'Incomprehensible': Trump decimated for 'word salad on crucially important policy question'

11 March 2024

The Biden campaign blasted Donald Trump on Monday after a short clip of the ex-president’s remarks calling for cutting Social Security and Medicare received hundreds of thousands of views, but the full text of his remarks, which include at best inaccurate or misleading claims about inflation and the stock market are raising red flags. Some political and policy experts are saying Trump “has no idea what he’s talking about,” while others are calling them “basically incomprehensible,” a “word salad,” and “gibberish.”

This is the first part of the quote from Donald Trump, posted by NBC News’ Vaughn Hillyard, that is getting social media responses like the ones above, but it’s not even half of the “unofficial” CNBC transcript of Trump’s response to the question, “Have you changed your, your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President?”

TRUMP: “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak. And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is 50%. They say 32 and 33%. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50%, that means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50% more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy.”

“Lots of gibberish,” is how Jim Manley, the leadership aide and communications director to then Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, characterizedthe above quote.

“Trump spent 4 years in office and he still has no idea what he’s talking about, and he still can’t hold a single thought for more than 10 seconds,” observed The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, the international affairs expert and retired U.S. Naval War College professor.

MSNBC political analyst and Bloomberg Opinion Senior Executive Editor Tim O’Brien pointed to Trump’s claim we have “cumulative inflation of over 50%,” and wrote: “No, we don’t.”

University College London Associate Professor in Global Politics Brian Klass said: “This answer doesn’t make any sense. Word salad on a crucially important policy question. And yet this won’t get a big NYT headline or profile on how Trump is confused about how the government works and can’t string a coherent sentence together when asked about what he will do.”

Semafor Washington Bureau Chief Benjy Sarlin: “This is basically incomprehensible but that first line about cutting is going to end up in tons of ads if it’s at all coherent enough to clip.”

Award-winning journalist David S. Bernstein noted, “I cannot fathom a candidate for major federal office, at this stage of the campaign, not having a stock answer—even a transparently stupid one!—on Social Security and Medicare.”

Elizabeth Pancotti, Director, Special Initiatives at the Roosevelt Institute remarked, “we, uh, do not have a cumulative inflation of over 50%.”

Conservative U.S. economic policy analyst James Pethokoukis asked: “Does Trump have even a *very* rough idea of what how big, basic government programs work? How does he think Social Security is ‘managed?'”

“The worms are eating his brain,” said political columnist Dick Polman. “Trump on CNBC today, verbatim, discussing the inflation rate: ‘I believe that number is 50 percent. They say 32 and 33 percent. I believe we have cumulative inflationof over 50 percent.’ It’s 3.2 percent.”

Here is rest of Trump’s answer to that one question, unedited, via the CNBC transcript, which is part of the remarks above but was not posted to social media. It includes Trump’s claims about COVID, the economy, America’s energy independence, and more. Many of the remarks are disputable if not false. Nor do they include that Trump shut down the very agency that was designed to offer early warnings on pandemics months before COVID.

TRUMP: “When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil but we were going at a much higher level oil and gas. We were doing, you know, we were third when I started and when they ended we were one by a longshot and we were very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi Arabia and Russia were doing. And we were on that path. We were gonna be paying down debt. We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with Covid. I guess China found that out because they also really got hit very hard also, but nobody wins with Covid. And so we had to get to we had to do other things. We had to help."

"You know, if I didn’t do the expenditures that we didn’t do the kinds of things we did for the economy, we would add in 1929 type depression. And I had to say out in front of it, and we did we did a great job on that and we did with all of the things we’re coming up with Regeneron doing so much else, getting all because you know we had empty when I came in, we had empty, I call them empty cupboards. We had empty shelves, we didn’t have equipment, we didn’t have the gowns, we didn’t have the ventilators. We didn’t have anything."

"This country wasn’t prepared for a thing like that. And I’m not even blaming anybody in that. Because, you know, when when it came, nobody thought the pandemic would ever happen again. It sounds like an ancient’s problem, not a problem that you’d have you know at that time, you know, in modern, very modern age. It was like an ancient thing. We you know, who, who would ever show I’m not blaming anybody, but we had empty cupboards, and I got them stocked and I got them stocked fast. And we did a great job with it. Never got credit. I got credit for the greatest economy. I got credit for foreign policy. I got credit for knocking out ISIS and not going into wars. But we beat ISIS, but I never got the credit for having done a great job with that.”

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