The guy with the nuclear launch codes
But what stood
out is that Trump is consistently confused and disconnected from reality even
on issues that are supposedly in his wheelhouse.
Trump has always been an
ignoramus who masks his intellectual shortcomings with bombast and declarations
of his own brilliance, but his rambling nonsensical responses in these latest
interviews should set off alarms — especially in light of all the media
attention and scrutiny Joe Biden received after his disastrous debate
performance or when Special Counsel Robert Hur described him as “a well-meaning
elderly man with a poor memory.”
Trump, who turns 79 in
June, is the oldest person ever elected president. His repetitive speech
patterns, frequent use of empty phrases, and overall rambling discourse are too
often graded on a curve.
White House officials and pandering Republicans might boast about Trump’s boundless energy in a manner that would shame North Korean state media, but the Time and Atlantic interviews tell a very different story.
Rancid word salad
Trump was especially all
over the place during his Time interview.
Conducted on April 22, he
probably could’ve anticipated being asked about his April 9 executive order
directing Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Homeland Security to
investigate Christopher Krebs, former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency. (Trump has never forgiven Krebs for correctly stating publicly
that the 2020 election was secure and not in any way rigged.)
Shockingly, however,
Trump didn’t a prepare a defense for his abuse of power. Time asked Trump, “You
recently signed memos calling for an investigation of Chris Krebs, a top
cybersecurity official in your first term. Isn't that, though, what you accused
Biden of doing to you?” Trump’s response to this question was totally
incoherent.
I think Chris Krebs was a disgrace to our country. I think he was—I think he was terrible. By the way, I don't know him. I'm not—I don't think I ever met him. I probably saw him around. You know, I have people come in, like the other one. He came in, and he's on CNN all the time as like an expert on Trump. I have no idea who he is. And Chris Krebs the same thing. I guess he probably said he knows me, but I have no idea. And you know, oftentimes I'll have some people sitting right here, and behind them will be 10 or 15 people from their agency or their office, and they'll stand there, and then all of a sudden, I'll hear that like I'm, you know, they're all time experts in me. I know very little about Chris Krebs, but I think he was very deficient.
As the transcript shows,
Trump didn’t even attempt to answer the question posed to him. He often
pretends to have never met someone he believes has spoken ill of him, but his
situational amnesia is less effective as an explanation for why he’s weaponizing
the government against Krebs.
Later in the interview,
after Trump boasted that Biden would have never given an extensive interview
“because he was grossly incompetent,” Time reminded him that Biden had in fact
done so, just last June. (Biden’s interview responses were far more
ordered and disciplined than Trump’s improvisational fascist jazz performance.)
Notice Trump’s befuddled
reaction:
We spoke to [Biden] last year, Mr. President.
Huh?
We spoke to him a year ago.
How did he do?
You can read the interview yourself.
Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn't do well. He didn't do well at all. He didn't do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren't asking him questions like you're asking me.
Biden’s interview was 35 minutes. Trump was
either outright lying, hopelessly confused, or some combination thereof. In any
event, it’s not a great look for a sitting president.
This wasn’t just an off
day, either. On April 24, Trump sat for an interview with The Atlantic. Staff
writer Michael Scherer asked him bluntly, “Should people be concerned that the
nature of the presidency is changing under you?” Trump was unable to leave the
answer at “no” without going on a rant about James Comey, Robert Mueller, and
the supposed Russia “hoax.”
Look, in history, there’s nobody that’s been gone after like me. It may be harder for you guys to see because you’re on the other side of the ledger. But nobody’s been gone after like me. I didn’t realize it for a little while. I was told—when I fired [former FBI Director James] Comey, I was told that was a terrible, terrible mistake to fire him, that it’ll come back to haunt you. When I fired him, it was like a rock was thrown into a hornet’s nest. The whole thing went crazy in the FBI. And that’s where we found the insurance-policy statement. You remember the famous statement, “Don’t worry, he’s gonna lose. But if he doesn’t, we have an insurance policy”? The insurance policy was what they were doing.
Imagine if Kamala Harris
had responded to a basic question about border security with a lengthy
digression centering around her own obsessive personal grievances — it would’ve
been the subject of non-stop cable news panels and newspaper op-eds. But for Trump,
it was just a normal Thursday.
Dazed and confused
It’s notable how checked
out and utterly clueless Trump remains on the very issues that Republicans and
even the mainstream media insist are his strengths — immigration and the
economy.
When Time asked Trump,
“So you're not concentrating more power in the presidency?” he tried
retreating to his border security safe space, but the result was a rambling
mess:
I don't think so. I think I'm using it properly, and I'm also using it as per my election. You know, everything that I'm doing—this is what I talked about doing. I said that I'm going to move the criminals out. I saw what was happening early on when I heard that [Biden] had open borders, when I, because it was a hard thing to believe. I built hundreds of miles of wall, and then [Biden] didn't want to, and we had another, an extra hundred miles that I could have put up because I ordered it as extra. I completed the wall, what I was doing, but we have, I wanted to build additional because it was working so well.
Yes, Trump is apparently
still building the wall that he already built.
The president was
consistently unable to answer direct questions about his administration
illegally disappearing people without due process and shipping them to a
Salvadoran gulag. Most of the time, he resorted to the Shaggy Defense: “It
wasn’t me.”
Trump seemed shocked when
Time told him that in a previous interview, he had “committed to complying with
Supreme Court orders.” He responded, “I said what?” causing Time to repeat the
statement before reminding him that the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he
has to facilitate Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return — a ruling that the Trump
administration is openly defying.
He claimed that his
“people told me — they didn’t say it was, they said it was — the nine to
nothing was entirely different.” This is pathetic blame-shifting. It’s also
somewhat out of character. Trump didn’t play the strongman and simply reject
the Supreme Court’s ruling. Instead, he pretended his lawyers have told him the
ruling is in his favor. That’s not obstinance. It’s delusional.
During his first term,
Trump never shut up about the stock market. Now, the economy is teetering
thanks to self-inflected wounds, and Trump can only blame Biden for a mess
that’s entirely his own doing. When Time pressed him about economic conditions,
he offered a response that registered zero brainwave activity:
The prices of groceries have gone down. The only price that hasn't gone down is the price of energy. The cost of energy, I'm sorry, well, energy has gone down, excuse me. Let me change that—is the interest rates. And interest rates have essentially stayed the same. But almost every other thing, I mean, you take a look at what's going on, and this is, we're taking in billions of dollars of tariffs, by the way. And just to go back to the past, I took in hundreds of billions of dollars of tariffs from China, and then when COVID came, I couldn't institute the full program, but I took in hundreds of billions, and we had no inflation.
Trump seems to be in
total denial of the effects from his catastrophic trade war, and his usual
huckster bravado now reads like unhinged magical thinking.
Time pointed out that
Trump has made zero deals since his trade adviser Peter Navarro promised “90
deals in 90 days.” Trump simply denied this reality.
No, there’s many deals.
When are they going to be announced?
You have to understand, I'm dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We're meeting with China. We're doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I've made all the deals.
Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?
I’ve made 200 deals.
You’ve made 200 deals?
100%.
Then Trump imagined
himself a “a giant department store,” the way a small child might imagine
they’re a dragon.
I am this giant store. It's a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I'll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.
The GOP once prized
itself as the party of free market capitalism. Now its leader declares himself
the owner and operator of The America Store, where he sets the prices.
Trump’s delusions of
grandeur don’t end there. He told both Time and The Atlantic that he wasn’t
kidding about serving a third term, which is unconstitutional. Time asked
Trump, “You recently said you were ‘not joking’ about seeking a third term and
that there were methods to do it. What methods?” His response was alarming.
I'd rather not discuss that now, but as you know, there are some loopholes that have been discussed that are well known. But I don't believe in loopholes. I don't believe in using loopholes.
However, when Time
reminded him of his campaign promise to “end the war in Ukraine on day one,” he
claimed he was obviously joking around about the conflict he described as
“Biden’s war, not his.”
Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, by the fake news [unintelligible]. Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.
Trump’s cognitive
abilities and overall competence have always left a lot to be desired, but
these interviews show a president who’s no longer capable of even the veneer of
mental acuity. Meanwhile, his cabinet and even congressional Republicans behave
like courtiers to a mad king.
The emperor might be
clothed, but his mind is bare.
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