Opinion | Trump Has Become Unmoored in Time

This is the second in an occasional series about Donald Trump’s statements and language and what’s at stake in the election.Do you remember the California electricity crisis of 2000 and ’01? I do, because I wrote about it a lot at the time and stuck my neck out by arguing, based on circumstantial evidence, that market manipulation was probably an important factor.One economist colleague accused me of “going Naderite,” but we eventually got direct evidence of market manipulation: tapes of Enron traders conspiring with power company officials to create artificial shortages to drive up prices.Memories of that episode made me more sympathetic than many economists to claims that price gouging played a role in recent inflation, although I don’t believe that it was a major driver.

At this point, however, it’s all old history; aside from some blackouts during a 2020 heat wave, California hasn’t had major electricity shortages in decades.But don’t tell Donald Trump.On Thursday, in the course of a rambling, at times incoherent speech to the Detroit Economic Club, he declared, “We don’t have electricity.

In California, you have brownouts or blackouts every week.And blackouts, I mean, the place is stone cold broke, no electricity.” This isn’t true, it wasn’t true when he made similar assertions last year, and 39 million Californians can tell you that it isn’t true.

But in Trump’s mind, apparently, that long-ago electricity crisis never ended.There’s an obvious parallel with Trump’s language on crime.In big cities, he has asserted, “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread.

You get shot.You get mugged.

You get raped.You get whatever it may be.”Now, there was a time when America’s big cities were quite dangerous.

I remember the days when major parts of New York were more or less no-go zones.But that was long ago.

There was a huge decline in the national murder rate between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s; a surge...