CNN host mocks Trump's 'I know you are but what am I' economic arguments
Donald Trump faced tough questions about his economic proposals, and CNN's John Berman noticed something familiar about his arguments.
The former president bristled at Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait's repeated fact-checks and blustered through answers when pressed for specifics, and CNN business correspondent Matt Egan doesn't think he did much to reassure nervous economists.
"That's right, Trump's tariff plan is really the part of his agenda that freaks out economists the most, right across the board and rather than soften his pitch yesterday, Trump really went all in," Egan said. "He praised tariffs as 'the most beautiful word in the dictionary.' If anything, he sounded concerned that his tariff plan isn't tough enough, suggesting that his idea of 10-percent tariffs on all U.S. imports hasn't gone far enough, and it might have to go up to 50 percent."
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Economists broadly agree tariffs would reignite inflation and cause consumer costs to increase, while also dampening economic growth and harming the manufacturing sector, and Trump lashed out when Micklethwait pointed out that critics believe his policies would run up enormous debts.
"What does the Wall Street Journal know – I'm meeting with them tomorrow," Trump said. "What does the Wall Street Journal know? They've been wrong about everything – so have you, by the way. You've been wrong about everything."
Micklethwait called him out for trying to turn their exchange at the Chicago Economic Club into a debate, and while Egan described the face-off as "classic Trump, dismissing objective criticism, just attacking the interviewer," Berman saw something far less sophisticated.
"I'm familiar with that answer – I know you are but what am I?" Berman said.
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