The 37 must-see lines from Donald Trump's Bloomberg interview
Whoa boy.
Two days before he was struck by a would-be assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump sat down with Bloomberg to talk about his economic outlook — and his views on Diet Coke. (Yes, really.)
To their immense credit, Bloomberg published the full transcript of that conversation. I spent the morning going through it line by line — and pulling out the Trump quotes you need to see.
They’re below.
This is one of a handful of posts I regularly put behind the paywall. It’s hard work and I think I am the only one consistently doing it! If you have been on the fence about becoming a paid subscriber, there’s really no better time — I am running a special discount through the end of the Republican convention on Thursday. It’s just $5 a month or $50 a year to subscribe!
To the Lines!
“Well, I think manufacturing is a big deal, and everybody that runs for office says you’ll never manufacture again.”
“Everyone” who runs for office says “you’ll never manufacture again”? Really? And away we go!
“When I was president, I fought very strongly and hard with President Xi and with Shinzo Abe, who’s a fantastic man—actually, you know the story there.”
The “story there” is that Abe, the former Japanese prime minister, was assassinated while giving a speech in July 2022.
“And I think you’re going to see some very bad things happen in a little while.”
Do tell!
“They make a good product but you know—what it does is it forces, it’s going to force Caterpillar and these other companies to build, they already have plenty outside but it’s going to force them to build in other nations, which is what the other nations want. And it’s what we should want also in a different way, we should want that, we have to have that but I think you’re gonna see some very bad numbers coming over the next period of a year.”
“You saw last week they announced that they opened up seven chargers for a course of $8 billion. Seven. Seven chargers”
“A course of $8 billion.” (Also, there is some truth in what Trump is saying here — but only some.)
“So inflation was caused by energy. And what [Biden] did is he started immediately cutting my energy.”
“My energy.”
“So I cut regulations more than any president in history by far and I got the biggest tax cuts—more than any president including Ronald Reagan, which was second.”
Nope!
“As I handed over, the stock market was substantially higher than it was previous to the pandemic or the China virus or Covid, or whatever you want to call it, many different names”
“Some men have many names.” — Jaqen H'ghar
“So we have a whole set of macro issues that are also micro issues, they go into micro issues.”
[nods warily]
“I gotta get that hat. [To an aide sitting in on the interview] Can you tell her to bring me that new hat? This hat says, ‘Trump was right about everything.’”
This hat actually exists. And it can be yours for $40.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to So What to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.