Happy Day After Tax Announcement Day! On Wednesday, Goldman Sachs alums Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin were trotted out to defend Donald Trump’s one-page, double-spaced, bullet-point tax plan. This was no easy task: while few specifics were fleshed out (“we’re still working on the details,” the odd couple said over and over), the two things that were clear was that Trump himself would benefit big-league and that his kids would get to inherit his money tax-free when he kicks it (sayonara, death tax). Beyond that, there wasn’t much there there, particularly on the question of how the administration plans to make up for the trillions in revenue the voodoo plan would lose.

So why the rush to put out a plan at all, given how unlikely the current draft is to make it through Congress? Because the 45th president of the United States cares about appearances first and substance last, and wants to look as though he got his sh*t together as the clock strikes 100 days on his time in office. Per Bloomberg:

If the one-page outline seemed hastily assembled, it was. Some Treasury officials found out that a plan would be made public Wednesday only after Trump announced his intentions last Friday, promising “massive” tax cuts. The Treasury staffers and counterparts from the White House then rushed to prepare a presentation with enough viable talking points to satisfy Trump’s expectations, while keeping it open-ended enough to leave room for further consideration, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the discussions were private.

So Trump, because he doesn’t have control of the words exiting his mouth, blurts out “Tax plan! Wednesday!,” and his staff scrambles to make it so. One has to feel some sympathy for Mnuchin and Cohn: what were they supposed to say, when the president gave them a deadline? “Wednesday is no good. What about three weeks from Friday?” Less forgivable, in the eyes of one Larry Summers, is the bizarre, mendacious show both men put on in the White House briefing room yesterday, insisting that Trump’s trillions in lost revenue wouldn’t affect the debt or deficits because it will magically be offset by massive economic growth.

Summers, who actually had Mnuchin’s job under Bill Clinton, told CNBC he would have quit rather than thoroughly embarrass himself and the Treasury Department that way.

“If I had been asked by the White House to assert a proposition as demonstrably false as the claim that this plan would produce revenue, I would have resigned rather than put the credibility of the department behind a proposition that no one with real experience would believe was true,” Summers said Thursday. “I just don’t understand what could cause an administration to put its secretary of the Treasury in a position to assert something . . . that is generally regarded by economists as absurd,” he added.