CDZ Trump makes himself look crazier than ever -- Time magazine interview

[usmbguest5318]

Time magazine just published an interview with Donald Trump. You've got to read it for yourself. The man is positively incoherent...

I can remember my weed-infused college days when we'd chill in the eating club after studying. People stoned out of their minds could more coherently put together sentences and make points. Right or wrong, accurate or not, in most instances, nobody remembered the next day whatever "genius" notions they'd shared the previous night. Once in a while you'd get call on some BS that you'd uttered, but you had a good excuse: "I was stoned." Nuff said.

Trump doesn't have that excuse. He was ostensibly in his right mind for the interview, yet he's talking like a poorly educated 13 year-old being questioned about why the pages of his daddy's Playboy magazine are stuck together.

Here's an early passage from the interview:

Time: So you don’t feel like Comey’s testimony in any way takes away from the credibility of the tweets you put out, even with the quotes?

Trump: No, I have, look. I have articles saying it happened. But you have to take a look at what they, they just went out at a news conference. Devin Nunes had a news conference. I mean, I don’t know, I was unable to see it, because I am at meetings, but they just had a news conference talking about surveillance. Now again, it is in quotes.​

Later in the interview:

Trump: Today, Devin Nunes, just had a news conference.

Time: I’ll look that up.

Trump: Yeah, just had it. Now the problem, the thing is, I’m not sure they are watching anything other than that, let’s see members of Donald Trump transition team, possibly, oh this just came out.​

WTF? That's the POTUS talking like that! Anyway, read the article and see for yourself. One doesn't even need to know the details of the situations Trump mentions to tell the man is some sort of outré discombobulation of the brain. Had he just taken a Percocet or something?

 

[ABikerSailor]

Maybe the brain seizures would stop if Trump would just smoke a joint.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Maybe the brain seizures would stop if Trump would just smoke a joint.

Maybe I'd think reasonably for once in his life after doing so. We should all encourage him to do so...Maybe send joints to the president campaign!

 

[Camp]

The only way for him to keep from telling lies is to talk gibberish in circles so that nobody can understand what the hell he is saying.

 

[frigidweirdo]

Trump has articles, articles from the media he claims produce lots of "fake news", and he replaces these articles for EVIDENCE.... go figure.

 

[Luddly Neddite]

I've been reading that he's functionally illiterate and this gibberish us a symptom of that. He's not able to hold onto a thought or make even the simplest declarative statement.




Sent from my iPad using USMessageBoard.com

 

[Wyatt earp]

Time magazine just published an interview with Donald Trump. You've got to read it for yourself. The man is positively incoherent...

I can remember my weed-infused college days when we'd chill in the eating club after studying. People stoned out of their minds could more coherently put together sentences and make points. Right or wrong, accurate or not, in most instances, nobody remembered the next day whatever "genius" notions they'd shared the previous night. Once in a while you'd get call on some BS that you'd uttered, but you had a good excuse: "I was stoned." Nuff said.

Trump doesn't have that excuse. He was ostensibly in his right mind for the interview, yet he's talking like a poorly educated 13 year-old being questioned about why the pages of his daddy's Playboy magazine are stuck together.

Here's an early passage from the interview:

Time: So you don’t feel like Comey’s testimony in any way takes away from the credibility of the tweets you put out, even with the quotes?

Trump: No, I have, look. I have articles saying it happened. But you have to take a look at what they, they just went out at a news conference. Devin Nunes had a news conference. I mean, I don’t know, I was unable to see it, because I am at meetings, but they just had a news conference talking about surveillance. Now again, it is in quotes.​

Later in the interview:

Trump: Today, Devin Nunes, just had a news conference.

Time: I’ll look that up.

Trump: Yeah, just had it. Now the problem, the thing is, I’m not sure they are watching anything other than that, let’s see members of Donald Trump transition team, possibly, oh this just came out.​

WTF? That's the POTUS talking like that! Anyway, read the article and see for yourself. One doesn't even need to know the details of the situations Trump mentions to tell the man is some sort of outré discombobulation of the brain. Had he just taken a Percocet or something?

Why are you such a coward and post this in the CDZ?

 

[Wyatt earp]

I've been reading that he's functionally illiterate and this gibberish us a symptom of that. He's not able to hold onto a thought or make even the simplest declarative statement.




Sent from my iPad using USMessageBoard.com

Says the troll who always posts and runs like clayton

.

 

[Onyx]

It's hard to deny that he is fucked in the head when you read his words in writing.

 

[usmbguest5318]

I've been reading that he's functionally illiterate and this gibberish us a symptom of that. He's not able to hold onto a thought or make even the simplest declarative statement.

I haven't read that as much as I've observed and listened to the man and realized that my high school friends and classmates -- kids who went to East Coast boarding schools and elite colleges/universities just like he did -- as 9th graders, more coherently expressed themselves.

I think most people could "cut him some slack"' were he not to have bragged about being very smart and about having been a good student. Obviously, in an interview, one doesn't have the opportunity to proofread and edit one's words, so imperfection to some degree is expected.

It's no different than when I'm posting on USMB because I write here exactly the same way I speak. Rarely do I review what I write before posting, and often, I get interrupted in the course of writing a post, so when I get back to it, my train of thought has changed, and when I resume writing with the new "flow" I may mistakenly not correct all that I should.

That said, from our observers' perspective, the matter is one of the standards to which we hold Trump. Obviously those standards vary among the polity. I hold him to the highest standards of coherent and clear self-expression, which is to say I expect him to be as good at it as it is possible to be, within the limits of being human and thereby occasionally -- not all day everyday and everytime he speaks or writes -- making minor mistakes.

Minor goofs aren't what Trump consistently makes. The man is unfailingly inco-f*cking-herent, and in every way one can be.

 

[Toronado3800]

I don't find Trump to be incoherent all the time. Think about the debates.

Frequently I disagree with Trump and find his statements to be misleading at best.

Now when he is stuck answering questions he does not want to answer he is incoherent.

In some ways Trump's babble in those circumstances reminds me if I could not say "That is just the way it is" when I am being a good soldier at work and had to come up with something else to say.

 

[Meane]

It's just an interview. It's weird they don't edit it to be readable. Do they usually? But the constant "it was in the paper."but the president acts and then it's in the paper. Not the paper wrote and then the president spoke about it. " he has information" why doesn't he ever have it?

 

[usmbguest5318]

It's weird they don't edit it to be readable. Do they usually?

The editors of written news and information mediums as often as not edit an interviewee's remarks to make them appear coherent or add clarity to them. In order to do that, however, the publication has to obtain the interviewee's approval of the edited version being presented as what they said and meant, both denotatively and connotatively. Absent that approval, the writer/editor cannot present the remarks as quotes; they must instead present them as paraphrases and descriptions of the interviewee's statements and tone.

The Time interviewer appeared on CNN and the CNN reporter explicitly asked him why they didn't edit the published interview. The Time interviewer answered that the magazine wanted to present Trump in the raw and leave it to readers to make of it what they would.

I think Time's editors made the right call in not abridging or editing the interview. Trump's litigious nature, linguistic style and argumentatively self-serving demeanor is such that no intelligent person dare paraphrase him. Besides, so much of what he says is all but incomprehensibly disjointed that accurately making sense of it is all but impossible. Hell, even when the man makes statements that denotatively are quite clear, if it turn out from it issue legitimate dissention, Trump will deny that the words he uttered and their standard meanings were in fact what he said and meant.

To wit, "bigly," according to Trump's son, Eric, was some sort of mispronunciation of "big league." Yeah, right....Who but folks having horrendous diction believes that? Moreover, such an explanation mocks people who indeed have speech impediments, though given Trump's mocking of a disabled reporter, maybe that is what he was mocking thus afflicted people. In Trump's mind, "wiretap" means "surveillance in general." That, of course, is but a recent example of Trump's near functional illiteracy and sophomoric (well, that's likely over generous) ability to express himself.

• Trump's many attacks on the English language
  
• Trump’s grammar in speeches ‘just below 6th grade level,’ study finds
  
• Donald Trump’s poor grammar threatened a 35% tax on any US company that fires employees

Sure as I and others have chided Trump for his deucedly poor elocution and general incoherence, there will be folks who race to deride us for having done. Others may remark that one mustn't take Trump literally. Be that as it may:

1. There is no valid exculpation for his lame communication ability; adolescents in the millions more effectively convey their thoughts
2. When the man makes one of his clear and coherent comments, regardless of how cogent (or not), what other way is there to take it when it's not proffered with enough context to make manifest its metaphorical meaning?
3. When the man is incoherent, it's impossible to take him literally because his remarks are propositionally and substantively amorphous.