As Election Day 2024 approached, Donald Trump started throwing around weird promises at a frantic pace. The Republican’s list of random, poorly thought-out gimmicks offered in the final weeks of the contest included offering free IVF treatments, defraying the costs of child care expenses with imaginary tariff money, cutting consumers’ car insurance bills in half and even eliminating the Department of the Interior for reasons that didn’t make any sense.

But among the deluge of panic-stricken proposals, one stood out for me: In September 2024, the then-candidate declared that he wanted to see a temporary 10% cap on credit card interest rates — an idea he appeared to take seriously for a day or two before quietly dropping it.,,,,

Whatever happened to this apparent presidential priority? Politico reported:

Trump said in early January that he’d cap credit card rates at 10 percent, a move that would have upended the banking industry, only to change his mind and ask Congress for legislation

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...Chatter about tariff rebate checks was briefly a big deal, before it quietly vanished, following the same path as the vaunted DOGE rebate checks from a year earlier. Trump’s pitiful health care plan was in the news for about a day, before it disappeared, too.

Remember 50-year mortgages? No wants to talk about them anymore. How about the White House’s plan to allow people to use 401(k) funds to make down payments on a home? That evaporated, too.....

Part of the significance to the trend is the implications of the public: For those who want to know what’s likely to happen, it’s generally a good idea to pay more attention to what Trump and his team do, not what they say, largely because what they say has little bearing on reality.

But I’m also struck by the underlying White House mania. According to The New York Times’ polling aggregator and its national averages, the president’s public support over the weekend reached its lowest point of his second term, and Democrats appear well positioned for this year’s midterm elections. It’s against this backdrop that a degree of desperation appears to have set in for Trump, leading him to start throwing out ideas he thinks people might like as if he were a casino dealer, tossing cards at poker players, only to throw out new ones soon after.

The difference, however, is that casino dealers tend to know what they’re doing.