This must be the press conference from Monday that everyone said was batshit crazy. Try to grasp what he’s saying here. You can skip the first minute or so to get the the part that completely goes off the rails.
When I first heard this I thought he was confusing NATO with the EU and claiming NATO was now paying tariffs. But it’s possibly just his old mistaken idea that NATO is a protection racket that pays the U.S. to protect Europe. (See an old post from 2018, Trump: International Man of Derp.) He’s now saying that the U.S. will not pay NATO anything any more, and NATO countries have to pay us or he won’t come to their aid. NATO countries never paid us for protection and are not supposed to.
The U.S. and other NATO countries committed long ago to paying a certain amount to maintain NATO headquarters in Belgium and a few other things, and this isn’t a huge amount and it’s not tied to military defense. Is he saying the U.S. will default on its obligations? Or is he confusing it with something else? I can’t tell.
And then if you go on just a bit longer, he starts talking about how great oceanfront property is, and how Ukraine is “a thousand miles of ocean,” by which I infer he means Ukraine has a thousand miles of oceanfront. But it doesn’t have any oceanfront. It has 1,056.5 kilometers (656.5 miles) of Black Sea coastline, which may be where Trump got the “thousand” figure. But his property swap plan fundamentally makes no sense.
So why aren’t all the nation’s media headlines about how Trump has oatmeal for brains? This isn’t just misspeaking, or using the wrong name or word. This is fundamentally misunderstanding what’s going on. And the NATO confusion really isn’t new. He seemed to think NATO paid us to protect Europe in his first term.
And where does this leave us with NATO? I don’t think anyone knows.
Stuck in the 1980s — I take it Trump chose the Kennedy Center honorees this year. Kiss, Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor, Michael Crawford, a country singer named George Strait. A 1980s give or take crew if their ever was one. People who know Trump all say his cultural references are all stuck in the 1980s, back when he was a (relatively) young hotshot and regular at Studio 54. See also How Trump’s economic thinking got stuck in the 1980s from WaPo.
See also Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times, Why Trump Always Wants a Crisis.
Another case of the media using "neutrality" to hide plain truths.
The media in this country will be the last to state the obvious. In Trump 1.0, it took the big papers almost 2 years to use the word "lie" in describing the stuff coming out of his mouth. It was like watching someone struggle to find a simple word in their vocabularly, and then struggle with the muscles around their mouth to say it.
It took them 2 years to get through this. Next week we start on colors.
This dumbing down of the media goes at least as far back as George W Bush. I remember being stunned by Jon Stewart, as a rare voice of truth, back in the oughts. The media was AWOL.
I instead look to the artists as truth tellers. The comedians, artists, musicians and kids. These people are leading the way, and have been, politically for a couple decades. I'm cheered that their ranks are growing, and that kids – the next generation – are joining them.
Trump thinks he can wing it and look brilliant and genuine. I know you have to be old to get it but, Trump comes off these days like Foster Brooks, but not funny.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&p=dean+Martin+meets+the+pilot&type=E210US105G91885#id=1&vid=96842391b955e7af1078e832b2e3a59d&action=click
Trump can deliver totally disconnected, irrational, and completely fabricated statements (aka lies) with the conviction that everyone is convinced. Maybe if the press cracked up like Dean Martin, the bubble would burst.
I recall some conversation about 35 years ago with public TV employees that talked of quite controlling administration forces in commercial broadcasting. Many topic were just off limits to stations who relied on ad revenue for profits. This may be a bit of a case here. They do love that political ad revenue.
So why aren’t all the nation’s media headlines about how Trump has oatmeal for brains?
I think because Stump is content, he makes them money, our cable news coverage is almost 100% Stump. He doesn't do anything good but they cover it all over and over go to commercial more Stump over and over. Every show is Stump. If they start reporting on his obvious mental decline it makes the rest of their programming meaningless? They could have buried him long ago with any multitude of stories but why kill the goose that laid that golden egg? Another reason could be because he is so dim it’s hard to tell between ignorance and mental decline, the media just doesn’t want to go there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6R7Idw1wRc&list=RDb6R7Idw1wRc&start_radio=1
"So why aren’t all the nation’s media headlines about how Trump has oatmeal for brains?"
Fear.
1. Fear of lawsuits (by Trump or associated right-wing legal orgs)
2. Fear of regulatory interference. Trump delights in using the power of Gov't to attack his personal enemies.
3. Fear of alienating Trump's Mob, which could play out as anything from boycotts to mass shootings.
Also, Trump represents the oligarchy. The billionaire class is his real constituency. They own the media. Trump could be out in public babbling incoherently, and they’ll turn him into Cicero.
We've had this argument before. Trump is NOT making the cable news companies more money. Cable news ratings actually are down this year from what they were last year, with the exception of Fox News, which is up. But most people do NOT want to watch Trump 24/7, apparently.
The media does not cover the orange man's dementia because our whole country is suffering from a mental crisis and can not see the forest through the trees.
Back in the day, who would have thunk that it would be grand for the US Government to try to rescind the enlightenment. I meet, many, many, too many MAGA flat-earthers. A collective mental and moral breakdown led by the moron-in-chief.
I just saw something by James Greenberg suggesting that the funders of Project 2025 are also underwriting an Article V Convention which could legally rewrite the US Constitution.
https://jamesbgreenberg.substack.com/p/the-quiet-path-to-a-new-constitution?utm_source=substack&publication_id=4042477&post_id=170950297&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=riq9&triedRedirect=true
If true, this could explain a lot of the wrecking ball approach. IF the object is to break stuff at random to condition voters that the system that worked should be replaced (by something the authors of Project 2025 designed as the END GOAL of the Trump debacle.
An Article V is very difficult to bring off. It does an end run around Congress allowing a 2/3 majority of the states to override the federal system to reform the federal system. But this is worth watching.
Conservatives have wanted to do this, like forever. I've read about this for a long time.
Their current wrecking ball will both 1) raise this idea in the public mind and 2) turn the public against the conservatives who are pushing for it, once the public discovers who's behind it.
That said, once the Ds regain power, the idea might gain currency among Democrats, IF we have significant say in the agenda and process.
Reforms will range from easy to hard:
1) expand the Supreme Court and enforce ethics laws (only takes Congress),
2) pass Constitutional amendments correcting various flaws that emerged from the Trump 2.0 stress test,
3) a wholesale Article V Constitutional Convention, that's never been done since the founding, and is fraught with peril.
Huh, I don't see direct evidence of 'mental decline' in that video clip. What I see is the same blithering poser that we've seen since Trump descended from 'heaven' on the Golden Escalator in 2016. If anything, he seems more coherent in this clip than any of the campaign speeches I forced myself to watch (though that's a low bar).
Sure, the clip shows many of Trump's standard tropes:
– Europe was ripping us off (skimping on NATO funding) and Trump fixed it.
– Everything is Biden's fault; everything 'he' did is wrong and bad.
– Everything Trump does/did is perfect.
– Everything is like a Real Estate transaction.
Buried in all that BS are some interesting tidbits that are very real:
– Ukraine is losing a lot of Infantry, and is having trouble drafting replacements.
– "This could have been a third World War".
– "Russia has to get back into building their country"
– "There will be some land-swapping…"
The word (phrase?) 'land-swapping' is a great example of Trump putting lipstick on the pig.
Russia will not give up ANY land from inside the [internationally recognized] boundaries of Russia. It will not give up Crimea, which it has considered to be part of Russia since 2014. It will not give up the Azov coastline, which it views as a strategic necessity (link to Crimea). Russia will not 'give up' any part of the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts, as it considers those part of Russia now. The same is true for at least the southern parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts (link to Crimea).
The wiggle room – the negotiable parts – are the parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts which Russia does not currently occupy. Just as Zelensky claims that the Ukrainian Constitution says he 'cannot' give up areas occupied by Russia, Putin 'cannot' give up (any part?) of those Oblasts, according to the Russian Constitution.
Of course, giving up something you don't have doesn't exactly count as 'swapping', but that's how Trump is selling it. This is classic Trump BS, but it's relatively good BS: it actually functions as fertilizer for nudging Ukraine and Russia (and USA/NATO) away from war and back toward economic cooperation (and/or competition).
IMO, that's far preferable to composting thousands more Ukrainian (and Russian) soldiers.
Trump was never very bright, but if you see videos of him from 15 or 20 years ago the difference is startling. He's definitely lost a lot of brain cells. And I think he is worse now than he was in his first term, although by then the decline had started.
I agree that Trump is in an 'obvious mental decline', I just don't see this video as strong evidence of it.
Well, I definitely do.
Yes, videos from 20 or more years ago show a different person. There are what appears to me, but I'm not a clinical psychologist, to be very clear indications of cognitive decline in his speech patterns.
He, also, does not seem to grasp the idea that the USA is a member of NATO.
To some extent though I agree with @elker. Trump was relatively coherent, for Trump. He did a telephone interview with a BBC reporter, perhaps two weeks ago and THAT was shocking.
I did not save the link but I think this is it. Donald Trump's exclusive BBC phone interview
I would love to see the Trump–Putin meeting. If you have seen Putin in meetings or at his hours–long yearly televised Q&A he is sharp, well-briefed, and decisive while generally polite and diplomatic.
Meeting with a "Rambling Wreak" like Trump is going to be painful.
Trump doesn't grasp what NATO is. He didn't grasp it in his first term, either. He's got it in his head that NATO is something like the old Mafia protection rackets, when businesses paid the local mob boss to not get robbed. In this case, Trump appears to think NATO countries pay the U.S. to protect them. In a lot of his ramblings he has complained that NATO is "ripping us off" when other alliance nations aren't spending as much of their GDP on their militaries as they are supposed to, per the NATO agreement. But this isn't taking any money away from the U.S. or forcing us to spend more on our own military, as he seems to think.
Trump doesn't grasp strategic alliances, period. He's complained that countries where there have been U.S. bases since World War II, like Japan, do not pay us to keep our troops there. And of course we keep troops there now mostly because it's useful for U.S. military operations in the Asian-Pacific region, near China and North Korea. It's a big benefit to the U.S. I understand the Japanese are way ambivalent about our being there.
I'm going with progressive deterioration of brain spurs making him unfit for public service. The diagnostic code for that is not yet available, as there is much politically induced pathology in the medical system with the rampant RFK jr. syndrome still out of control.
DC is challenging the takeover of the Metro Police.
D.C. attorney general sues over Trump's 'hostile takeover' of local police
It now has a name. California's response to Texas, The Election Rigging Response Act