This story originally appeared in Vox.com Nov. 15, 2018 Trump’s latest interview shows a president who’s in way over his headHe has no idea what he’s doing, but what else is new?By Matthew Yglesias | @mattyglesias | Nov 15, 2018, 1:10pm EST Alex Wong/Getty Images In some ways, the friendliest Donald Trump interviews are the most revealing. Given the opportunity to ramble and free-associate without any pushback whatsoever, you can see what channels his mind naturally follows. His latest interview with the Daily Caller shows a president who’s fundamentally out to sea. The sycophantic interviewers can’t get Trump to answer a policy question of any kind, no matter how much of a softball they lob at him. The only subjects he is actually interested in talking about are his deranged belief in his incredible popularity and how that popularity is not reflected in actual vote totals because he’s the victim of a vast voter fraud conspiracy. It’s the kind of thing that would be a bit sad if it were just your elderly uncle ranting about his past glories, but Trump mixes it in with authoritarian asides and the fundamental reality that whether he cares to do the actual job or not, he is ultimately the president of the United States. Trump slips on Whitaker and MuellerAn extremely telling moment comes early in the interview when the Caller asks him a basic question: “Could you tell us where your thinking is currently on the attorney general position? I know you’re happy with Matthew Whitaker, do you have any names?” They are hoping here that Trump will say something about potential candidates for a permanent appointment to the AG job. And there is nothing in this question about special counsel Robert Mueller or the presumption that Whitaker was brought in to stymie his investigation. But Trump starts answering a question he hasn’t been asked, explaining that the Mueller inquiry is for some reason an “illegal investigation”:
This is a complete non sequitur. The issue with Whitaker is whether a person who holds a DOJ job that isn’t Senate-confirmed can serve as acting attorney general. Nobody is suggesting that Mueller should serve as acting attorney general, so the fact that he isn’t Senate-confirmed has no relevance to anything. Though the sheer quantity of untrue things Trump says is so large that to be merely irrelevant is almost refreshing. Trump tells weird lies about pollsA certain amount of dissembling has been a part of politics for thousands of years, but Trump is relentlessly dishonest in a very odd way. In the midst of a rambling diatribe about CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, Trump engages in a lot of name-calling about major television networks and makes some wild misstatements about polling:
Rasmussen last had Trump at 51 percent approval back on November 2, and his numbers have gone down since then. In FiveThirtyEight’s broader polling average, he’s at 42 percent, which is literally worse than any other president on record in the history of polling. Meanwhile, a July Mediapost survey showed that CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS are all more trusted than Trump, and Poynter’s surveys show that confidence in the media is rising during Trump’s time in office as part of a backlash to his anti-journalism rhetoric. The Caller staffers, of course, don’t push back on any of this nonsense and are in fact so in the tank for Trump that he winds up needing to push back against them and observe that Acosta’s behavior in the briefing room isn’t actually as unusual as they think. This broadly follows a template that ABC’s Sam Donaldson set decades ago:
Trump rants on and on for a while about how good his presence in politics is for the media business (this is true, though of course it undercuts his argument that the media is trying to undermine him), while the Caller flails around trying to get him to talk about something important. Trump is utterly unable to discuss policyA unique aspect of Trump as a politician is that he can’t talk about the substance of any policy issue in a remotely coherent way. Tough interviews can sometimes obscure exactly how bad he is at this because they become combative. But here is he grappling with a softball:
If you haven’t been following this issue, you might be curious as to what the content of the bill Trump is backing is. What does it do? How will it impact your life and your community? Trump has nothing to say about this, nor does he seem up to speed on what the actual state of play in Congress is. He just knows he has a meeting and also that his energy secretary likes the bill and that Utah Sen. Mike Lee “votes against a lot of things.” Of course, nobody in politics is an expert on everything that crosses his desk, but when Trump gets a question on his signature issue of immigration, he starts ranting about Mueller again:
Where Trump does have detailed, albeit entirely made-up, beliefs is on the subject of voter fraud — a phenomenon he claims to believe is widespread despite all evidence to the contrary. Trump tells a lot of lies about voter fraudAt the intersection of the Caller’s sloppy, dishonest journalism and Trump’s egomania and disdain for the truth, you get a long dialogue in which Trump makes a range of false assertions about voter fraud, egged on by his interviewers. One part of this starts with Trump asserting that Republicans lose elections in California because of “illegals voting” and ends with him saying you need to show ID to buy breakfast cereal:
Trump is presumably rich enough that he hasn’t actually done his own grocery shopping in a long time and maybe thinks what he’s saying about cereal is true. But the next thing he says about Massachusetts residents crossing over to vote illegally in New Hampshire and then staying in New Hampshire is so incoherent, it’s a bit hard to know what he’s even trying to say:
Having previously lived in Massachusetts, I can tell you that one thing that happens during election season is that lots of liberals take buses to New Hampshire to volunteer as canvassers and phone bankers, which is obviously not illegal. You can’t come up from Massachusetts and vote in New Hampshire because, obviously, you need to live in New Hampshire to register there. What’s more, New Hampshire already has the kind of voter ID law that Trump says would stop the fraud he claims to believe is happening. Later, Trump and Conway team up to get confused about time zones:
Polls close an hour later in the Panhandle than in the rest of Florida because it is farther to the west and in a different time zone from the rest of the state. There’s no big mystery here. The various forms of dissembling about vote fraud, however, at least have a clear tactical purpose. Trump later offers some backward-looking misinformation about 2018 that serves no obvious function whatsoever. Trump can’t count or remember what campaign events he didAsked, “What’s your takeaway from the 2018 election and what do you think that means for the 2020 election for you?” the president can’t even muster a brief acknowledgment that a large majority of Americans voted to put a check on his power. Instead, he says “we picked up three or four Senate seats depending on how it all goes,” when the right number is two. He also says they “almost picked up Arizona,” when in fact they previously held Arizona and then Trump personally drove Jeff Flake out of office, which let Democrats pick up the seat. He says that “in the history of politics, nobody’s ever gotten crowds like that or close because you were in those stadiums and those arenas, but outside you had many more times — you know, in Houston we had 109,000 people sign up for 22,000 seats.” In fact, a Beto O’Rourke rally in Texas had almost twice that attendance. He bizarrely says Ted Cruz is an example of a politician who “wouldn’t have won without my helping them,” as if a Republican incumbent getting reelected in Texas is a huge political triumph. Last but by no means least, he says “the only congressman I went for was Andy Barr,” which I think is supposed to be a boast because Barr won his race. But Trump actually rallied for lots of House Republicans who were running in red states, and while some of them lost, plenty won, so it’s not clear what Trump’s motive would be in forgetting about this. Note also that it would be total political malpractice for Trump to have just forgotten to try to help House Republicans, and despite the impression he sometimes gives, Trump is not nearly stupid enough to do that. Indeed, a few minutes later, Trump has changed his story on this:
Note that there were only nine GOP-held seats up for election, so it would have been literally impossible for Democrats to gain 10 seats. The two faces of Trump perilAs David Brooks tries to reassure us that Trump is too inept to be a scary authoritarian, the Caller review is a reminder that it’s really a both/and situation. There’s no clear line between Trump’s dishonesty and his sincere lack of information, or between his tendency to engage in vain but pointless boasting and his alarming efforts to overturn legitimate election results. The main throughline is that even though Trump makes no sense, tramples on basic values routinely, and has no grasp of the actual substance of his job, he does have a large, well-financed, and fairly relentless conservative propaganda apparatus at his back that tries to obscure his failings from their audience while trusting that keeping him in power is broadly beneficial for the goals of the conservative movement — even if he is only dimly aware of what those goals are. So we’re left with a president who is both relatively likely to blunder us into some catastrophe and likely to respond to catastrophe in inappropriate or illegal ways. |