And for dessert
I hadn’t realized that Trump yammered at the trapped military brass yesterday for AN HOUR AND THIRTEEN MINUTES. Freestyle. Typical Trump brainless babbling, no script, just the endless spool of stupid soundbites and boasts and lies and gibberish.
Shawn McCreesh at the Times has some details.
Several hundred military commanders turned up at Quantico on Tuesday morning. Some had flown in for it from places as far away as Germany, Brussels, Japan and South Korea. They sat mostly in silence as Mr. Trump talked for 73 minutes about the same things he talks about almost every day, no matter where he is or to whom he is speaking.
He talked to the generals about Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the infamous autopen. He talked about the media. He talked about tariffs and the border. He talked about the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner. He talked about not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.
It’s a milkshake of engorged ego and abject stupidity. Only an ego that blots out the sun can think that people want to sit still for AN HOUR AND 13 MINUTES OF BABBLING ABOUT SELF from a markedly brainless egomaniac.
These were pretty much the same things he talked about a day earlier while standing next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the State Dining Room at the White House, which were the same things he talked about at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, which were the same things he talked about at Windsor Castle and at Chequers in England.
He might as well be a wind-up toy. He babbles the same babble every time he babbles.
On an almost daily basis, thousands of words pour forth from the president’s mouth. Sometimes, he tucks in a wild insight about the direction he is taking the country.
It can be hard to discern these moments for what they are. Partially that’s because we hear from Mr. Trump so often. He is on TV constantly. But it’s also because, in his second term more than ever, he has become so devoid of context. He seems unwilling or unable to modulate based on his audience, his setting or his circumstances.
Which is (surely obviously?) a sign of extreme mental impairment.
I see nothing wrong with an autopen. As someone with arthritic hands, I understand how hard it can be. I just finished writing checks on my dad’s estate; he had thirteen beneficiaries, plus bills I had to pay, so I wrote more than 20 checks. By the time I finished, my signature was scrawled more than written.
Of course, it’s impossible to read Trump’s signature anyway, so maybe it doesn’t matter.
I would think at the least a personality disorder, maybe even a sociopath. Being Trump, I would not have any disbelief to suspend if a professional saw him and diagnosed him as sociopathic.
Well obviously sociopath, but my point was specifically about the cognitive vacancy of being unwilling or unable to modulate based on his audience, his setting or his circumstances.
Dumb as well as evil, in short.
I vote for both.
The man can’t speak for thirty seconds without using one of his stock phrases, or saying something is the “best” or “worst”, or making whatever the subject might have been all about him. Sure people might “um” and “ah” when they’re reaching for the right words to convey their thoughts, but Trump has no thoughts worth conveying that he hasn’t uttered previously. He can’t not speak about himself, and he’s a moral vacuum, with no imagination beyond that needed to be a tawdry, money-grubbing huckster. It’s verbal incontinence chained to extreme mental impoverishment, within a bloated, thin-skinned, vindictive, red giant sized ego, where the sum of the parts is so much worse than each could ever be on its own. He is so much less plausible than most fictional characters it’s frightening.
I can’t decide between his skull being occupied by an insane parrot, a demented hamster on a wheel, or a player piano with a short, Moebius strip of dreadful music, played endlessly.
Well he is a sociopath or psychopath too of course, it’s just that this particular post was about his dummitude. Sometimes we do big picture, sometimes we zoom in.
He contains multitudes!
He’s fractally awful.
Here’s an excerpt, via Heather Cox Richardson, suggesting what’s uppermost in his thoughts at the moment:
‘They looked at him [Biden] falling downstairs every day. Every day, the guy is falling downstairs. He said, It’s not our President. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for, like, a month, stairs, like these stairs, I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall, because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You’re not having—you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down, but don’t—don’t pop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a President, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, It’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually, bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once.’
I think that more than one general was considering that any order Trump gave might be legitimately challenged.
From #1 to #7 above:
Well, that covers his better points. Now, what about his worst.?
Omar
It’s often said that if you could arrange single atoms into the shape of letters, you could write the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin. Even by that standard a complete description of Trump’s worst traits wouldn’t fit into the known universe, and anyway you would run out of atoms (and your pin head would collapse to a black hole) long before making it to the end of the foreword.
(I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Trump is the dark energy that’s pushing everything apart. If I were the rest of the Universe, I would also keep accelerating forever to get as far away from him as possible)
Maybe Trump’s the reason for “Mostly harmless.”
Bjarte,
And even then all the pinheads would vote for him.
His “weave” is unwoven. Not only is he diminished, but it seems like nothing really matters to him enough to bother with checking out the facts, and so he just does a stream-of-consciousness everywhere he goes. His speeches have always been long and dull. Like with Bush II, I often wonder who is actually in charge at 1600.
@Mike,
Seems to be Stephen Miller, at least in regards to law enforcement.