Analysis: Trump’s incomprehensible child care comments appear to have broken a dam

Former President Donald Trump gave a meandering, nonsensical answer to a question about child care costs when he addressed the Economic Club of New York on Thursday. Spencer Platt/TNS

In a “30 Rock” episode called “Governor Dunston,” the writing staff of the fictional sketch comedy show is confronted with a conundrum: The newly tapped Republican vice presidential candidate looks exactly like one of the show’s actors, and happens to also be prone to mortifying gaffes. They’ve been handed a comedic golden ticket, but there’s one problem.

The network’s boss insists they shouldn’t write any jokes making fun of the candidate. So the head writer, played by Tina Fey, finds a loophole. Instead of writing jokes, she simply enlists an actor to quote the candidate verbatim.

It is a not-so-subtle sendup of how Fey actually handled a real vice presidential candidate — then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — on “Saturday Night Live” in the run-up to the 2008 election.

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Fey understood a valuable truth: In the end, nothing was funnier — or provided a clearer window into her fitness for the job — than Palin’s own words.

It’s a lesson many mainstream journalists are beginning to endorse when it comes to covering former President Donald Trump.

Longtime Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle called out major newspapers’ coverage of Trump on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, suggesting they’re sanitizing Trump’s comments by simply describing them instead of allowing readers to see his actual words in their entirety.

“There’s a false equivalency going on in the coverage of this race, in that Donald Trump can say whatever crazy things he wants to say about submarines and sharks and electric batteries, whatever he wants to say, and it’s not really covered in the sense that it’s covered describing who said it, why he said it and who the man is. … And always in that story, in the false equivalency by too many reporters and too many American newspapers, is ‘By the way, Kamala Harris changed her mind on fracking.’”

Charges that Trump benefits from the media cleaning up his speeches are not new. And plenty of journalists do, of course, scrutinize and fact-check Trump’s bizarre claims. (See, for example, Joe Garofoli’s account of Trump’s speech to the California Republican Party last year, in which he promises to address the state’s wildfire crisis by wetting forest floors.)

But just a day after Barnicle’s criticisms aired, Trump’s comments at an economic forum in New York appeared to break the dam.

When asked what specific policies he would advance to make child care more affordable, here is Trump’s response, in full:

“Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that because the child care is, child care is you couldn’t, you know there’s something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country. Because I have to stay with child care, I want to stay with child care but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth. But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’re going to be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first, it’s about ‘Make America Great Again,’ we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it.”

The New York Times characterized Trump’s remarks as “an extended discourse on the glories of William McKinley and the power of tariffs to cure all that ails what Mr. Trump called a nation nearing economic collapse.” Not a glowing review, by any means, but it certainly does not paint a full picture of the incoherence of Trump’s musings on a monumentally important policy issue that impacts millions of families.

The Washington Post did not quote Trump’s response in full, but did include substantial portions of it. The story called it a “confusing answer.”

“Here’s my challenge to journalists over the next two months: quote Trump in full,” Max Kennerly, a lawyer and legal commentator, wrote on X on Thursday, alongside a video posted by the Harris campaign of Trump’s comments. “Don’t clean him up, don’t reinterpret what he says in a more sensible way, don’t secretly editorialize. Just quote him. Let the voters see how this man’s mind doesn’t work.”

Journalist Parker Malloy posted the same clip, and wrote: “It really is jarring to read Trump’s comments as he actually delivers them vs. how they’re eventually cleaned up in mainstream news outlets.”

Still, liberal columnist Greg Sargent argued, there’s a difference between highlighting individual speeches or wild comments and taking them seriously as a collective whole.

“What’s really at issue here is whether the media — as an institution, and in a comprehensive sense — is treating Trump’s mental state as an overarching and critically important factor in determining whether he is fit to be president,” Sargent wrote in the New Republic.

But the media appears to be coming far closer to embracing Sargent’s vision for an effective way to cover Trump after this week.