Donald Trump has made the headlines for a lot of things and making false claims without any proof to support them come quite on top of the list. From making vague arguments about how his new tariff plans will ultimately boost the economy despite the initial chaos to citing inflated numbers of illegal immigrants entering America during Joe Biden’s presidency, the list can go on.
During Trump’s first term as the president, one such incident of false claiming occurred when in 2017 he said that he has coined the three-word phrase “prime the pump”, a term that has been used by economics students since the 1930s. This happened when Trump was in conversation with a journalist of The Economist and asked him if he had ever heard that phrase before.
The conversation came to being when Trump was asked about his previous tax reform plans and he responded by saying, “But, but it’s called priming the pump. You know, if you don’t do that, you’re never going to bring your taxes down.” He also insisted that his taxation plan will not be increasing the deficit that the journalist was referring to and added, “You may have two years where you’ll…you understand the expression ‘prime the pump’?”
He further said, “We have to prime the pump. We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world. Have you heard that expression before, for this particular type of an event?” Given how many times he was using the phrase prime the pump, it clearly showed he was somehow fixated on it and then proceeded to ask the reporter, “Yeah, have you heard it? Have you heard that expression used before?”
When the reporter said that he had indeed heard the phrase before, Trump said, “Because I haven’t heard it. I mean, I just…I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It’s what you have to do.” Unfortunately, simply because Trump did not hear it before and tried to take credit for coining the term, did not make the term non-existent in history.
Following Trump’s claims, dictionary leads Merriam Webster took to X to post, “The phrase ‘priming the pump’ dates to the early 19th century.” It further added, “Pump priming’ has been used to refer to government investment expenditures since at least 1933.”
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BBC also provided more information on the phrase, mentioning that it is often associated with John Maynard Keynes, an influential British economist, who said that public spending would ultimately lead to an economic boost. BBC further reported that The Oxford English Dictionary has an instance of the 1916 version of Everybody’s Mag which says, “When the waters of business are stagnant, gentlemen, it becomes necessary, if I may say so, to prime the pump.”
These instances show how the term has been in use long before Trump ever uttered it. It also shows how the American President makes baseless claims even about historically proven facts.
