As 2024 got underway, Susie Wiles, one of Donald Trump’s top advisers, spoke with wealthy Republican Party donors at a luxurious Florida hotel. That wouldn’t have been especially notable, except for the fact that Wiles delivered a curious message to her deep-pocketed audience.

As NBC News reported at the time, she specifically warned the GOP donors that they’d probably hear the former president say all kinds of ridiculous things in the coming days, weeks and months, and they should simply disregard those comments. The prospective campaign contributors were instead told to focus on the fact that Trump was likely to win, whether his public comments made sense or not.

This came to mind watching Sen. Tim Scott on CNBC trying to defend the former president’s stated plans for inflation-driving tariffs. HuffPost noted what happened after the South Carolina Republican was asked to defend Trump’s threat to hit John Deere with a 200% tariff in a possible second term.

‘You agree with all the tariffs. Do you think John Deere, 200%? Do you think companies that make stuff here should have a 15% tax? That’s industrial policy, isn’t it?’ [‘Squawk Box’ host Joe Kernen] asked of Trump, whose tariff proposals have prompted warnings by economists. ‘I believe that President Trump oftentimes talks in the abstract, number one,’ Scott replied.”

It was at that point when CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin interjected, asking, “What are we supposed to believe, then?”

That need not be a rhetorical question.

In reality, the GOP senator almost certainly knows that Trump’s increasingly bizarre tariff agenda would be a disaster. I can say this with some confidence because Scott is on record already having said so.

The result, of course, was a challenge for the South Carolinian: He was on national television as a surrogate for Trump, whose tariff plan he opposes. And so, asked about his party’s nominee and his bad idea, Scott was reduced to saying that Trump “talks in the abstract.”

This generated on-set chuckling, and for good reason. For one thing, as far as the former president is concerned, there’s nothing “abstract” about his economic and trade plans, which he talks up on a nearly daily basis.

For another, to Sorkin’s point, we’re in the midst of a presidential campaign. The stakes couldn’t be much higher. If Americans are supposed to see the Republican Party’s presidential nominee and perceive his promises as “abstractions,” the result is a race in which no one will know — or even can know — what the candidate actually intends to do with power.