Longing for the Transcript of the Ukraine Call

So *NOW* can we *FINALLY* have a serious national conversation about the psychological condition of the President of the United States?

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 2, 2019

Because direct quotes from the press conference earlier today in the Oval Office make wondrous reading:

“She should focus on her own district!” Trump ranted “You see what is happening to her district? We call it tent city, it is terrible. We just sent a violation to the city of San Francisco. Unsafe water, unsafe conditions, environmental, EPA, our EPA, doing a great job at sending Nancy Pelosi with all of the talk about EPA, there are needles and drugs all over the street, there are tents, there are people that are dying in squalor, in the best location, and San Francisco. It used to be a great city.”

As in:  you wonder how a man who can't put sentences together any better than that is POTUS.  It's sort of word scatter and word association where "environmental" leads to "EPA" leads to "needles drugs all over the street" (which is actually a DEA concern, but that's also the tell that Trump isn't serious about this, just inflammatory).  He manages, at the end, to put a simple sentence together, but what comes between "You see what is happening to her district?" and that last sentence is gibberish that seems to make sense only because it's in English; but it's English as broken as any attempt at using language can be.

This is a little better, but only because it's a subject close to his malignant heart, because it is bitter and because it is his heart:

“What about Obama’s conversation with the president of Russia?” Trump yelled. “Where he says, hey, hey, tell Vlad I will talk to them after the election is over, nobody reports that, right? That is stuff that you should report, but you people should be ashamed of yourselves. We have the most dishonest media that you can imagine, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

He apparently means this, which everybody knows about; but the proof they don't, is that they are talking about Trump rather than somebody else:

Former President Barack Obama was famously caught on a “hot mic” telling a Russian official that he would have more “flexibility” to conduct negotiations with his country after the 2012 presidential election.

This next bit is just full blown fantasy, an hallucination like a "snake-filled valley" on the U.S.-Mexican border:

“When Nancy Pelosi, who worked a day early, Nancy Pelosi called for essentially impeachment, let’s impeach the president before she saw the transcript, and this is a word-for-word transcript of the conversation taken by talented stenographers, when she saw that, I heard, she went crazy,” the president said. “She said, ‘We can’t impeach him with this conversation, that’s a great conversation!’

Notice "Nancy Pelosi called for essentially impeachment," and then realized she can't impeach him, based on a memorandum of conversation which is NOT a "word-for-word transcript" of the conversation.  Does such a transcript exist?  Maybe in Trump's mind, maybe in reality: it's impossible to know the difference, because it's a cinch the White House is not even letting Christmas cards go out at this point.  And more sheer fantasy:  he keeps insisting, against the reactions of all who have read the whistleblower report and the transcript (all of which has been confirmed as accurate by the White House), that the conversation was "great!".  Everyone else who reads about it begs to differ or, at best, changes the subject ("hearsay" or "quid pro quo" or other irrelevancies).

If you follow this next one carefully, you realize he's talking to himself about himself, actually narrating a conversation with himself and staff in the White House.  It's rather difficult to follow, though, because he gets distracted by his own enthusiasms:  building the wall, and decrying "fake news."

“They said President Trump started screaming, ranting, raving that on the southern border, where we are right now building a tremendous wall, it is unbelievable what is going up, army engineers, we are doing a lot, we will soon have over 100 miles under construction completed, and we will end up with 400 or 500 miles,” Trump said. “[The reporters said] that I wanted not a wall, but I wanted a moat, whatever it is, a moat, and in the moat, I wanted alligators and snakes, and I wanted the wall to be a fence, and I wanted to be electrified, and I wanted sharp spikes at the top, so it would go piercing through their skin is somewhat the way they said it, skin piercing spikes. But I want that whole wall to be electrocuted, and sir, you never said that, they came to me, the comms people yesterday, and they said did you say this? I said, why are you asking that stupid question? Because the fake news media is saying that you said this in a book. “

Why would anyone say he ever said anything like this?

Trump just went on a rant claiming he never said any of those things that are in the story in the NYT, including his desire to put flesh-piercing spikes at the top of his wall.

Of course, Trump tweeted this: pic.twitter.com/0qhlWM0iMs

— S.V. Dáte (@svdate) October 2, 2019