"This is how we live now"

Хорошая статья Matthew Yglesias -- "Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying". Я процитирую пару кусков полностью.

It’s not exactly a news flash at this point that Donald Trump isn’t very fluent on questions of public policy, but his interview over the weekend with Fox Business Channel’s Maria Bartiromo is really a sobering reminder of the levels of ignorance and dishonesty that the country is dealing with.

Bartiromo is an extraordinarily soft interviewer who doesn’t ask Trump any difficult questions or press him on any subject. That makes the extent to which he manages to flub the interview all the more striking. He’s simply incapable of discussing any topic at any length in anything remotely resembling an informed or coherent way. He says the Federal Reserve is “important psychotically” and it’s part of one of his better answers, since one can at least tell that he meant to say “psychologically.”

By contrast, it’s often hard to make any sense at all of Trump’s words. Asked whether he plans to tie an infrastructure plan to his tax plan, Trump says, “I was thinking about tying it, but there’s too many honestly.” Too many what? He then continues: “You lose a few votes, you gain a few votes. I don’t want to take any chances ’cause I feel we have the votes right now the way it is.” There is, of course, no tax bill at the moment, so there’s no way Trump has the votes for it.

It’s a funny interview in many ways. Along with being comically ignorant, Trump for some reason keeps referring to Chief of Staff John Kelly as “elegant.” But the prospect of a president of the United States who’s incapable of talking about any of the many issues he oversees in a reasonable way is also pretty scary.

Кусок из интервью Трампа:

Another signature quality of the interview is that since Trump is actually totally incapable of answering softball questions, Bartiromo has to try to lead him by the nose to delivering on-message propaganda. Trump, however, is not that cooperative with this agenda.

Cutting taxes on the rich, for example, is unpopular. So the White House’s plan to get tax cuts on the rich passed is to lie about it and pretend they’re actually proposing a big middle-class tax cut. Bartiromo tries to get Trump to say that, but he keeps getting distracted by his desire to tell a name-dropping story about the owner of the New England Patriots:

BARTIROMO: If the top earners pay 80 percent of the taxes, why are you so afraid to cut taxes on the top earners?

TRUMP: I think this, look, you know, I am very happy with the way I’ve done part of this in my civilian life, all right.

BARTIROMO: Of course. This is not about —

TRUMP: Other people — well, it’s about me representing rich people.

BARTIROMO: Okay.

TRUMP: Representing — being representative of rich people. Very interesting to me Bob Kraft was down. He was very nice. He owns the Patriots. He gave me a Super Bowl ring a month ago. And he —

BARTIROMO: Well, Putin took his —

TRUMP: Which was very nice. That’s right. But he left this beautiful ring, and I immediately give it to the White House and they put it some place, and that’s the way it is.

BARTIROMO: That’s great.

TRUMP: He said to me — he’s a good man. He said to me you have to do us all a favor, give the tax decrease to the middle class, we don’t need it. We don’t need it. We don’t want it. Give it to the middle class. And, I’ve had many people, very wealthy people, tell me the very same thing. I’ve had very few say I want more, I want more.

И заключение:

This is how we live now

Over the course of the interview, Trump also claims to be working on a major infrastructure bill, a major welfare reform bill, and an unspecified economic development bill of some kind.

Under almost any other past president, that kind of thing would be considered a huge news-making get for an interviewer. But even Fox didn’t tout Bartiromo’s big scoops on Trump’s legislative agenda, because 10 months into the Trump presidency, nobody is so foolish as to believe that him saying, “We’re doing a big infrastructure bill,” means that the Trump administration is, in fact, doing a big infrastructure bill. The president just mouths off at turns ignorantly and dishonestly, and nobody pays much attention to it unless he says something unusually inflammatory.

On some level, it’s a little bit funny. On another level, Puerto Rico is still languishing in the dark without power (and in many cases without safe drinking water) with no end in sight. Trump is less popular at this point in his administration than any previous president despite a generally benign economic climate, and shows no sign of changing course.

Perhaps it will all work out for the best, and someday we’ll look back and chuckle about the time when we had a president who didn’t know anything about anything that was happening and could never be counted on to make coherent, factual statements on any subject. But traditionally, we haven’t elected presidents like that — for what have always seemed like pretty good reasons — and the risks of compounding disaster are still very much out there.