Read Trump's garbled argument about how Obama was dealt an easier economic hand

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last updated 28 November 2018

During a wide-ranging interview on Tuesday, The Washington Post's Philip Rucker asked President Trump about the raft of bad economic news, noting dips in the stock market and GM's decision to close five auto plants and lay off 15,000 workers. Trump pointed to his trade deals, blamed the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes, said he's "not blaming anybody," then offered this explanation, apparently arguing that former President Barack Obama had less challenging economic headwinds than he's weathered:

It's not clear how Obama's "rules" were different, or why inheriting a historically brutal recession, as Obama did, was better than Trump's taking office in the middle of a long economic upturn. Trump appears to be specifically complaining about the Fed's slow increase in interest rates and its balance-sheet reduction via unloading billions of dollars worth of bonds — "pay-downs" clearly doesn't refer to paying down the ballooning national debt — but it certainly isn't obvious what he's talking about.

Trump, like all of us, fares better with an editor — reading his transcribed interviews is always an adventure — but presumably he makes sense to himself. "I have a gut," he told Rucker, "and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me." You can peruse the entire (annotated) interview at The Washington Post.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.