Public Notice’s Noah Berlatsky analyzed Trump’s TIME interview so I didn’t have to. It truly is astonishing that he is apparently considered some sort of political savant considering how incoherent he is. Here’s an excerpt of the Public Notice piece:
To quote from our analysis of his previous Time interview, “even after four years as president, Trump has virtually no grasp on any policy issue beyond empty talking points, most of which are lies.” And he ain’t changing.
Even when Trump is trying to sound reasonable, he’s hampered by the fact that his knowledge of issues never goes deeper than talking points. Perhaps even worse, he’s clearly in thrall to the world’s worst conspiracy theorists and authoritarian rulers.
Obviously, his admission that it’s “hard” to bring down prices is the takeaway from this interview and Berlatsky gives it the full treatment, But there’s more. Here he was on abortion:
I’m not sure he even knows what the abortion pill is but he most certainly was not “strongly against” stopping it. Right now he’s struggling to appear “presidential” so he thinks he’s being moderate but it’s pretty clear he really doesn’t give a damn about reproductive rights and as a result will very likely allow his right wing zealots to have their way.
Berlatsky writes that Trump is weirdly trying to distance himself from the harsh transgender stance he took on the campaign trail. This is a man who ran vicious ads against trans people on a loop and said daily that schools were performing gender reassignment surgery against the parents’ wishes! But here he is dismissing the issue as
Cute. He goes into Trump’s discussion of Ukraine and Israel in which he proves once again that he is completely uneducated on the subject and has no interest in learning anything about it. It’s all about how it “never would have happened” if he had been president and that it will all stop once he is simply because he declares that it will or very bad things will happen. Same old same old.
He went on and on about expelling immigrants and as Berlatsky writes, he talked about how he would punish any foreign country that refuses to accept them:
Time also asked Trump where he would send migrants if their home countries do not want to accept them. He tried to dodge, saying “I’ll get them into every country, or we won’t do business with those countries.” But when pressed, he acknowledged he might in fact might have to build concentration camps to house them.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Whatever it takes to get them out.”
“I don’t care” is not generally what you want to hear from a president, especially when he’s discussing plans to conduct militarized deportation raids in parts of the country that don’t want them. But based on this interview, and on the entire rest of his political career, “I don’t care” does seem to sum up Trump’s approach to most issues that don’t directly involve puffing up his ego.
After a decade at the center of Republican and American politics, Trump continues to barely pretend to understand the broad outlines, much less the nuances, of his own agenda. When he talks about abortion, or tariffs, or trans people, or concentration camps, or Ukraine, or Gaza, he cheerfully flatters himself and talks about how great he’s going to make everything. But he offers few policy details, and when he does, those details are almost always conspiracy theories and lies.
By contrast here’s a 15 minute interview with the president everyone says is demented. Joe Biden is no Barack Obama or Bill Clinton when it comes to oratory or political analysis. But he’s not Donald Trump either. It’s amazing that America hates this man and loves the addled weirdo who clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.
It’s a damn shame Joe Biden isn’t getting a second term.
— Chris D. Jackson (@ChrisDJackson) December 18, 2024
Watch him actually answer questions like an adult with depth—then compare it to Trump’s word salads. The downgrade is almost comical.pic.twitter.com/czlHEThc8e