Unintelligible and Un-fucking-believable

I've just delved into the "unintelligible" AP interview. Mostly, you just have to read it yourself to appreciate the unbelievable awfulness, but here are a few excerpts from the reports.

In the A.P. interview, alongside complaints about CNN and MSNBC, and praise for the superiority of Fox News (“It’s not that Fox treats me well; it’s that Fox is the most accurate”), he included a boast about his appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” which, he said, drew more than five million viewers: “It’s the highest for ‘Face the Nation,’ or, as I call it, ‘Deface the Nation.’ It’s the highest for ‘Deface the Nation’ since the World Trade Center. Since the World Trade Center came down."

[...]

Why are we spending so much time trying to match what Donald J. Trump says to reality? Is it because he is the President of the United States, and could start a war with words? Or because we place some sort of value on the truth, or on the meaning of words? Whatever the source of our folly, it is, from the President’s perspective, just that: a big waste of time. Reality will contort itself to match his imagination—his Presidentialness—all on its own. He doesn’t even need to sign laws, let alone accurately describe what he wants to do. He is in the White House; the world and time bend.

That, at any rate, is among the secondary conclusions that one can draw from Trump’s interview, over the weekend, with Julie Pace, the White House correspondent for the Associated Press. [...] Pace asked Trump about his assertions, during the campaign, that he would designate China as a currency manipulator (a label that has consequences under U.S. trade law).

[...]

TRUMP: No. 2, from the time I took office till now, you know, it’s a very exact thing. It’s not like generalities. Do you want a Coke or anything?

A.P.: I’m O.K., thank you. No.

TRUMP: But President Xi, from the time I took office, he has not, they have not been currency manipulators. Because there’s a certain respect because he knew I would do something or whatever.

[...]


“And I said, ‘How badly have they been’ . . . they said, ‘Since you got to office, they have not manipulated their currency.’ That’s No. 1.” (It had been No. 2, but only if you’re hung up on numbers as well as words.)
  New Yorker

Or whatever. But at least we now know, he's a bigger audience draw than 9/11.

he memory of mass terror seems to exist for Trump only as a measure of his own presence. In case anyone didn’t think that the attacks were a way to keep score on the Trump scale, he added, in the A.P. interview, that “MSNBC, I heard, went crazy” when he had said “about the thing, you know, when I said it’s a terrorism,” before all the details were in. (It was not clear which “thing” he was talking about.) “By the way, I’m 10–0 for that,” Trump said. “I’ve called every one of them. Every time, they said I called it way too early, and then it turns out I’m—whatever.” [...] “Whatever,” Trump continued. “In the meantime, I’m here and they’re not.”

This week, indeed, he will have been here for a hundred days. During that time, he has delivered a plodding address to a joint session of Congress (“A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber”); ordered the firing of fifty-nine Tomahawks at Syria (“I’m saying to myself, ‘You know, this is more than just like, seventy-nine [sic] missiles. This is death that’s involved,’ because people could have been killed”).

I'm dying right now.

The final tally is in, and you can add 16 lies to Donald Trump’s AP interview total of 16 unintelligible remarks. We owe Toronto Star fact checker Daniel Dale for his attention to detail in gathering all the facts and presenting them to us.

[...]

Trump repeated some oldies but goodies for the AP interview, including his lie about his Lockheed Martin savings, which, as Dale remarks, “remains untrue.” There are also his various lies about his 100 Days. Dale debunks each and every one of them.

[...]

The scope of Donald Trump’s dishonesty is nothing less than breathtaking and he tells them so smoothly and effortlessly that you have to wonder if he even knows what the truth is any longer.

If you add Trump’s 16 lies to the 16 times he said something completely unintelligible in what was a one-on-one interview, you don’t even need the ever-present cloud Trump’s collusion with Russia to identify him as a man wholly unsuited to the office of president.

  Politicus USA

The 16 lies are listed here. Some of them may not be lies so much as ignorant statements.

In his interview with the A.P., Trump had this to say about how he is personally saving taxpayers billions:

I saved $725 million on the 90 planes. Just 90. Now there are 3,000 planes that are going to be ordered. On 90 planes I saved $725 million. It's actually a little bit more than that, but it's $725 million. General Mattis, who had to sign the deal when it came to his office, said, “I've never seen anything like this in my life.” We went from a company that wanted more money for the planes to a company that cut. And the reason they cut—same planes, same everything—was because of me. I mean, because that's what I do.

This has been debunked: the Pentagon has asserted that it negotiated the lower costs for a 90-plane order with Lockheed Martin long before the election had occurred. But what’s stunning is that Trump one-upped his own claims for how much money he’s saved the country. Back in February, Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed that he had saved $455 million, while Trump himself claimed he saved $600 million. (For the record, the Pentagon said it saved $500 million without Trump’s help.)

[...]

Despite estimates suggesting Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border would cost north of $20 billion, the president—who likes to think he knows a thing or two about cost overruns—says otherwise. When asked why the wall was so expensive, and whether he would refuse to sign an omnibus spending bill that did not contain funding for the wall, Trump was adamant about correcting the record. ”One hundred percent it's getting built. And it's also getting built for much less money—I hope you get this—than these people are estimating,” he said. ”The opponents are talking $25 billion for the wall. It's not going to cost anywhere near that.”In fact, he promised that it would cost only $10 billion—that is, unless ”I do a super-duper, higher, better, better security, everything else, maybe it goes a little bit more.”

It is unclear what a “super-duper” is, but we can’t wait to find out.

  Vanity Fair

It was a journey through the Hieronymus Bosch hellscape of Trump’s brain, and not even a legendary news outlet like the AP could decipher Trump’s incoherence — peppering the interview with more “unintelligible” parentheticals than an interview with Ozzy Osbourne.

[...]

In this quote, Trump elaborated on the responsibilities of the president, and whether he anticipated the gravity of the job.

Number One, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, “You know, this is more than just like, 79 [sic] missiles. This is death that’s involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area — you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away — and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet . . . every decision is much harder than you’d normally make. [Unintelligible.]

This is involving death and life and so many things. . . . So it’s far more responsibility. [unintelligible.]

The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world. The second-largest company in the world is the Defense Department. The third-largest company in the world is Social Security. The fourth-largest — you know, you go down the list.

  Alternet

Jesus wept.

Furthermore, when I repeat the phrase “Trump knows nothing,” I’m not exaggerating all that much.

They had a quote from me that NATO’s obsolete. But they didn’t say why it was obsolete. I was on Wolf Blitzer, very fair interview, the first time I was ever asked about NATO, because I wasn’t in government. People don’t go around asking about NATO if I’m building a building in Manhattan, right? So they asked me, Wolf . . . asked me about NATO, and I said two things. NATO’s obsolete — not knowing much about NATO, now I know a lot about NATO — NATO is obsolete, and I said, “And the reason it’s obsolete is because of the fact they don’t focus on terrorism.” You know, back when they did NATO there was no such thing as terrorism.

Still weeping, along with the early Christians.

Worse, he based his entire NATO platform — the idea that it’s obsolete and they have to pay up (for something, something, something) — on an answer he yanked out of his ass with the help of Wolf Blitzer, apparently.

He’s now president and is still mad about something last year.

The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. I’ve always said the popular vote would be a lot easier than the Electoral College. The Electoral College — but it’s a whole different campaign [unintelligible]. The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win.

[...]

You have to win all these states, and then I won Wisconsin and Michigan and all of these other places, but you remember there was no way to, there was no way to 270.

So [Hillary Clinton] had this massive advantage, she spent hundreds of millions of dollars more money than I spent. Hundreds of millions . . . Yeah. Or more, actually because we were $375 she was at $2.2 billion. But whatever. She spent massive amounts of money more and she lost. Solidly lost, because you know it wasn’t 270, it was 306.

[...]

The Electoral College is so skewed in favor of a Democrat that it’s very, very hard. Look at Obama’s number in the Electoral College. His numbers on the win were . . . but the Electoral College numbers were massive. You lose New York, you lose Illinois. Illinois is impossible to win. And you look at, so now you lose New York, Illinois, no matter what you do, and California.

There have been two modern cases in which the Electoral College vote winner was different from the popular vote winner. In both situations, a Republican won.

  Salon

This electoral college business will have to be summarized so that it can fit on his tombstone, because he can't get over it.

The whole bleeding interview, if you're up for it, is here.  It starts right in from the beginning to be Trump in all his self-absorbed glory:

AP: I do want to talk to you about the 100 days.

TRUMP: Good.

AP: I want to ask a few questions on some topics that are happening toward the end of the interview.

TRUMP: Did you see Aya (Hijazi, an Egyptian-American charity worker who had been detained in the country for nearly three years) ...

AP: Can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?

TRUMP: No, just — you know, I asked the government to let her out. ...

TRUMP: You know Obama worked on it for three years, got zippo, zero.

  AP News

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.