Time magazine Trump interview

The interview as a whole paints a clear picture of a vain, vindictive man locked in an information bubble of one.

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Trump’s proposals are terrifying. But they’re also remarkably incoherent. What’s most striking in the interview is that Trump, even after four years as president, has virtually no grasp on any policy issue beyond empty talking points, most of which are lies. When asked how he will implement his plans, he waffles, obfuscates, and delivers a stream of non sequitur boasts about how great he is or about how other people have said that he’s great. He lies all the time, but many of his statements on core policy issues are so garbled and gassy they don’t even qualify as lies. It’s like interacting with a chatbot programmed by a fascist parrot.

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He offers a vision of a presidency of cruelty and violence disavowed as it occurs, with every abuse of power accompanied by a vague flurry of denials and endless self-hagiography. Trump promises us, over and over, that he will do harm, and that he will learn nothing.

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Trump insisted that if the court does not give presidents immunity, Biden would be prosecuted for “20 different acts,” including “taking a lot of money” (there’s no evidence Biden has been bribed in office in any way) and for “being a Manchurian candidate” (which is not even a coherent accusation, much less a crime).

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Summarizing and codifying the policy points makes Trump sound like he is focused, or at least like he has a general understanding of what he’s saying or thinking.

Reading the whole interview, though, it’s clear that Trump does not know anything about anything. His mind is a series of hazy orange corridors filled with dead ends, open pits, and trip wires. He stumbles through the maze, thunking gently off the walls, every so often belching forth a random quasi-anecdote or catch phrase. Here a steel executive weeps with gratitude at sight of Trump; there people spontaneously break into laughter when Trump says he’s going to be a dictator on day one; over here, Trump confusingly argues that his former National Security Advisor John Bolton "served a good purpose because he's a nutjob." And no, there's no context in which that statement make sense.

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Trump just doesn’t seem to understand his own policies. He insists that tariffs will not increase prices basically because he doesn’t want them to increase prices. (“I've seen — I don't believe it'll be inflation. I think it'll be lack of loss for our country. Because what will happen and what other countries do very successfully, China being a leader of it.”)

  Public Notice

What the everloving fuck does that even mean?

It’s unclear that Trump even really knows what a tariff is. He often speaks like he thinks we’re charging foreign countries directly, rather than putting an additional tax on foreign goods which consumers have to pay.

Which he did throughout his entire presidency. Did no one educate him?

Despite the devastating covid pandemic, which killed over a million Americans, Trump insists that there’s no reason “to spend a lot of money on something that you don't know if it's gonna be 100 years or 50 years or 25 years,” and argues that the office is just “giving out pork.” He adds that the experience of the pandemic means that “I think we've learned a lot and we can mobilize, you know, we can mobilize” — missing the obvious point that one of the things the pandemic taught us is that you need to have systems in place before the pandemic begins if you want to “mobilize.”

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The rest of the interview is filled with him boasting about saving money or forcing other countries to pay the United States. Trump’s refusal to pay his bills is legendary; miserliness is his one real ethical commitment.

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