Trump uses interview to promote ‘beautiful’ tariffs and riff on his favourite themes

Donald Trump seized on an opening to sound his frequent argument that imposing huge tariffs on foreign goods would amount to an economic elixir – one that he claims would raise enormous sums for the government, protect US firms from overseas competition and prod foreign companies to open factories in the United States.

Appearing before a friendly audience at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, the Republican presidential nominee repeatedly asserted that tariffs are misunderstood as an economic tool.

“To me,” Trump said, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. It’s my favourite word. It needs a public relations firm”.

If tariffs need an image makeover, it’s probably because mainstream economists say they actually amount to a tax on American consumers that would make the economy less efficient and send inflation surging in the United States.

The moderator, John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, often struggled to keep the conversation focused on economics and business. Asked, for example, whether the government should break up Google after an antitrust case, Trump started talking about fighting voter fraud in Virginia and how, in his view, Google had treated him unfairly.