He's such a dumb fucking asshole:
"Trump’s proposals are terrifying. But they’re also remarkably incoherent. What’s most striking in the interview is that Trump, even after four years as president, has virtually no grasp on any policy issue beyond empty talking points, most of which are lies. When asked how he will implement his plans, he waffles, obfuscates, and delivers a stream of non sequitur boasts about how great he is or about how other people have said that he’s great. He lies all the time, but many of his statements on core policy issues are so garbled and gassy they don’t even qualify as lies. It’s like interacting with a chatbot programmed by a fascist parrot.
Trump’s blank, aggressive ignorance shouldn’t be a comfort. He has shown, over and over, that incompetence doesn’t have to undermine evil intent; often it can exacerbate it. He offers a vision of a presidency of cruelty and violence disavowed as it occurs, with every abuse of power accompanied by a vague flurry of denials and endless self-hagiography. Trump promises us, over and over, that he will do harm, and that he will learn nothing.
(snip)
Trump’s threats and schemes are grim. But in some ways, highlighting his worst plans and schemes undersells how disturbing the interview is. Summarizing and codifying the policy points makes Trump sound like he is focused, or at least like he has a general understanding of what he’s saying or thinking.
Reading the whole interview, though, it’s clear that Trump does not know anything about anything. His mind is a series of hazy orange corridors filled with dead ends, open pits, and trip wires. He stumbles through the maze, thunking gently off the walls, every so often belching forth a random quasi-anecdote or catch phrase. Here a steel executive weeps with gratitude at sight of Trump; there people spontaneously break into laughter when Trump says he’s going to be a dictator on day one; over here, Trump confusingly argues that his former National Security Advisor John Bolton "served a good purpose because he's a nutjob." And no, there's no context in which that statement make sense.
Again, these layers of fantasies, excuses, self-justifications, and boasts are so convoluted and meaningless that it’s hard to even fact check them or call them lies. Per philosopher Harry Frankfurt, Trump is a master of (or mastered by) “bullshit” — he is utterly indifferent to whether his words are true or false.
In some cases, Trump bullshits somewhat like a normal politician because he doesn’t want to take a solid position. On abortion rights, for example, he refused to say whether he would sign a 15-week abortion ban because he knows such bans are popular with his base and deeply unpopular with everyone else. And he refused to say whether women should be able to get mifepristone, though in a classic twist he did promise to make a statement on the matter in two weeks.
In the interview, Trump even openly admits he’s dodging some issues for political reasons, as when he takes credit for covid vaccines while saying that he doesn’t want to take credit for them because they’re unpopular with Republicans. (“The Democrats love the vaccine. The Democrats. Only reason I don’t take credit for it. The Republicans, in many cases, don’t…”)
In other cases, Trump just doesn’t seem to understand his own policies. He insists that tariffs will not increase prices basically because he doesn’t want them to increase prices. (“I've seen — I don't believe it'll be inflation. I think it'll be lack of loss for our country. Because what will happen and what other countries do very successfully, China being a leader of it.”) It’s unclear that Trump even really knows what a tariff is. He often speaks like he thinks we’re charging foreign countries directly, rather than putting an additional tax on foreign goods which consumers have to pay.
And then there are baffling passages where Trump’s motives and cognition fall into a semantic black hole.
In the interview he promises, incredibly, to eliminate Biden’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. Despite the devastating covid pandemic, which killed over a million Americans, Trump insists that there’s no reason “to spend a lot of money on something that you don't know if it's gonna be 100 years or 50 years or 25 years,” and argues that the office is just “giving out pork.” He adds that the experience of the pandemic means that “I think we've learned a lot and we can mobilize, you know, we can mobilize” — missing the obvious point that one of the things the pandemic taught us is that you need to have systems in place before the pandemic begins if you want to “mobilize.”"
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-time-magazine-interview-2024
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