Donald Trump Has No Idea What He Said One Day Ago

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Donald Trump has apparently decided that he’s the master of the long-form interview, so he’s been giving a bunch of them lately. But they raise a question: does Trump really think he’s impressing people in these interviews? Today we got our answer: he does indeed. Here he is in his latest Q&A with Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:

I do say this: My media coverage is not honest. It really isn’t. And I’m not saying that as a person with some kind of a complex. I’m just saying, I will be saying words that are written totally differently from what I’ve said. And I see it all — in all fairness, the editorial board of The Washington Post. I was killed on that. I left the room, I thought it was fine.

Just as a reminder, this is the interview where his comment on racial disparities in law enforcement was “I’ve read where there are and I’ve read where there aren’t.” On Iran: “We should have gone in and said, ‘release our prisoners,’ they would have said ‘no,’ and we would have said, ‘double up the sanctions.'” On his beef with the Ricketts family: “I’ll start doing ads about their baseball team.” On using nukes against ISIS: “I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good-looking group of people here.” On his hands: “My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay?” On how he’d address racial problems: “I actually think I’d be a great cheerleader for the country.” On taking Iraq’s oil: “For that, I would circle it….I would defend the areas with the oil”—apparently not realizing that the oil is spread throughout nearly the entire country.

That interview was a train wreck. Trump’s ignorance and incoherence was on a Charlie Sheen-esque level—except that Trump didn’t have any pharmaceutical help. But he thought everything went fine. Apparently he can’t read a room quite as well as he thinks.

And he’d better be prepared to get treated badly again. Here he is on the national debt:

DT: We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt.

BW: How long would that take?

DT: I think I could do it fairly quickly, because of the fact the numbers….

BW: What’s fairly quickly?

DT: Well, I would say over a period of eight years. And I’ll tell you why.

BW: Would you ever be open to tax increases as part of that, to solve the problem?

DT: I don’t think I’ll need to. The power is trade. Our deals are so bad.

So…Trump is somehow going to start running a budget surplus of $2 trillion per year without raising taxes. How? Something to do with trade.

Is this even fact checkable? Or is it, in Wolfgang Pauli’s famous words, so nonsensical that it’s “not even wrong”? In any case, I promise Trump that every quote in this post is a direct quotation. Nobody is making him say words that are totally different from what he’s said. Honestly, there’s no need.

However, the fact that he thinks he’s being constantly misquoted really does make you wonder if he’s all there. He seems awfully sincere about this. He really and truly talks in such a stream of consciousness that he doesn’t even realize what he’s said half the time.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate