FOR Donald Trump, details are not a strong suit. His policies typically fit in a tweet: build a wall, reduce Muslim immigration, make NATO allies pay for protection. That makes them easy to list but hard to fathom. His speech on August 8th, on economic policy, was an opportunity to explain at greater length how he hopes to achieve the economic boom that he promises American workers. Alas, the extra detail did not bring greater clarity. Even when sticking to a script, Mr Trump seems incapable of producing ideas of depth and rigour. His plan is more wild brainstorm than policy memo.

Mr Trump paints a picture of the economy that is irreconcilable with the facts. He says jobs are scarce, poverty is rising and incomes are stagnant. But in reality America’s economy is the strongest in the rich world. Unemployment is only 4.9%. The poverty rate, though high, has been falling since 2012. And median earnings have risen by 5% in real terms in the past two years. It is normal for opposition politicians to exaggerate economic problems, and the image of an economic wasteland is based on the genuine problems of areas that relied on low-value manufacturing, where workforce-participation has fallen (see article). But Mr Trump goes much further, claiming that America’s unemployment statistics are “a hoax”.

The treatments he proposes are no better than his diagnosis. To boost growth, he promises to free the economy from “onerous” government regulations and to cut taxes. That sounds fair enough, until you get to the details. Mr Trump would scrap the wrong regulations. America has as many barmy rules as the next country—such as those, often at state level, which mean that more than a quarter of workers must hold occupational licences. Yet, for reasons best known to him, Mr Trump chooses to focus on federal energy and car regulations designed to ameliorate climate change.

On tax, he has watered down the ruinously expensive plan he put forward during the primaries. He now promises to cut the top rate of income tax from 39.6% to 33% (instead of 25%). He would still cut corporate tax by more than half. There is, though, no plan for how to pay for this largesse, other than to borrow (how much is unknown, because he has revealed just the contours of his proposal). Even if America could afford this profligacy, spare cash would be much better spent fixing the country’s wretched infrastructure than on tax cuts for the rich. As it happens, Mr Trump has promised that, too. But he thereby only exacerbates his difficulty in coming up with the astronomical sums needed to pay for his ideas.

The worst part of the Trump economic plan is its defining element: trade policy. His protectionism would wreck the economy, reduce wages and achieve little in return. If America shredded trade deals and imposed tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports, jobs would not simply reappear as Mr Trump claims. Manufacturing’s share of employment has fallen mostly because of technology, not trade. Indeed, it is almost exactly where you would predict it to be just by extrapolating the 1946-80 trend. Were Mr Trump miraculously to turn back productivity gains, he would add to the problems by causing average wages to fall. And those few jobs that did return would cater only to domestic demand: high-cost American workers would not be able to sell to the world as they did.

Bad!