Trump was never an oratorical Churchill. And his vocabulary has the breadth of an ESL student in their second semester. But in his youth — and even occasionally during his 2016 campaign — he could construct a sentence. Reasonable people disagreed with what he said, but they could usually understand what he meant. He was going to build a wall. Mexicans were rapists. His hands were normal-sized.
No more. The dotard’s brain has given up on syntax, grammar, and sentence structure. Subject and object float around unrelated to the verb — if there is one. Unmoored verbosity obscures his meaning — a secular speaking in tongues. The cult does not care. They assume he is a genius. And it is their fault they have no idea what he is saying.
On Monday, the spiraling man offered cable news a sample of his mental decline.
On CNBC's Squawk Box, Trump gave his first interview since Joe Biden’s masterful State of the Union (SOTU) speech. In Congress, the President had stood confident and beaming in front of the hostile MAGA horde and outlined his faith in America while gleefully giving the congressional conservatives rhetorical wedgies.
By the end of the evening, all conversation about Biden’s age was stilled. The conservative media were denied their anticipated evisceration of an old man flubbing his lines. They complained that Joe was too vigorous, too mean, and too political. Sean Hannity said that Biden was “hyped up” and “weird.”
Worse for the MAGAs praying for a Biden face plant, polls showed that the critical independents had positively reviewed the President’s oratory. And in an unanticipated gift from the electoral Gods, the GOP rolled out a breathless tradwife with high school acting skills to offer a rebuttal highlighted by a widely scorned and debunked lie.
Faced with the reality that Biden is still on his game, Trump proved time had robbed him of his few verbal skills. The CNBC host, Joe Kernen, opened with a question that should have allowed Trump to rattle off some rehearsed boilerplate.
“So can we just start your vision for this country after watching the State of the Union? How does it differ from what you heard from President Biden, President Trump?”
Trump fell at the first fence. He offered no word on his vision. Instead, he presented a masterclass of projection. Trump attempted to rip Biden — but gave the audience an insightful if unintended self-analysis.
“Well, I heard a very angry man who’s losing badly in the polls, who’s willing to weaponize government like has never taken place in this country.”
“I saw a very angry and confused man.”
“But it was really a speech on division and hate more than anything else.”
He ended with his rating of Biden’s SOTU speech. It was here that he started to spin out,
“But no, it was probably the worst State of the Union ever made. According to many that’s not according to be although according to me, it was also but I haven’t heard too many of them.”
Next, Kernen turned to the budget deficit he claims is driven by programs millions of working Americans have paid into for decades — while he ignores the catastrophic effect of 40 years of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.
“Have you changed your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President? Seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be stuck at 120% of debt to GDP forever.”
Trump had a non-answer answer.
“So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak.”
The lede is Trump promoting budget balancing on the backs of the old and poor. But my interest is his logic.
The IRS collects Social Security and Medicaid taxes. The money is put into a pool of government securities as required by law and paid out to the beneficiaries through a formula established by law. What does “bad management” have to do with it?
I am sure some people collect benefits they are not entitled to. The way to root that out is by hiring more auditors — which the GOP refuses to do — not by cutting benefits to honest Americans (the vast majority of us).
The gibberish continues:
“And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is 50%. They say 32 and 33%. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50%, that means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50% more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy.”
I think he is trying to say that the stock market is doing great — which it is. Biden has seen a 29% increase in the DJIA compared to Trump’s 10% return at the same point of his sole term.
However, his inflation rant is incomprehensible. Inflation since the beginning of the Biden term is 18%. This number means that, even in the worst-case scenario, Trump is wrong by 32 percentage points — or 277%.
Trump’s lying gibberish piles up:
“When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil but we were going at a much higher level oil and gas.
We were doing, you know, we were third when I started and when they ended we were one by a longshot and we were very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi Arabia and Russia were doing.”
Trump did not “start to pay off debt.” In raw numbers, the ‘King of debt’ added $7.8 trillion in red ink. In a deeper analysis, which subtracts the debt obligations Trump inherited but adds the debt obligations he burdened the future economy with, the number is $8.4 trillion + interest.
As for energy, America currently extracts more fossil fuel today than it did during the Trump administration. And the country continues to produce more energy than it consumes. In addition, the Biden administration is issuing more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands than Trump did. (Note to global warming activists. It is not entirely Biden’s fault. Some (all?) of the increase is legally mandated.)
Trump layers in another lie (remember the bleach and UV light COVID cure?
“We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with Covid.”
And another lie
“And I had to say out in front of it, and we did we did a great job on that and we did with all of the things we’re coming up with Regeneron doing so much else, getting all because you know we had empty when I came in, we had empty, I call them empty cupboards. We had empty shelves, we didn’t have equipment, we didn’t have the gowns, we didn’t have the ventilators. We didn’t have anything.
This country wasn’t prepared for a thing like that. And I’m not even blaming anybody in that. Because, you know, when when it came, nobody thought the pandemic would ever happen again.”
Bill Clinton created the Strategic National Stockpile of pandemic-related supplies in 1999. Why? Because many people in government were very aware that pandemics could be devastating. Dear God, even Hollywood knew. Outbreak (1995). Contagion (2011)
There’s more. But you get the point. Here is one for the road. After talking about Bitcoin — Trump clearly has no idea how cryptocurrency works — he segues to his golden sneakers.
“They’re crazy, whether it’s Bitcoin or others, and so many people were buying these things when ultimately, the last pair of sneakers sold for approximately I hear $450,000 was a limited edition or run they were gold.”
The record paid for Trump sneakers was $9,000.
Dear God, will the lies ever stop 😏 but as you say he’s getting more incoherent by the day. But the way I’d never heard “tradwife” 😂 I love it, thank you Pitt