By Stephen Macaulay

Right for America, a super PAC backing Donald Trump for president, is running a $37.2-million TV ad buy concentrating on Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, according to Axios.

A focus of the ads is on how Kamala Harris has changed her views on things, like fracking, since she ran for president for the 2020 election.

The 2020 Harris campaign officially began on January 21, 2019.

The 2020 Harris campaign officially ended on December 3, 2019.

Not much of a campaign.

But here’s the thing: Harris is doing what most of us do when we get additional information about something:

She changed her opinion about it.

Certainly part of her action is predicated on political considerations.

But let’s say it is 50-50: a changed opinion/playing for votes.

Now let’s compare this with Donald Trump who has made claims about things—lots of things—and then simply ignores them when they don’t come to be.

Arguably his most famous has to do with immigration at the southern border.

More specifically, the Wall that not only was he going to build, but that he was going to have Mexico pay for.

The amount of Wall that he built was, well, not much in the grand scheme of things.

And as for the Mexican government putting up even recycled rebar. . .well, that didn’t happen, either.

Unquestionably the number of illegal immigrants from below the southern border was a fraction under Trump than Biden, but it had little to do with the Wall, which was in effect nothing more than a political symbol. (The existing walls and fencing that were there when he took office undoubtedly helped reduce some of the illegal border crossings, but that was something already in place and far more comprehensive than anything than happened under his watch.)

Then there is the issue of tariffs.

Trump announced at a rally in Michigan recently, “Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented.”

He has long supported tariffs.

Yet economists—pretty much across the political spectrum—realize that tariffs are taxes on consumers.

Trump looks at it as though it some somehow the tariffs are paid for by the exporting country.

Which is simply not the case.

So rather than protecting the consumer or the domestic producers of whatever it is that tariffs are applied to (and apparently, he’d like them to be applied to everything), tariffs simply increase costs at the local cash register.

It sounds good.

But rather than a surefire way to increase economic well being for American citizens, it is a Three Card Monte: no way you can’t pick the queen.

So given all of the information available about the essential ineffectiveness of tariffs, did he change his mind about them?

Of course not.

Does he change his mind about anything, or does he exhibit mental arteriosclerosis?

What’s better: someone with the mental aptitude to change her mind or someone who is set in their ways, something not uncommon for those pushing 80.