Here is an interaction with the president of the United States that I cannot hope to fully understand. Following an Oval Office event this afternoon to swear in Gene Scalia, the new secretary of Labor, Donald Trump briefly took questions from the press.
The first question: “Do you now know who the whistleblower is, sir?”
Trump’s answer starts off relatively normally, but then things then take a turn, leading into one of perhaps the most word salad answers I have heard Trump give in some time, which is a pretty high bar. Watch this and try to follow along.
The first part of the answer—“Well we’re trying to find out about a whistleblower”—does not look great!
And that’s about the last coherent point that Trump gets across. Where did you lose the plot? For me it was somewhere around “I guess statement you could say with CALL. I made a call. The call was PERFECT.”
He touches on several coherent topics and you can see thoughts forming, sort of: Ukraine’s president is a nice young man who is new to his job, Adam Schiff did a stupid parody, there are some conspiracy theories about Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election... but then he just says “thank you very much” and stops talking.
Then he just leaves! Wanders on out. There have been presidents as malevolent as Trump before, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find one as deeply weird and confused.