Steven Rattner, a New York Times columnist who was also the Obama administration’s “auto czar,” has a piece out Thursday morning defending the auto bailout. This being the New York Times, the piece can’t just make an argument about the bailout: It also has to serve as a rebuke of Donald Trump. And so, the headline is “What Trump Doesn’t Know About Detroit.”
The premise of Rattner’s piece is that Trump opposed the auto bailout. Right off, Rattner’s contention struck this reader as odd. Trump, for whatever he is, is hardly a lodestar of free market conservatism, after all. He supported TARP, for one thing. And sure enough, back in 2008, Trump said, “I think the government should stand behind [the car companies] 100 percent. You cannot lose the auto companies. They’re great.”
Rattner mentions this quotation at the bottom of the article—how inconvenient!—and so instead is forced to ground his column in a different remark that Trump made last summer. “You could have let it go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself,” the Republican nominee said of the car industry, “and a lot of people felt it should happen.”
Now, unfortunately for Rattner he—or more likely an editor—included a link to that quotation. And here it is, in full:
In other words, Trump expressed nothing but ambivalence: He would have supported the bailout, or perhaps he would have let Detroit declare bankruptcy. (And given that Trump was already on the record supporting the bailout, lets be honest, it’s more likely he would have backed the bailout.) From this rather innocuous statement, Rattner goes into high dudgeon, blasting “Trump’s vision of a free-fall bankruptcy.”
“Flimsy” would the kindest way to describe the premise of Rattner’s column.
