Donald Trump h as given a bizarre solution to the child care cost crisis – increasing tarrifs on foreign imports.

The Trump ticket has struggled with questions on the spiralling costs of child care this week, with JD Vance saying grandparents need to help out and his 78-year-old running mate suffering a senile moment.

But Trump has now gone even further by telling business leaders his plans to increase tariffs on foreign imports, in a bid to solve seemingly unrelated challenges such as the rising cost of child care.

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The Republican presidential nominee promised to lead what he called a “national economic renaissance” by increasing tariffs, slashing regulations to boost energy production and drastically cutting government spending.

“Child care is child care, it’s something you have to have in this country. You have to have it,” he started rambling at the Economic Club of New York

Trump said his plans to tax imports from foreign nations at higher levels would “take care” of such problems.

“We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s – relatively speaking – not very expensive, compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in,” he said.

Trump has been accused of not knowing what tariffs actually do as he tries to appeal to working-class voters who oppose free-trade deals and the outsourcing of factories and jobs.

He’s made seemingly implausible promises on tariffs, that they can raise trillions of dollars to fund his agenda without those costs being passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices.

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Kimberly Clausing, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has repeatedly warned in economic analyses about the likely damage to people’s finances from Trump’s tariffs.

She noted that Trump wants tariffs to pay for everything, even though they can’t.

“I believe Trump has already spent this revenue, to pay for his tax cuts (which it doesn’t), or to perhaps end the income tax (which it cannot),” she said in an email. “It is unclear how there would be any revenues left over to fund child care.”

Trump pointed to his tariff ideas as well as efforts he announced to reduce what he described as “waste and fraud.”

“I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about,” he said.

Trump’s running mate JD Vance was also asked about proposals to lower day care costs earlier this week, and he suggested making it easier for families to keep the kids at home with a grandparent or another relative.

“Make it so that, maybe like grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit more,” he said. “If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all the resources that we are spending on day care.”

Vance also suggested training more people to work in day cares, and said some states required what he called “ridiculous certification that has nothing to do with taking care of kids.”