Former President Donald Trump, a father of five, was asked Thursday what he would do to lower the cost of child care if he wins in November — and his answer was puzzling.
Following a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Trump was asked what specific legislation he planned to pass to help lower child care costs for working parents. His answer was a long, incoherent string of words that seemed to suggest that broad tariffs would solve the problem.
“It's a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers I'm talking about, child care is child care. It's something you know you have to have, in this country you have to have.”
The former president then spoke about taxes on foreign countries, adding: “But when you talk about these numbers compared to the kind of numbers I'm talking about by taxing foreign countries at levels that they're not used to, but they'll get used to it very quickly.”
Both the White House and Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign mocked Trump's response.
“If you have any idea what that answer means, you’re a better detective than I am, because these tariffs that he wants to implement broadly would be the equivalent of a $4,000 tax increase on working families,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told MSNBC on Friday.
Harris' campaign posted a video of the moment from its official X account.
The rising costs of child care and raising children have become a major issue in Harris’s campaign. The vice president has promised to restore the expanded child tax credit, a $6,000 tax credit for parents of newborns.
By contrast, the Republican Party has struggled to come up with an answer on child-rearing and reproduction that doesn't sound like it was plucked from a men's rights activism forum.
On Wednesday, Trump’s vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was asked about how to lower child care costs at a Turning Point USA event. Vance suggested that family members could help, as if struggling Americans weren’t already doing as much as they could.
“I think one of the things we can do is make it easier for families to choose whatever model they want, right? So one way that you might be able to take a little bit of the pressure off people who are paying a lot for daycare is… maybe grandma and grandpa [want] “To help out a little bit more, or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle who wants to help out a little bit more. If that happens, it will take some of the pressure off all the resources we spend on child care,” Vance replied.
This response echoed previous statements by Vance where he agreed that the “whole purpose” of postmenopausal women's existence is to help other women raise their children.
