http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/08/trump-time-capsule-69-cows/494420/?utm_source=atltwTrump Time Capsule #69: 'Cows!'James Fallows
August 4, 2016
Too much, too fast. To jot some of this it down, for the long-term record:
1. There is no there there. For some reason, Donald Trump agreed to another long on-the-record interview with a major newspaper. The three previous times he has done so — two sessions with David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of the NYT in March and July, and one in March with the full editorial board of the Washington Post — the result was a long run of negative coverage about the knowledge gaps his comments revealed and the risky claims he had made. For instance, the second NYT interview was the source of his observation that under a President Trump the U.S. might honor NATO obligations to defend European allies, or might not, depending on whether the country under attack had paid up.
He’s done it again, and this newest one, yesterday with Philip Rucker of the Post, made news for Trump’s studied refusal to endorse either Rep. Paul Ryan or Sen. John McCain in their hard-fought GOP primaries. These are two people who, especially Ryan, have piled their personal dignity up in a pyre and set it alight, through their stance of “rebuking” Trump but still saying he should be Commander in Chief. And Trump says, Meh.
But the real news of the transcript is the utter void of knowledge or ability to maintain consecutive thought it reveals, on any topic other than Trump’s own glory. Time and again, Rucker shows Trump’s attention flitting away to whatever has caught his eye on a TV running in the background. Eg, when Trump is talking about how his daughter Ivanka would not have put up with sexual harassment like that at Fox News:
RUCKER: Would you want her to follow the path that Gretchen Carlson did?
TRUMP: I’d want her to do what makes her happy. I’d want her to do, Phil, what makes her happy. [Trump looks at a nearby television, which was tuned to Fox News.] Oh, did they have another one of these things go down? It’s terrible that crash. Never liked that plane, structurally. I never thought that plane could —
RUCKER: Why should she have to change careers or jobs?...
Similarly:
RUCKER: Well, half the people in your rallies are veterans.
TRUMP: [Looks at the television again] Look at this. It’s all Trump all day long. That’s why their ratings are through the roof. I’d hate to say, Philip, if I wasn’t running, the television networks would be doing less than half the business.
I’ve transcribed interviews with presidents and presidential-aspirations over the years. This is not the way the rest of them talk. When listening to Trump I often think of Danny DeVito’s “Cows!” moment from Throw Momma From the Train, which you see 40 seconds into the clip below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv3oDHGXdKI2. “You can get that baby out of here.” At a rally in Virginia, Donald Trump grew annoyed at a baby that was crying and asked to have it removed from the hall.
Write your own punch line.
3. I feel your pain here in — wherever you are. That rally with the baby was in Ashburn, Virginia, a DC suburb that is one of the richest tech-and-defense-areas anywhere. In his speech Trump went on a litany of how Ashburn had been devastated by factory closures — mentioning factories hours away on the other end of the state or in other states altogether. This is more or less like giving a speech in Palo Alto and imagining that you are addressing drought-stricken farmers and migrant laborers in Merced. Betsy Woodruff has the delicious details here.
Obvious-but-worth-making point: if you have any experience in politics, the incompetence behind such a performance is almost impossible to comprehend. I could write six more paragraphs but I’ll just say: it’s like a junior high-school drama club appearing on Broadway. (Or, to use an Ashburn-specific reference: it's like Coach Jim Zorn’s famous “swinging gate” play.)
4. Yeah, we’re on the same ticket, but we keep our endorsements separate. After Trump studiously declined to endorse Paul Ryan, his VP pick Mike Pence made clear that he “strongly supported” Ryan, thus disagreeing with his running mate.
In the known political universe, this kind of thing does not happen. Yes, VP Joe Biden signaled his support for same-sex marriage long before President Obama did, but that was years into the administration rather than in the heat of the campaign.
5. Republicans abroad. The worldwide vice president of Republicans Overseas, Jan Halper-Hayes, told the BBC that Trump was “out of control” and therefore she could no long support him.
6. A narcissist with nuclear weapons. John Noonan, a nuclear expert who had advised Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, unleashed a long Tweet-storm arguing that Trump’s ignorant cavalierness about nuclear weapons threatened to upset the decades-long balance-of-terror that had kept nuclear weapons from being used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can read the whole thing here; sample below.
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To put this in perspective: Howard Dean’s campaign for president in 2004 was dealt a serious blow by a single five-second “screaming” episode. Rick Perry was hurt badly in 2012 by one ten-second brain freeze on a debate stage. Dan Quayle never fully recovered from spelling out potatoe in 1992.
Those were single episodes, with outsized consequences. Yet in 2016 Donald Trump does something like this practically every hour.
This is part of what he did on just another average day, 96 days before the election, with tax returns and a plausible physical-exam report nowhere in sight.
