Bouie: Trump is incomprehensible, but there's a message there

By Jamelle Bouie / The New York Times

You must keep two things in mind if you hope to watch — and successfully parse — a Donald Trump speech, news conference, interview, social media post or debate.

First, the former president is incoherent. A rhetorical improviser of sorts, he now struggles to follow a train of thought from beginning to end. A vague and elliptical speaker, he jumps from subject to subject in a form of word association that is less a sophisticated “weave,” as he puts it, than it is what you might produce if you wrote a message using the predictive text feature of your smartphone. An always ignorant man now on the decline, he cannot form the kind of complex sentence you might find in a college term paper.

Consider his answer to a simple question about child care during a recent appearance before the Economic Club of New York:

“Well, I would do that. And we’re sitting down — you know, I was somebody — we had — Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka were so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, child care is child care. It’s — couldn’t — you know, it’s something — you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/bouie-trump-is-incomprehensible-but-theres-a-message-there/