Trump’s applause-line economic plan was a disaster - By Michael Gerson

Many Republicans are being driven mad by hope. In the moments between Donald Trump’s attacks on grieving parents and his joke about assassination, GOP loyalists are grasping at any straw of competence or sanity to justify their continued support of a Hindenburg-inspired presidential campaign.

So Trump’s recent speech at the Detroit Economic Club was received by some conservatives with grateful praise as “unifying” and a “good first step.” It was, in fact, the least appealing, least creative, least coherent economic address I have ever had the extreme displeasure of reviewing. It is the product of a campaign searching for new ways to fail.

A major policy address is a different kind of test for a presidential campaign than building a crowd or controlling damage after gaffes. It requires a group of policy and political advisers — often holding different views on substance and strategy — to agree with (or at least live with) a text. And it forces a candidate to shape and affirm the best version of their agenda. Many internal policy debates in a campaign get decided in the struggle over the wording of a key paragraph.

The Trump campaign clearly intended the Detroit speech to appease economic conservatives by sounding slightly less like Bernie Sanders. So he supported an end to the death tax (affecting about three-tenths of 1 percent of the public), embraced the House Republican proposal for a simplified tax-rate structure, proposed lowering the corporate tax rate; and promised a moratorium on government regulations. These ideas range from good to irrelevant. But they hardly constitute a new economic agenda. They are more like the least popular leftovers of the Reagan Revolution.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reagan-revolution-leftovers/2016/08/11/eb36ce24-5ff8-11e6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html