Trump’s Word Salads: Three Served Raw, without Editing

Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, only one candidate is showing signs of age and age-related dementia, even derangement. One increasingly self-evident sign is his “word salads”: meandering, almost incomprehensible speech, raw streams of consciousness with little or no logic or sense.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, the Washington Post kept track of his lies and misleading statements. There were 30,573 of them, according to the final tally. That tally appears to have had little impact on Trump’s voters.

Perhaps his cult has come to view him as an oracle and discounts the Post’s so-called “liberal bias.” But it’s hard to discount the word salads as anything other than signs of senile dementia, or in Tim Walz’ parlance, signs of being “weird.” Maybe the Post or some online pundit should collect them all, with video clips and verbatim transcripts, and make them available in single, ever-expanding online source.

In the meantime, I’ve collected a small sample of three in this post. It’s hard work, and I’m pretty sure I’ve just scratched the surface. Just by itself, Trump’s Economic Club rant took me well over a half hour to transcribe, as accurately as I could, from the video clip linked below.

The headings below are mine. If in quotes, they are the question to which the word salad is a response. If not in quotes, they are the general topic of discussion or my own title. Otherwise, except for my final “Comment,” they are the words of Trump himself, verbatim, as transcribed by me from the linked video clips. Read them and weep (The many ellipses represent odd pauses; nothing is omitted.):

Rant against Kamala Harris during rally at Potterville, MI, August 29, 2024 (watch the less-than-one-minute video, in the scrolled down video box, for the full, deranged emotional affect):

“She destroyed the city of San Francisco. It’s — and I own a big building there. It’s — no — I shouldn’t talk about this. But that’s OK. I don’t give a damn because that’s what I’m doing. [cheers from crowd] I should say it’s the finest city in the world — telling ‘Get the hell out of there’ — right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care. You know. I lost billions . . . billions of dollars. You know? Somebody here . . . ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two-three billion.’ They said, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nooobody [pause] . . . They always say . . . I don’t know if you know . . . [inaudible] Lincoln was horribly treated . . . Uhhh . . . Jefferson was pretty horribly . . . Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all . . . that he was treated worse than any other president. And, I said, ‘do that study again,’ because I think there’s nobody close [laughter from crowd] to Trump. I even got shot. And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”

The Hannibal Lecter rant [Scroll down for Newsmax clip], ostensibly on the subject of immigration:

“‘Silence of the Lamb’ [sic: the title of the movie is actually “Silence of the Lambs,” plural]. . . . Has anyone ever seen ‘The Silence of the Lamb’? The late, great Hannibal Lecter [a fictional killer and cannibal], is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. [slight laughter from crowd]. Remember the last thing? ‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner.’ And this poor doctor walks by, . . . ‘I’m about to have a friend for dinner,’ but Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations! The late, great Hannibal Lecter. . . . We have people . . . that are being released into our country, that we don’t want in our country . . . .”

Response to this question, posed at the Economic Club of New York on September 5, 2024: “If you win in November, do you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable and, if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

Here’s Trump’s answer:

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down here . . . . I was, uh, was Senator Marco . . . Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so . . . impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue . . . but, when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about . . . that . . . because . . . the child care . . . is child care. Couldn’t . . . uhh . . . 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 the send product into our country, and those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have . . . I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about, on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care.

I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth. . . . But growth also headed up by ‘what’s the plan’ is . . . uhh . . . that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars and, uh, as much as child care, uh, as talked about, is, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”

“We’re gonna make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. This is about ‘Make America Great Again.’ We have to do it. Because right now we’re a failing nation. [weak applause]”

My Comment. Few, if any, reporters get these rants down verbatim. I suppose that reporters don’t like excess verbiage, let alone when it doesn’t make sense.

But here the lack of sense is precisely the point, isn’t it? When reporters cut, digest or summarize the rants, what they publish makes sense out of nonsense. It shows Trump through a reality distortion field, not as he is.

For the guy who aspires to be the sole person authorized to start a nuclear war that would extinguish our species, aren’t rants “news” when they make no sense and scream “disordered thinking,” if not “derangement”? Shouldn’t they be shown full bore and transcribed for reading in their entirely, as I’ve laboriously done above?

The people who attend Trump’s rallies and laugh or cheer at everything he says are probably beyond reason. But don’t the rest of the voters—especially those still trying to make up their minds—deserve to see Trump as he is?

Don’t they silently beg to read his “speeches” as given, without editing or “prettying up”? When reporters make logic and sense by picking the few sentences that seem to say something out of a minutes-long brain fart, aren’t they effectively, if unwittingly, serving as part of Trump’s campaign team? Aren’t they therefore complicit in the possible near-term destruction of our Republic? Inquiring minds want to know . . .


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