It’s been a pretty jarring couple of days for all Americans, from Sean Spicer’s press conference to horrifying stories from Politico and the New York Times about the Stalinesque bubble aides try to maintain to manage Donald Trump’s temper. (“He gets bored and likes to watch TV … so it is important to minimize that,” one source said). So it’s easy to assume that the most horrifying interpretation of anything a Trump supporter says is the correct one. But this isn’t always the case, and Trump supporter and CNN commentator Jeffrey Lord is getting a bad deal.
The uproar started Monday night with a tweet from New York and Daily Beast contributor Yashar Ali about Lord’s appearance on Anderson Cooper 360. The topic of conversation was NAFTA, which Trump plans to renegotiate. In the since-deleted tweet, Ali wrote:
CNN’s Jeffrey Lord is saying NAFTA has caused women to come into this country who don’t use tampons + that’s hurting the dry cleaning biz.
This would be an absurd thing for Lord to say or believe, but then Lord supports Donald Trump, who reinstated the abortion gag rule the second he got into office, so clearly absurdity is not a big problem for the guy. Naturally, the outrage machine got whirring. But check the video above; that’s not what Lord meant.
Well, all I can say is, let me give you a local example here from the middle of Pennsylvania. My dry cleaner complains to me at length—I mean, I have learned more about the dry cleaning business than I ever thought I would know—about NAFTA and its effect. About the minimum wage. I mean, these are things that affect local businesses as they try, as hard as they can, to employ people. These things are great in academia, they are great in theory, but at the local level, in fact, they are not working. I’ll just give you one quick example here—let me just give you one quick example. Here is a guy who is being asked to clean ladies’ garments. And they bleed, which costs him money because he has to pay for the garment. The reason they bleed is because they don’t come into this country with the same standards, because of NAFTA. That’s part of the problem here. In other words, what we’ve got is a disconnect between people who are operating in theory in Washington, and people who are on the ground living with the results. They’re very unpopular and I can only tell you the dry cleaner voted for Trump.
This is an awkwardly phrased answer from Lord, but it’s clear he was talking about color bleeding rather than menstruation. In the sentences, “Here is a guy who is being asked to clean ladies’ garments. And they bleed, which costs him money,” the word they refers to garments, not ladies. Lord is also talking about garments when he says, “And the reason they bleed is because they don’t come to this country with the same standards, because of NAFTA.”
The scenario he’s describing is one where NAFTA lets cheaply made Mexican clothing flood the market, those clothes are taken to his dry cleaner, the colors bleed, and the dry cleaner has to replace the clothes. (Why does this only happen with “ladies’ garments”? That’s between Lord, his dry cleaner, and his psychiatrist.) There’s plenty to argue with here about NAFTA’s effects on the clothing and dry cleaning industries without claiming Jeffery Lord thinks immigrants don’t use tampons. Ali has since deleted his tweet and seems to have come around to the idea that Lord was talking about fabric, but his interpretation is still traveling far and wide on Twitter.
We have a president who began his campaign with the idea of an invasion of Mexican “saboteur-rapists,” to use Ben Mathis-Lilley’s phrase, and who began his presidency by misspelling “honored.” It’s an age of unreality. But there’s no sense making things out to be worse than they are; they’re terrible enough as it is.
