During Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Event,” an attempt by the president to win over holdouts in the Senate and push through his tax and spending plan, his remarks meandered briefly into an alternate history of the paper clip.
Trump’s speech touted the bill, in typical Trump fashion, as “one of the most important pieces of legislation in the history of our country.”
It also briefly touched on one provision that would make interest on auto loans for American-made cars tax deductible, an idea Trump suggested he thought up himself—and which, MarketWatch reports, “you probably won’t notice … once you factor in tariffs.”
“What a great idea,” Trump said “people” told him. “It’s like the paper clip.” Trump used the same analogy when announcing the proposal in October 2024.
Here, the 79-year-old president strayed from his monotonously delivered prepared remarks to edify us with a made-up factoid: “Somebody came up with the idea of the paper clip many years ago. 1817. And he became a very rich person, and everybody looked at it and said, ‘Why the hell didn’t I think of that?’”
Trump’s guess was a little bit off, as paper clips didn’t appear in their familiar modern form until around 1892, and the invention was never patented, according to Scientific American.
But a more significant falsehood followed, as Trump went on to claim that his supposedly automaker-friendly policies accounted for his past electoral successes in Michigan, falsely stating, “I actually think we won it three times in a row” because of them. Trump lost Michigan in 2020 against Joe Biden by more than 150,000 votes.
The post Cognitive Decline? Trump Rambles About Paper Clip During Speech appeared first on New Republic.
