Biden and Trump were both awful last night!

FRIDAY, JUNE 28, 2024

We note one important distinction: Let's repeat something we said in this morning's report.

If you watched last evening's event, you saw the two worst debate performances in modern political history.

That said, there was a difference between the two performances—a basic difference which cuts in favor of Candidate Trump:

Many of President Biden's presentations made little or no apparent sense. That said:

For most people, the depth of President Biden's struggles would have been apparent to the naked eye. 

By way of contrast, to grasp the depth of Candidate Trump's disorder, a viewer would have to be familiar with an array of elementary facts. Consider an early presentation by Trump—and as you do, consider also the silence of CNN's two lambs. 

Below, you see an early Q-and-A. The presentation concerns the mysterious creatures commonly known as tariffs:

TAPPER (6/27/24): You want to impose a 10 percent tariff on all goods coming into the U.S. How will you ensure that that doesn’t drive prices even higher?

TRUMP: It’s not going to drive them higher. It’s just going to cause countries that have been ripping us off for years, like China—and many others, in all fairness to China—it’s going to just force them to pay us a lot of money, reduce our deficit tremendously, and give us a lot of power for other things.

That was Trump's full response concerning the matter of tariffs. Trump continued on from there, changing the subject and making little sense in his new exploration. 

Already, though, he had apparently gone off the rails. He'd gone off the rails in a way which has been explained about three million times—but in a way which millions of viewers almost surely didn't, and don't, understand.

Regarding the nature of tariffs:

When the United States imposes a tariff on Chinese products, that doesn't mean that the Chinese government or some Chinese company pays money to the U.S.  

Instead, the cost of the Chinese product is increased by some designated amount when the product is sold in the United States. It's the American citizen buying the product who coughs up the extra amount. 

In theory, the Chinese government, or the Chinese company involved in the matter, is harmed because fewer items will be sold within the U.S. at the inflated price. 

But the extra money comes out of the pockets of American consumers who choose to buy the goods at the inflated price. In that way, the tariff serves, in effect, as a tax on American citizens. 

China may be hurt by a reduction in sales. But no Chinese entity is "forced to pay us [any] money," as Trump plainly implied.

Trump has been misconstruing tariffs this way for roughly a million years. He makes the misrepresentation on a regular basis. 

We don't know whether he understands the way tariffs actually work. But he constantly makes this mistaken representation—a representation which makes him sound like an "America First"-style hero. 

He's been fact-checked on this matter about a million times. In the case of this AP fact-check, that dates back to August 2019.

He's been fact-checked many times. Despite that fact, we would assume that most viewers of last night's event don't understand the way a tariff actually works.

By the way:

Candidate Trump wasn't fact-checked on this claim last night! CNN's two moderators—Tapper and Bash—simply let the statement go, moving to a new topic.

As you can see, Trump didn't answer Tapper's question, but Tapper let it go. What Trump did say was flatly misleading. Neither Tapper nor Bash made any attempt to clarify what had been said.

Just a guess:

Most people watching the debate don't know how tariffs work. To them, Trump's presentation may have seemed to make perfect sense—but so it goes in this least rational of all possible worlds.

Overall, Trump's presentations last night were full of groaning misstatements of fact. That said, a misstatement of fact may not be visible to the naked eye.

Trump's endless groaners may not have been visible. The president's struggle was.