Listen, the big homie David Dennison showed up at a private fundraising event in Missouri on Wednesday evening and according to audio obtained by the Washington Post, Politico, and the Atlantic, said some of the most ridiculous shit imaginable about trade and also about the Pennsylvania special election.
Like the rest of humanity, Trump has a tendency to vent when he feels like things aren’t going his way. That’s not the problem – we all do that.
The problem is two-fold: 1) Trump doesn’t confine his venting to confidants, and more importantly 2) his venting very often betrays what sounds like instability at best and outright insanity at worst. Those problems are complicated by the fact that he’s the fucking President of the United States, which means his rantings cannot simply be dismissed as the inconsequential ramblings of a demented narcissist.
The last couple of weeks have been a rollercoaster for Trump and while there have been peaks (securing a meeting with Kim Jong-Un), there have also been valleys (porn star lawsuits, firing the Secretary of State, etc.). Last weekend, it looked like he was coming unglued (again) when he showed up at a rally for Republican House candidate Rick Saccone and delivered one of his more memorable performances to date. At one point during the spectacle, he called Chuck Todd a “sleeping son of a bitch.”
Things got even more bizarre on Tuesday evening when, on a trip to California that included a stop in the San Diego desert where 8 prototypes for his border wall are gathering dust, Trump told a group of soldiers that he’s considering building out what the President is calling “Space Force“, which he imagines will be a kind of galactic army.
One thing you should stop and take note of here: it doesn’t matter whether or not a part of Trump realizes he’s riling up the media with this crazy shit. That’s an excuse a lot of Right-wing propaganda sites fall back on when Trump goes off script. Something like this: “He’s playing the media like a fiddle.”
Irrespective of whether he’s trying to get a rise out of the media, the shit he’s saying is still crazy. If I charge out into my neighbors’ yard naked and start urinating on their vegetable garden while shouting about how the deep state is conspiring to slow my plans to develop a team of genetically enhanced lizard space warriors, I can’t just tell the police that I was just “playing my neighbor like a fiddle” when I get put in handcuffs.
That brings us to the above-mentioned private fundraising event.
Now to be clear, this was a private event, so I guess you could say that Trump felt like he was free to improvise, but there’s a difference between a private event and a private conversation. The former suggests you’re talking to a group of people while the latter implies an audience that, at most, comprises a handful of acquaintances. Here is what Trump said about a conversation he had with Canada’s Justin Trudeau on trade (via WaPo):
Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy, Justin. He said, ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please,’ ” Trump said, mimicking Trudeau, according to audio of the private event in Missouri obtained by The Washington Post. “Nice guy, good-looking guy, comes in – ‘Donald, we have no trade deficit.’ He’s very proud because everybody else, you know, we’re getting killed.
… So, he’s proud. I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know. … I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’ You know why? Because we’re so stupid. … And I thought they were smart. I said, ‘You’re wrong, Justin.’ He said, ‘Nope, we have no trade deficit.’ I said, ‘Well, in that case, I feel differently,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said, ‘Check, because I can’t believe it.’
Obviously, that is insane. It would be bad enough if that’s some semblance of true, but it’s even worse if he’s just making it up because you know: who would make something like that up?
He also seemed to suggest that Japan is conspiring against U.S. imports by dropping bowling balls on cars. To wit:
It’s the bowling ball test. They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car. If the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify. It’s horrible.
As WaPo dryly notes, “it was unclear what he was talking about.”
And how about North Korea? Here’s Trump on that:
[Bush and Clinton] couldn’t have met with Kim. Nobody would have done what I did.
It’s called appeasement: Please don’t do anything.
[The media says], ‘Maybe he’s not the one to negotiate. He’s got very little knowledge of the Korean Peninsula. Maybe he’s not the one. … Maybe we should send in the people that have been playing games and didn’t know what the hell they’ve been doing for 25 years.’
And on NAFTA:
The best deal is to terminate it and then make a new deal. But I don’t know that we can make a deal because Mexico is so spoiled with this horrible deal. Sometimes something is so good, how do you negotiate? The best way: terminate.
And on Conor Lamb:
The young man last night that ran, he said, ‘Oh, I’m like Trump. Second Amendment, everything. I love the tax cuts, everything.’ He ran on that basis. He ran on a campaign that said very nice things about me.
You get the idea.
Clearly, all of that is crazy. Stone, cold crazy.
On trade, he is suggesting that he is purposefully making it up as he goes along with only his own intuition about the relative “fairness” of deals to guide him. And if you’re inclined to think he knows what he’s talking about, well then just go up and read the quotes about the Trudeau conversation again – either he’s lying or else it’s an admission (straight from his own mouth), that he in fact has no idea what the numbers are. Either way, it’s egregious.
On North Korea, he’s walking into a trap. He’s correct to observe that the media is skeptical of whether he’s the right person for a meeting with one of the most obstinate regimes in modern geopolitical history. What he’s incorrect about is his implication that the media is wrong to be skeptical. One way or another, he’s going to get played “like a fiddle” (as he would put it) by Pyongyang and the rest of the world will pay the price.
But again, the bottom line on Thursday is that these leaked comments betray a detachment from reality that is almost unfathomable for a world leader. Sooner or later, that’s going to have dire consequences.
Here’s the ad which was twisted in his mind into the bowling ball test:
https://youtu.be/Y70eWqM4GrY
If the test were real, there would be far fewer yakuza driving black Cadillacs.
In Canada, they call made -up facts “LIES”