NBC News has been publishing clips of President Donald Trump's pre-recorded Super Bowl interview, and each clip has brought its own unique problems for the administration.
The latest example is Trump's story about the classified military operation in Venezuela.
At the end of January, Trump began bragging about a "device" he said the military has called the "discombobulator." For the Super Bowl interview, he did it again, only this time, before speaking about it, he prefaced his statements by saying that he is "not allowed to talk about it."
"Let me just tell you, you know, what it does? None of their equipment works ... Everything was discombobulated. We lost no men, and we lost no equipment," Trump told Tom Llamas.
He bragged that he was the one who came up with the name for the equipment, which doesn't exist.
As was reported last month, there is no such thing as a "discombobulator."
In a report Sunday, CNN cited a senior U.S. official who claimed Trump "may be conflating several capabilities into a single weapon that doesn’t exist."
A "discombobulator" is not a standard or officially recognized military weapon or device. The term doesn't appear in military equipment databases, Department of Defense documentation or official weapons systems nomenclature, the report said at the time.
The word itself is slang, meaning to confuse or perplex someone, and it has occasionally been used colloquially or humorously to describe various non-lethal devices or tactics intended to disorient targets. However, there is no formal military equipment known by this name.
“The discombobulator, I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Trump said, but added that it “made [enemy] equipment not work” during the capture of Venezuelan politician Nicolás Maduro.
After the clip was released, the White House's hype team account on X promoted his comments. Trump's Truth Social team then used the transcript to post the video a second time, less than 60 seconds later.
Even "The Daily Show" keeps mocking Trump over it.
