Opinion | Trump Has Become Unmoored in Time

This is the second in an occasional series about Donald Trump’s statements and language and what’s at stake in the election.

Do you remember the California electricity crisis of 2000 and ’01? I do, because I wrote about it a lot at the time and stuck my neck out by arguing, based on circumstantial evidence, that market manipulation was probably an important factor. One economist colleague accused me of “going Naderite,” but we eventually got direct evidence of market manipulation: tapes of Enron traders conspiring with power company officials to create artificial shortages to drive up prices.

Memories of that episode made me more sympathetic than many economists to claims that price gouging played a role in recent inflation, although I don’t believe that it was a major driver. At this point, however, it’s all old history; aside from some blackouts during a 2020 heat wave, California hasn’t had major electricity shortages in decades.

But don’t tell Donald Trump. On Thursday, in the course of a rambling, at times incoherent speech to the Detroit Economic Club, he declared, “We don’t have electricity. In California, you have brownouts or blackouts every week. And blackouts, I mean, the place is stone cold broke, no electricity.” This isn’t true, it wasn’t true when he made similar assertions last year, and 39 million Californians can tell you that it isn’t true. But in Trump’s mind, apparently, that long-ago electricity crisis never ended.

There’s an obvious parallel with Trump’s language on crime. In big cities, he has asserted, “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped. You get whatever it may be.”

Now, there was a time when America’s big cities were quite dangerous. I remember the days when major parts of New York were more or less no-go zones. But that was long ago. There was a huge decline in the national murder rate between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s; a surge during Trump’s last year in office seems to be fading away. New York’s transformation into one of the safest places in America has been especially spectacular: The city had 83 percent fewer murders last year than it did in 1990, and neither I nor my neighbors seem terrified about crossing the street to buy bread at my local bodega.

No doubt much of what Trump says about crime is a cynical attempt to stir up fear for political gain. That’s certainly true of some of his other untrue assertions, like his false claims that the Biden administration is refusing to aid Republican regions devastated by hurricanes and has diverted disaster funding to migrants. I don’t know whether Trump is aware that he’s wrong to claim that all of the jobs created under President Biden have gone to “illegal migrants,” but I’m fairly sure that he doesn’t care whether what he’s saying is true.

But it’s hard to escape the sense that there’s more than cynical calculation going on in some of Trump’s whoppers, that he may actually believe some of what he’s saying because he has become unmoored in time. On crime, for example, my guess is that in Trump’s mind it’s still 1989, the year he took out a full-page ad demanding that New York State bring back the death penalty after the rape of a woman who had been jogging in Central Park, for which five teenagers were wrongfully convicted.

Electricity supply and urban crime aren’t the only issues on which Trump’s image of America seems stuck in the past. During his Detroit speech, the former president did something unusual for a candidate one might have expected to flatter the voters in an important swing state: He insulted the city that was hosting him, declaring that if Kamala Harris wins, “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit.”

Actually, that would be great if true: Detroit has been experiencing a major economic revival, so much so that it has become a role model for struggling cities around the world and has been praised for its startup ecosystem. But I doubt that Trump knows or cares about any of that, and in his mind Detroit is probably still the poster child for the industrial Midwest’s economic struggles around, say, 2010.

The point is that there’s a pattern here. As many observers have noted, Trump routinely peddles a grim picture of America that has little to do with reality. What I haven’t seen noted as much is that his imaginary dystopia seems to be, in large part, a pastiche assembled from past episodes of dysfunction. These episodes apparently became lodged in his brain, and perhaps because he’s someone who is not known for being interested in the details and who lives in a bubble of wealth and privilege, they never left.

The thing is, Trump is fond of denigrating his opponents’ cognitive capacity. He has called Harris “mentally disabled” and a “dummy.” He has called for CBS to lose its broadcasting rights over a “60 Minutes” interview with her — one that was edited in a routine way — in which Harris, a former prosecutor, came across as, well, pretty smart, whatever you may think of her policies.

But what would Trump say about an opponent who, like him, seems stuck in the past, who routinely describes America in ways that suggest that he doesn’t know what year it is?

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