Trump stumbles when asked how he will tackle child care

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump stumbled over a question about his child care plan on Thursday when asked whether he would make the issue a priority and how he would handle it if elected president.

The Republican presidential candidate's lengthy response lacked a coherent vision or policy on how he would address child care needs, instead focusing entirely on promoting his planned tariffs on U.S. imports and touting the revenue they would generate.

When asked if he would “work to prioritize legislation that makes child care affordable” and “what specific legislation” he would support during a question-and-answer session at the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Trump said:

“Well, I would do that, and we sit down together. You know, I was someone – we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka – who were very influential on this issue. It's a very important issue.

“But I think when you talk about the numbers that I'm talking about — child care is child care, you couldn't — you know, there's something — you have to have that in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, versus the numbers that I'm talking about, when you tax foreign nations at a level that they're not used to. But they're going to get used to it very quickly. And it's not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they're going to impose a very high tax when they send products into our country. Those numbers are so much higher than any of the numbers that we're talking about, including child care, that it's going to be enough. We're going to — I look forward to being out of deficits within a relatively short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I've been telling you about, in waste and fraud and all the other things that are going on in our country.

“Because I have to stick with child care. I want to stick with child care. But those numbers are small compared to the economic numbers that I'm talking about, including the growth, but the growth is also led by the plan that I just told you about. We're going to raise trillions of dollars. And even though child care is called expensive, it's not very expensive, relatively speaking, compared to the numbers that are being raised.

“We're going to make this an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we'll take care of the rest of the world. Let's help other people. But first, let's take care of our country. This is about America first. This is about making America great again. We have to do it because right now we're a failing nation. So we're going to take care of that. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.”

After the clip and transcript were shared, Trump's response went viral online, drawing criticism from the campaign team of his Democratic presidential rival Kamala Harris and leaving political pundits across the ideological spectrum baffled.

“Somewhere in that incoherent jumble of words was the claim that the proposed tariffs could both balance the budget and fund free child care across the country, which is of course mathematically absurd,” said Brian Riedl, an economic policy expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute and former policy adviser to prominent Republicans. “Trump sounded like the student who didn't study for the test and was making up numbers.”

The Harris team responded by attacking Trump's tariffs while highlighting their proposals to expand the child tax credit.

“Billionaire-bought Donald Trump's 'plan' to make child care more affordable calls for a $3,900 tax increase on middle-class families,” said Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello, citing estimates from two think tanks on the impact of Trump's tariff plan. “The American people deserve a president who will actually cut costs for them, like Vice President Harris' plan to reinstate a $3,600 child tax credit for working families and an expanded $6,000 tax credit for families with newborn children.”

Harris' proposal is less aggressive than what the Biden White House has advocated for families with children, including capping child care costs for the middle class at 7% of income and making preschool universal. The Harris campaign did not respond when asked whether she would support those provisions if elected president.

White House spokesman Andrew Bates mocked Trump's response in an interview on MSNBC's “Morning Joe” on Friday.

“If you have any idea what that answer means, you're a better detective than I am,” Bates said, citing analyses by bipartisan experts that Trump's tariffs would limit economic growth.

Reshma Saujani, who asked Trump the question about child care at the Economic Club of New York, told NBC News after the event that the former president's answer “pretty much blew her away.”

“He basically said that child care isn't that expensive or that tariffs would solve the problem,” said Saujani, who is on the board and was invited by the club to ask Trump a question. “That shows me how out of touch with reality he really is. When you talk to parents, mothers and families on the campaign trail, they talk about child care and the costs associated with it.”

In her question to Trump, Saujani, a founder of the groups Moms First and Girls Who Code, cited statistics that show child care costs a total of $122 billion a year and called it “one of our country's most pressing economic problems.”

She asked him to name a specific bill he would propose to address the problem.

Trump did not answer her directly. Instead, he talked about the amount of money that would flow into the U.S. through tariffs on foreign countries. He seemed to suggest that those amounts would be more than enough to cover child care, although he did not provide a plan for how the government would raise those amounts.

Saujani, for her part, believes Trump raised another point that she described as “shocking”: the cost of child care is not such a big problem for the United States when compared to the costs of imposing tariffs.

Asked to explain his response, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded: “President Trump's first-term economic policies helped families by putting more money in our pockets, while he made improved access to child care and paid family leave top priorities of his administration. Now, hard-working families in Kamala Harris' America are struggling to buy basic groceries, diapers and baby formula for their children. President Trump will make America strong, safe and prosperous again for struggling American families when he returns to the White House.”