RADDATZ: Let me ask you a serious foreign policy question. What would you do about ISIS using chemical weapons?
TRUMP: I think it’s disgraceful that they’re allowed and you can’t allow it to happen and you have to go in and just wipe the hell out of them.
RADDATZ: What do you do? Do you go in with ground troops?
TRUMP: What did you say? Say that again.
Ah, the old “I can’t hear you over the crowd noise” routine. I see that Trump is picking up political pointers from the pros already. He’s a quick learner.
Over on NBC, he has his usual addled conversation with Chuck Todd, but I see that he hasn’t been getting pointers from his policy advisors:
DONALD TRUMP: No, not at all. Look, we are a debtor nation. We owe, I mean, now it’s 1.9 trillion, okay? I’ve been saying 1.8. Now, it’s 1 point — it’s really kicked in. It’s soon going to be 2.4 trillion dollars, okay? That’s like a point, whether you believe in the great economists or not, that seems to be a point of no return. That’s where we’re Greece on steroids, okay?
This is one of the dozen or so talking points that Trump uses as his random answer to whatever happens to have been asked, and yet he still doesn’t actually understand it. The number he’s trying to pull from his brain is 19 trillion, not 1.9 trillion. Since Trump is obviously good with figures and would never misstate, say, the buying price of a property, it’s hard to avoid the obvious conclusion that he doesn’t really have the slightest idea about—or interest in—the size of the national debt and what it means. It’s just a good applause line.
