
Trump managed, simultaneously, to attempt to court Black voters—“When I am president, we will end this Biden betrayal of the African-American community”—and also to denounce Biden for renaming an army base that had been called Fort Robert E. Lee, calling that decision a “terrible thing.”
He mocked Governor Newsom of California as “Gavin Newscum—s-c-u-m is his last name.”
He complimented the physical appearance of the “hot” governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem.
“You’re not allowed to say she’s beautiful…so I will not say that,” Trump said.
Substantively, Trump’s main push was against the traffic of people and goods across the southern border. He said that on day one of his presidency he’d “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” to reverse “Joe Biden’s migrant invasion.” He also said he’d impose a 100 percent tariff on Mexican-built Chinese cars. “We’re gonna tariff them at 100 percent,” he said.
In case that was all too subtle for anyone watching, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio got up and said, “all the net job growth in the Biden presidency has gone to the foreign-born.”
I find a lot of the anti-Trump rhetoric overwrought (Dick Cheney once said “In our nation’s 246-year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.”) The Trump folks may figure Biden is so weak that they can beat him by running mainly against illegal immigration, inflation, and imported electric cars.
Yet it sure would be nice to hear something more about a constructive, positive second-term Trump agenda that goes beyond deportation and tariffs. Maybe Trump can’t articulate that without a functioning teleprompter? I understand he’s been busy defending himself from the legal war the Democratic prosecutors are waging against him. And maybe “Not Biden” will indeed be sufficient for a win in 2024. Risk-averse advisers, seeing Trump leading in a lot of polls, may think that sticking with what is working is a better strategy than putting out new policy substance that would only provide Biden with new targets to attack.
Another political risk, though, is that Trump makes it back to the White House with a political mandate that is limited to deportation and tariffs. Or that, failing to inspire voters with a positive vision, he doesn’t wind up winning.
Steven Levitt on why he’s retiring from the University of Chicago: Jon Hartley ’s “The Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century Podcast” has an interview with Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt, who is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.
Steve recently told me that he has actually decided to retire from academia and is going emeritus at the young age of 57…
[Levitt]: So, these were four papers that I was really excited about and collectively they had zero impact. They didn't publish well by and large, nobody cared about them and I remember looking at one point at the citations and seeing that collectively they had six citations. I thought, my god, what am I doing? I just spent the last two years of my life and nobody cares about it…. And that was really discouraging to me. And you combine that with the idea, with the fact that along with Stephen Dubner, we've got this media franchise where Dubner's podcast Freakonomics Radio gets a couple million downloads a month. And if I want to get a message out, I can get millions of people through a different medium. It just didn't make sense to me to keep on puttering around, doing all this work, spending years to write papers that no one cared about when I had other ways of getting my ideas out…. The question I should ask myself is why didn't I retire a long time ago? It made no sense. I've just been, I've thought, I've known for years, it's the wrong place for me to be. And it just took me a long time to figure out how to extricate myself from academics.
Levitt also recalls taking his economics students to a shooting range in Gary, Indiana.
“So, there aren't really an incentive to teach well. No one really cares how you teach. But what I quickly learned is that it's a lot more fun to teach a good course than to teach a bad course. And part of what makes a class good is if you actually have fun. And so, I put a real premium on trying to make integrate learning with fun and in storytelling and doing things that would be enjoyable for the kids. And so, the gun range, I think, was a great example because almost nobody who was in the class would have ever shot a gun. They thought guns were the worst things ever. They thought anyone who liked guns must be a complete lunatic. And so, it was not only fun, it just gave a chance for us all to have dinner together and... sit in some greasy spoon restaurant in Gary. But I've heard a number of students say that how is one of the most transformative things they did in Chicago. Because it made them see someone else's perspective. It made them see why people like guns and feel the power of guns.”
Sorting for stupidity? Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a column laying out a provocative and intriguing theory that as the federal government got bigger and more powerful, it also became more stupid. “You can make much more money outside the government, trying to influence it, than you can make inside the government, trying to do your job. The result is a steady movement of the smartest people out of government,” he hypothesizes.
Richard Haass in the Wall Street Journal: I wrote Friday (“Wall Street Journal and Zonstein”) about how the news sections of the Wall Street Journal have tilted against Israel. Another example came in the Saturday Journal, in a long piece by Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Haass’s piece is so erroneous in so many ways that a full-length rebuttal almost isn’t worth the time and effort, but it’s not worth letting it go unanswered, either.
So just for starters, consider that in claiming that “Israel’s actions have left it worse off,” Haass doesn’t mention that Hamas had been a position to rain rockets on Israel cities, and that, with Israel’s successful war in Gaza dismantling the rocket launchers and killing the terrorists who were firing them, those rocket attacks have largely ceased.
Consider that Haass writes, “what else could and should Israel have done? One thing was to wait. Much is said about the parallels between the Oct. 7 attacks and what the U.S. faced in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Often lost in this comparison is the fact that U.S. military operations to oust Afghanistan’s Taliban government for providing sanctuary to al Qaeda did not begin for nearly a month. Other fateful decisions, including enlarging the mission and increasing the number of American soldiers on the ground, did not happen for months or even years. Had Israel waited to respond after Oct. 7, Hamas’s atrocities would have dominated the news, allowing Israel to focus international attention on the barbaric attack.”
That’s ridiculous. On October 7, there were Hamas terrorists who had infiltrated Israel and were aiming to kill or kidnap as many Jews as possible. If Israel didn’t immediately mobilize to fight them off and restore its border with Gaza, more Israelis would have been killed or captured. “Waiting” was not an option. And Haass totally omits the fact that Israel did wait to launch its ground invasion of Gaza. Don’t take my word for it; the Wall Street Journal itself reported October 27, “Israel has agreed, for now, to a request from the U.S. to delay its expected ground invasion of Gaza so the Pentagon can place air defenses in the region to protect U.S. troops.” The Journal headlined an October 27 podcast, “Why Israel Is Waiting to Invade Gaza.” How long was Israel supposed to “wait” with rockets landing on its cities and with kidnapped Israelis in the clutches of Hamas terrorists?
Haass claims “the backlash against Israel has emboldened Iran, the principal backer of Hamas.” How much more “emboldened” could Iran have gotten—it trained and funded the October 7 Hamas attack? In fact rather than emboldening Iran, Israel’s war has left the Iranians begging for a ceasefire; the New York Times reports that Iranian negotiators in January in Muscat, Oman, “wanted the Biden administration to deliver a cease-fire in Gaza.”
Haass’s article proposes “economic sanctions” on Israel, which is nuts. The mere suggestion demonstrates a basic moral confusion. An Iran-backed terrorist organization launches a rampage of rape, burning alive, kidnapping, and beheading against an American ally; the American ally responds by militarily degrading the capability of the terrorist organization; and Richard Haass responds by proposing economic sanctions on the American ally? The logical move would be tightening up sanctions on Iran, not punishing Israel.