Donald Trump has never been what you’d call eloquent. An orator, he is not. And yet, the former president seems to be getting even more incoherent by the day, as his latest “press conference” underscored Thursday.
Speaking to reporters at his Bedminister country club in New Jersey, Trump stood before a display of groceries—coffee, cereal, milk—for what was billed as a presser on the economy, one of those “issues” his allies and advisers wish he’d spend more time talking about. What everyone got instead was a series of rants on subjects ranging from his anger at Kamala Harris calling him and JD Vance “weird” to the “bird cemeteries” under windmills to his math-defying contention that “beyond…100 percent” of job creation under Joe Biden in the past year has “gone to migrants.”
“It’s a much higher number than that,” Trump said, “but the government has not caught up with that yet.”
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“I haven’t seen Cheerios in a long time,” he remarked at another point, saying he wanted to “take some of them back to [his] cottage and have a lot of fun.”
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What, exactly, does that mean, you might ask? Well, what does any of this mean? Trump isn’t just inarticulate, trying in vain to express his thoughts and emotions with a vocabulary that seems limited to “beautiful,” “perfect,” and maybe thirty other words. He’s now riffing on riffs, becoming so self-referential and so discursive that you need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find your way back to the original thought. Take Trump’s latest addition to his repertoire about Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal of page and screen portrayed by Anthony Hopkins: “He’d love to have you for dinner,” the former president said during a rant on immigration during his Republican National Convention speech last month. “That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums.”
Is he confusing migrants seeking asylum with psychiatric hospitals—of the kind that the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” might be held in? Probably. Does that make sense of it? Not really! To his supporters, understanding the bit—or at least recognizing it—reminds them that they’re part of the MAGA in-crowd. But to anyone else, tangents about Hannibal Lecter or a montage of him dancing to the YMCA—which played every night of his convention, and which the Republicans in attendance couldn’t seem to get enough of—are surely incomprehensible.
Or are, as Harris puts it, deeply “weird.” Indeed, her campaign pounced on Trump’s “whatever that was,” releasing a statement mocking his “lies and delusions” and pumping out clips of his ravings at Bedminster, where he made more headlines later Thursday as he suggested the Presidential Medal of Freedom medal he bestowed on donor Miriam Adelson was “better” than the Medal of Honor given for valor in combat because those recipients are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.” Trump clearly hopes that by getting cameras on himself as much as possible, he can steal back the momentum he’s lost to Harris over the last month. Instead, he’s helping make the case against his own return to power, one bizarre tirade at a time. “I think we’ve done very well,” Trump said at Bedminster on Thursday. “Some of you will say, ‘He ranted and raved!’ I didn’t rant and rave,” he added. “I’m a very calm person, believe it or not.”