Warning: Readers who already looked at portions of Donald Trump’s The Economist interview may have reached or exceeded their gibberish exposure level for the day. If that’s the case … oh, read this anyway. It’s too late for all of us.
What follows are 100 percent real excerpts from Donald Trump’s conversation with Time magazine reporters Nancy Gibbs, Michael Sherer, and Zeke Miller on the subject of “what it means to be president.”
Trump: I find the job very natural for me. I find–it’s a very big job obviously, there’s no job big like this. No job is important like this. But I think some of the–I just think it’s something that works for me, it feels very natural to me.
And all I said, the job, it is, it’s a difficult job but it’s a job that I find to be–I love doing it. I love helping people. Mike [Pence] is doing a fantastic job. He fits it so well. I mean we have a great team, he and I guess, they say we’re somewhat opposite and that works to be a very good combination.
That’s Trump’s first response. Again: This is real. It may seem like the kind of response you would get by listening to a Chatty Cathy filtered through a fan. But no.
Trump: They said the F-35 program is now straightened out and the costs are way down. They’re down because of me. Then Boeing when the F-18, I mean I must have got thirty-five million of each plane off. . . . You know they had the F-35s, they had thirty-five of them fly over Japan when [Defense Secretary] General [James] Mattis was there, and they were not detected by the radar. They flew over and everyone said where the hell did they come from? That’s stealth. It’s pretty cool, right. Thirty-five of them flying at a high speed, low, and they were not detected. They flew right over the top of the deal, nobody knew they were coming. Pretty cool, right?
Absolutely cool. There is nothing an ally likes better than being surprised by 35 planes, each of which packs two 1,000 pound bombs.
And no one can say that Donald Trump isn’t afraid to get down to the details—and completely get Every. Last. One. Wrong.
Trump: You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, "Ah, how is it working?" "Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air."
It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said–and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be–"Sir, we’re staying with digital." I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.
Donald Trump believes that modern aircraft carriers toss planes forward using … digital.
Honestly, there is no way to abbreviate this interview. No summary or snippet can do justice to the magnificent desolation, the towering cliffs of insanity, the mountainous madness, the baleful mounds of gibbering, ichorous, tentacular mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn ngphlegeth n'gha stell'bsna n'ghft, ehye, eyhe, ya uh Cth ….
Umm. That is … go read the whole thing. But here’s one last glimpse of what lies ahead …
Trump: You know what’s interesting, I’m getting very good marks in foreign policy. People would not think of me in that light. I’m just saying, and you read the same things I read. I’m getting As and A+s on foreign policy. And nobody thought about it.
On whose grade card? On whose grade card?