"I am Ozymandias, king of several casinos and golf courses and a very classy mixed-use tower. Look on my works, ye mighty,
and despair."
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
That's a single sentence from a Donald Trump speech last July. Kevin Drum calls it
eerily Palinesque; I'd probably classify it as post-modern Limbaughian, myself, as the reflexive interruptions to lavish self-praise weave in and out of a central point that may or may not make any sense, but does not have to so long as it eats up the long minutes between commercial breaks. But there's a twinge of something else in there, as if Donald ate some of Bill O'Reilly's chyrons and is regurgitating them back up in short, chewed phrases?
Ah well, I suppose it doesn't really matter. To sum up: 1) Donald Trump is smart. 2) Nuclear is powerful. 3) Persians are great negotiators.