🦂 🧠

'Lots of gibberish': Transcript of Trump's social security interview shocks expertshttps://t.co/lJirYG2jwO

— Raw Story (@RawStory) March 11, 2024

If you met this man at a bar, you’d move to the other end:

TRUMP: “When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil but we were going at a much higher level oil and gas. We were doing, you know, we were third when I started and when they ended we were one by a longshot and we were very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi Arabia and Russia were doing. And we were on that path. We were gonna be paying down debt. We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with Covid. I guess China found that out because they also really got hit very hard also, but nobody wins with Covid. And so we had to get to we had to do other things. We had to help." 

"You know, if I didn’t do the expenditures that we didn’t do the kinds of things we did for the economy, we would add in 1929 type depression. And I had to say out in front of it, and we did we did a great job on that and we did with all of the things we’re coming up with Regeneron doing so much else, getting all because you know we had empty when I came in, we had empty, I call them empty cupboards. We had empty shelves, we didn’t have equipment, we didn’t have the gowns, we didn’t have the ventilators. We didn’t have anything." 

"This country wasn’t prepared for a thing like that. And I’m not even blaming anybody in that. Because, you know, when when it came, nobody thought the pandemic would ever happen again. It sounds like an ancient’s problem, not a problem that you’d have you know at that time, you know, in modern, very modern age. It was like an ancient thing. We you know, who, who would ever show I’m not blaming anybody, but we had empty cupboards, and I got them stocked and I got them stocked fast. And we did a great job with it. Never got credit. I got credit for the greatest economy. I got credit for foreign policy. I got credit for knocking out ISIS and not going into wars. But we beat ISIS, but I never got the credit for having done a great job with that.”

You don’t have to fact check every sentence or remember the days of Covid in the US or even know that Trump shut down the very agency that would have warned us of Covid before it reached us, to know this is sheer gibberish and gobbledygook. You’d expect an x-ray of this man’s head would show a rat’s nest sooner than show the shadow of grey matter.

And this is the man trying to answer a question in an interview. Imagine what he’s going to do in a debate, especially after sundown. 

In the same interview, responding to a question about how he’s changed positions on Social Security and Medicare:

TRUMP: “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements.” 

"There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak. And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is 50%. They say 32 and 33%. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50%, that means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50% more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy.”

Ideas are scorpions 🦂 in his brain, fighting for supremacy. Again, you don’t have to rebut every sentence he speaks, because I defy you to make sense of them, separately or cumulatively.

The good news is, even the Grey Lady is beginning to pay attention:

Donald Trump offered a rambling and confusing explanation of why he had reversed himself on whether the U.S. should ban TikTok, telling CNBC that a ban would make young people “go crazy” and could benefit Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.” https://t.co/SOAvDs4Q1i

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 11, 2024

The CNBC interview is the one these quotes are from.

May you live in interesting times.