Trump's Broken Brain On Full Display

He's been a proudly ignorant, lying moron criminal for his entire life. Now his mind has demented, and he no longer can think coherently or group simple words into logical sentences.

Over the past few weeks, we have heard reports of various MAGA party members and Trump advisers strongly suggesting that the Orange Turd maybe ease up on his racist and sexist insults of Kamala Harris and perhaps devote some time to talking about “policy” — what he and MAGA have to offer the American people.

Everyone offering this advice knows Trump personally and therefore they know Trump will not listen. You cannot reason with him, make him see your point, have him stop doing bad (or weird) things and start doing good (and normal) things. Trump doesn’t need to take any advice from anyone. He’s the smartest and most savvy political campaign strategist of all time. If you don’t think so, just ask him. Why should he pay attention to any of those losers?

Also, don’t all these people realize by now that any time Trump attempts to talk about policies, he lights an even bigger dumpster on fire and causes an even bigger shitshow? Indeed, you might say it would be a shitshow with “big massive dumps”.

Trump gave what was billed — in a spasm of unwarranted optimism by his campaign — as an “economic policy speech” to New York Economic Club.

Heather Digby Parton wrote that Trump “attempted to deliver a rote teleprompter speech”, but “inevitably digressed to his usual meandering stump speech which he delivered in ever desperate tones” to a quiet room “filled with educated people who have a deep understanding of the way our economic system works”. He also took a few questions, a rare move when he’s talking to anyone not in the employ of Fox or Newsmax.

Reshma Saujani, the CEO of Girls Who Code, asked a question about child care costs. Every news source I saw quoted only the final two sentences. This is the full question. Did she really think Trump would be capable of following this?:

President Trump, you talked about how the increase in the price of food, gas, and rent is hurting families, but the real cost that’s breaking families’ backs and preventing women from participating in the workforce is child care. Child care is now more expensive than rent for working families and is costing the economy more than $122 billion a year, making it one of the most urgent economic issues that is facing our country. In fact, the cost of child care is outpacing the cost of inflation, with the majority of American families of young children spending more than 20% of their income on child care. One thing that Democrats and Republicans have in common is that both parties talk a lot about what they’re going to do to address the child care crisis, but neither party has delivered meaningful change. [Quoted portion usually started here] If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable and, if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?

Trump’s lengthy response was described as “gibberish”, “an incoherent string of words that sounded like a 4th grader giving a book report of a book he didn’t read”, “two of the most puzzling minutes of his campaign”, “a jolting journey through disjointed logic”, and “a lengthy, utterly incoherent word salad” that showed “Trump’s inability to respond to the most basic of policy questions without devolving into inarticulate rambling.”

That really builds the anticipation, doesn’t it? . . . Okay. . . . Here we go (read it out loud for maximum effect):

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh — somebody — we had Senator Marco [pause] Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka — were so, uh — impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that — because child care is child care. It’s — couldn’t — you know, it’s something — you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care — I want to stay with child care — but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care, uhh, is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into [pause] an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.

UPDATE: Reshma Saujani, the woman who asked the question, says Trump is “not fit to be president”. She added: “What he told us is that child care expenses are no big deal. The fact that you’re drowning in debt because of them? Sorry, but not sorry! And he also told us that, no, I don’t have any ideas, or a proposal, or legislation… It’s insulting to parents who are constantly having to choose between funding their daycare and feeding their kids.”

Chris Hayes, MSNBC: “The applause (laughing), the applause at the end, after he’s falling all over. He does the Simone Biles dismount. MAGA!”

Philip Bump, Washington Post columnist: “His descriptions of how things are working are much more effective with people who don't know how things work. . . . He clearly didn’t know what he was going to say. He had suddenly been thrust into a dark, smoke-filled room and had to find the exit.”

Catherine Rampell, CNN commentator and Washington Post columnist: “My job is to analyze policy. I can’t even find a complete sentence in this.”

Jessica Grose, New York Times: He offered a pile of nonsense. [She quoted part of it but confessed] I didn’t even know how to punctuate [it] properly . . . Trump is off in La La Land . . . It’s an understatement to say this isn’t a priority for him . . .”

Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC senior business analyst: “Calling Trump’s remarks at the NY Economics Club incoherent gibberish is not a biased attack. It is a completely rational observation. He did not speak in coherent or complete sentences. And when he did . . . [he did] not make sense.”

Becky Quick (who was part of the event’s on-stage panel), CNBC: “The idea that you’re going to raise a lot of money through tariffs and not have it be inflationary does not make a lot of sense to me. It’s one or the other. If you’re putting tariffs on things, like a 200% tariff on Chinese cars that he talked about . . . you’re not going to raise the money on that . . . it’s inherently inflationary. Because your consumers are not — American consumers will not be getting low prices.”

David A. Graham, The Atlantic: “Today’s Republican Party . . . has demonstrated that it has no idea how to help people care for children once they’re born. . . . Trump’s answer was, even by his standards, confusing and rambling . . . That’s a lot of words, from which it’s hard to reach any conclusion except that Trump not only has no plan for lowering child-care costs, but has not thought about the issue at all. What do tariffs have to do with day-care prices? This writer doesn’t know, and neither does Trump. The economist Brad DeLong, inspired by South Park, has referred to this sort of “solution” as the underpants-gnome theory of policy. Step 1: Jack up tariffs. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Affordable child care!” . . . [Also:] In 2021, [Vance] tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.”

Others offered commentary on the difference in media coverage of Trump versus Joe Biden or Kamala Harris and how the media helps Trump — and has helped him for nearly a decade — by “sane-washing” (h/t to Parker Malloy, who should be read by everyone, for this perfect term) his incomprehensible rantings so they appear to be in English and make at least some sense when published, while ignoring his obvious mental decline.

Jeff Tiedrich, everybody is entitled to my own opinion, September 6, 2024:

elderly golfer in serious cognitive decline rambles through another crazypants speech
and the worthless press, naturally, cleans that shit up

Donny not only shit the bed, but enthusiastically rolled around in it. . . .

this dumbfuck still has no idea how tariffs work. he imagines that by slapping tariffs on all imported goods, he’s going to raise a pickeldillionty dollars and everyone in America will have all the money they need to buy all the Trump Steaks they could ever want.

sadly, no. “a tariff is a tax that is levied on an importer the moment a foreign-made product enters our country. the importer passes that cost onto you, the consumer. not one penny of the tariff is paid by any foreign country.”

now, feast your eyes on how the AP papered over that shit. . . . just a successful businessman giving a ‘major economic speech.’ oh, okay. . . .

nowhere in AP’s reporting does it mention that Donny’s plan is an outright fantasy because that’s not how tariffs work. the AP notes that “some” find Donny’s plan “implausible” — but they never bother to explain why.

The New York Times’ reporting was no better. . . . once again, nowhere in the piece does the Times explain how tariffs actually function — nor do they bother to mention that Donny’s plan is a delusional fantasy. . . .

not only did none of the mainstream reporting on Donny’s speech bothers to explain who pays for tariffs — nowhere was it mentioned that Donny’s answers were incoherent. . . .

the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media spent months picking apart every single one of Joe Biden’s public appearances and pouncing on every verbal stumble, using them as proof that SEE? SEE? THE MAN IS TOO OLD AND UNFIT FOR OFFICE.

they were relentless, and finally hounded Joe out of the race — and now these same shitfucks are giving Donny’s obvious cognitive deficiencies yet one more free pass.

Heather Digby Parton, Salon, September 6, 2024:

It seems like only yesterday that the elite media were extremely concerned that President Joe Biden had mistakenly referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico. . . .

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been speaking nonsense and spouting gibberish on the campaign trail and the media is covering for him by pretending that his verbal incontinence actually makes sense or by ignoring it altogether. . . .

Despite his regular protestations that he’s “like, really smart,” he communicates at a 4th grade level (the lowest level of any of the past 15 presidents going back to Hoover) and uses the same handful of words and phrases over and over again to cover for the fact that he never really has any idea what he’s talking about. . . .

Trump’s getting worse and the press is failing to properly report it. . . . [P]olitical reporters have normalized his unfit intellectual and emotional characteristics . . . even though he is rapidly deteriorating.

Trump appeared with Sean Hannity for a pre-taped “town hall” in which he wondered how anyone could be voting for Biden. He has repeatedly made that mistake, declaring that he’s running against his former rival instead of his current one. That might have been an understandable gaffe in the early days after Biden withdrew but this has now been going on for a couple of months. I think we know that if Biden had done this we would have had screaming headlines.

But it’s the truly demented and/or incoherent blather that's going unremarked upon and there is no excuse for it. I already wrote about his stunning declaration at the Moms for Liberty event in which he said that kids are getting transgender surgeries in school and the parents don’t know anything about it. But in the write-ups of the event in all the big papers it wasn't even mentioned. . . .

Meanwhile, here’s a recent headline about Vice President Kamala Harris that’s indicative of the coverage she’s been getting from the [New York] Times: Harris’s Early Campaign: Heavy on Buzz, Light on Policy. The piece immediately inspired a whole line of criticism about Harris’ grasp of the details of the job of president.

Isabel Fattal, The Atlantic, September 6, 2024:

[T]he biggest problem, the problem that all journalistic analysis of Trump’s response ought to lead with, is that his answer makes absolutely no sense. Earlier this summer, The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, warned about “one of the most pernicious biases in journalism, the bias toward coherence.” Journalists “feel, understandably, that it is our job to make things make sense,” he wrote. “But what if the actual story is that politics today makes no sense?”

Reading through some media outlets’ attempts to report on Trump’s comments yesterday, one can witness in real time the process of trying to impose sense where there is none. An Associated Press headline reads: “Trump Suggests Tariffs Can Help Solve Rising Child Care Costs in a Major Economic Speech”; the article gives ample space—and the implication of seriousness—to Trump’s unspecified tariff plan. A CNN headline reads: “Trump Claims Boosting Tariffs Will Pay for Child Care but Doesn’t Explain How.” The story acknowledges that Trump “dodged” the question asked, but it still tries to parse a policy point from his answer, discussing economists’ concerns with Trump’s tariff idea and Harris’s own proposals to lower the cost of child care for Americans.

A Newsweek article rounded up some social-media comments about Trump’s incoherent response but then went on to say: “However, not all social media users were critical, with a number praising Trump for answering questions, pointing out that Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris has largely avoided unscripted interviews during her campaign.” . . .

I was heartened to see at least a few analyses leading with the incoherence of his child-care reply. But press coverage of Trump's statements is not actually serving readers unless each and every article begins with the fact that his words are gibberish.

Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC, September 6, 2024:

He didn’t utter a single coherent sentence. Many of the things he said, there weren’t even verbs in his sentences. It was Marco Rubio, my daughter Ivanka, child care is child care. And the fact that we’re not covering that — let’s be clear, day in and day out we’re saying, “I need to see every single one of Kamala Harris’ policies and I want to see every punctuation and I want to see it listed in fifteen point font.”

There’s an absolute double standard in the way these two individuals are being covered. Remember how Joe Biden performed at the debate? It was a disaster, everybody here at the table knows it was a disaster, and we talked about it day in and day out. Where is the media talking about what Donald Trump presented? If under that word salad there was policy, bring it on, let’s talk about it. I would love to do so. Donald Trump is invited to come on, and let’s discuss it, but there isn’t a policy to discuss.

When he’s not fucking his furniture or trying (and totally failing) to losing a debate to a display case of donuts, JD “Okay Good” Vance thinks about child care.

Gary Legum, Wonkette, September 6, 2024:

[W]hat vice presidential candidate and awkward try-hard JD Vance proposes is this: You should get your children’s grandparents/aunts/uncles/who the hell knows to chip in, or watch your kid for you for free! Easy peasy lemon squeezee!

No, seriously, that is what he told Turning Point USA head lickspittle Charlie Kirk during a TPUSA event this week. Why did he say this? Is it because he has an angry swarm of bees inside his skull instead of a working brain? Probably, it’s as good an explanation as any for JD Vance.

Kirk kicked off the exchange by noting that daycare is very expensive and it’s “very hard for working families to get by,” and how does Vance think he can lower the cost of daycare for those working families?

Of course there are a lot of possible answers here. Universal daycare. Giving straight cash to working families to help defray the costs of private daycare. Shoot, encourage companies to run daycares at their offices so the parents can at least be close by. Plenty of companies have started doing this over the years. . . .

We’re not spending enough resources on daycare now, that’s part of the problem, Yale Law. But beyond that, this is just the standard GOP solution for everything: see a problem, shrug, say “Just get someone else to take care of it,” and then go hang out at a Purge with your rich funders, where you all cackle maniacally while watching poor people kill each other for sport. . . .

This entire idea seems to be part of Vance’s weird natalism, where (white) Americans should be popping out (white) babies like hens laying eggs, so all the immigrants won’t take over and turn the country a darker shade. . . .

And yet somehow, Vance’s ideas are more coherent than those of Donald Trump, who was also asked at an event yesterday — at the Economic Club of New York, which greeted his “major speech on the economy” with stony silence — about the high cost of daycare and what he might do about it should the nation, in its infinite insanity, return him to the White House this November. About all one can say for Trump’s answer is that the words were all in English, though not in any order or coherence that has ever been recognized outside a bowl of alphabet soup . . .

Forty-six percent. Forty-six percent of American voters want to put this lumbering case of extreme aphasia back into the most powerful job in the world. It never stops sounding insane.

As a bonus, please enjoy this clip of a low-energy Trump at the same event, reading (barely) a speech off the teleprompter. Very low energy! Sad! We remember a time in this country when such low energy from such an old man raised lots and lots and lots of questions about his fitness for the presidency. You know why we remember this? Because it was less than two fucking months ago and we’re not nearly as old and run down as Donald Trump, that’s how.

Next Tuesday’s debate will put Trump’s dementia and inability to speak front and center for the entire nation. (Harris will not mind if Trump goes over his time limits, I’m sure.) When he is exposed, will the media finally give his broken brain the serious attention it deserves? I’m not hopeful. They’ve made ever-more-ridiculous excuses and intentionally ignored it for nine years; why bother changing now? But if it’s going to happen, it seems like the debate would be the catalyst.

And then there was Friday:

Trump forced four of his lawyers to stand at attention on stage while he insulted them, whined about next Tuesday’s debate, and ranted for almost an hour. It was “unhinged even by his standards”. He also set himself up very nicely to be sued for additional tens of millions of dollars for defaming E. Jean Carroll. (He also “seemed confused about whether or not he was still in office at the time” of Carroll’s trial. The second Carroll trial was this year (in January). Trump left the White House in 2021.)

Trump also reminded everyone about another woman (one of over two dozen) who has accused him of sexual assault — an interesting move only two months before an election he has to win to avoid going to (and perhaps dying in) prison. Trump said the incident “didn’t happen”, it was “a total lie”. As Trump explained, when he rapes women, he has a different type (“she would not have been the chosen one”).

Vance expressed his support for Tucker Carlson giving a neo-Nazi a spot on his podcast to downplay and deny the Holocaust. Also, Vance said OF COURSE he does not agree with Darryl Cooper’s vile beliefs, but he still follows the Hitler apologist on Twitter. (Also: Conservatives are acting shocked that Carlson has a soft spot for Nazis.)

Vance also said school shootings were “a fact of life” — not unsimilar from Trump’s remark after a January 2024 shooting that, sure, “it’s horrible,” but “we have to get over it”.