Trump's Interview is "A display of unbelievable ignorance"

A new poll reports that 98 percent of Donald Trump voters don’t regret their choice for president. It’s a number that’s simultaneously too difficult to believe and infuriating. By any reasonable account, whether by experts in presidential history or by relatively nonpartisan commentators, Trump’s first 100 days have been an endurance test for the republic. His erratic, ignorant, deeply incompetent presidency is, day by day, causing damage — damage to the traditions of the White House and, indeed, to the spoken and unspoken rules that preserve our constitutional democracy.

At the center of it all is a chief executive who knows nothing. When he desperately avoids details by rotating through his mental rotisserie of superlatives — “very, very” or “tremendous” or “terrific” or whatever hyperbolic pitchman gibberish he’s trained himself to repeat — he comes off as an uninformed dolt, conspicuously avoiding the question with more vigor than he avoids strong gusts of wind. Conversely, when Trump struggles to repeat issue-oriented details, he comes off as a scattered, barely coherent toddler attempting to repeat something he heard at the grownups’ table and failing badly.

Both aspects of Trump’s ignorance were on mind-blowing display in his recent one-on-one interview with the Associated Press. It was a journey through the Hieronymus Bosch hell-scape 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.

Let’s dig into the three worst quotes.

Among other things, Trump delivered perhaps the best example of word salad since Sarah Palin’s “broken prompter” incident several years ago. 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.