You must keep two things in mind if you hope to watch — and successfully parse — a Donald Trump speech, news conference, interview, social media post or debate.
First, the former president is incoherent. A rhetorical improviser of sorts, he now struggles to follow a train of thought from beginning to end. A vague and elliptical speaker, he jumps from subject to subject in a form of word association that is less a sophisticated “weave,” as he puts it, than it is what you might produce if you wrote a message using the predictive text feature of your smartphone. An always ignorant man now on the decline, he cannot form the kind of complex sentence you might find in a college term paper.
Consider his answer to a simple question about child care during a recent appearance before the Economic Club of New York.
“Well, I would do that. And we’re sitting down — you know, I was somebody — we had — Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka were so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, child care is child care. It’s — couldn’t — you know, 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 they send product into our country.”
If there was anything of substance in this jumble of half-thoughts and unfinished sentences, it is suffocated under a heavy fog of thick gibberish.
The rest of the answer wasn’t much better, in that it demonstrated the former president’s almost total ignorance of his own policy platform, such as it is. Trump insists that his tariffs, if passed into law, would raise trillions of dollars with which the federal government could subsidize child care. In reality, according to the Tax Policy Center, the worldwide 10% tariff and 60% tariff on Chinese goods proposed by the former president would effectively raise the price of most goods, raise taxes on most households, slow economic growth and reduce both corporate and individual tax revenues.
This brings us to the second thing you must keep in mind if you want to understand Trump. He may rant and he may rave, but his rantings and ravings aren’t static; they carry meaning, even if the signal is hard to find in the noise. If the former president communicated anything in that Economic Club speech, it is that he was serious about pursuing tariffs if given a second term in the White House. More than that, Trump was telling his supporters that he’ll build the nation’s economy with a mercantilist plan to take the wealth of the world, especially that of China, and give it to the United States.
On Saturday, after a rally in Wisconsin in which he promised that his mass deportations would be “bloody,” Trump threatened to jail his political opponents, including Democratic donors, political operatives, “illegal voters” and election officials. “The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long-term prison sentences,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior,” he continued, “will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Trump took to Truth Social again on Sunday to warn his followers of a flood of “fraudulent” mail ballots in Pennsylvania. “We will WIN Pennsylvania by a lot, unless the Dems are allowed to CHEAT. THE RNC MUST ACTIVATE, NOW!!!”
Everything Trump said in both posts is a lie. There was no fraud or, as he declared, “skulduggery” in the 2020 election. Trump lost in a free, fair and secure election against an opponent who got the better of him, nothing more and nothing less. Nor is there a mass of fraudulent mail ballots in Pennsylvania, for the simple reason that voters haven’t even begun to return their votes to authorities. These Truth Social missives may not be unintelligible but, as per our first rule of Trump translation, they are nonsense.
And yet, as per our second rule, these posts are still full of meaning. Trump, in his usual, deranged way, is elaborating on one of the key promises of his campaign: retribution against his political enemies. Elect Trump in November, and he will try to use the power of the federal government to threaten, harass and even arrest his opponents. If his promise to deport more than 20 million people from the United State is his policy for rooting out supposedly “foreign” enemies in the body politic, then this promise to prosecute his opponents is his corresponding plan to handle the nation’s domestic foes, as he sees them. Or, as he said last year in New Hampshire, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Notwithstanding the cynicism of much of the public (and much of the press, for that matter), it is generally true that presidential promises translate into presidential actions. And for the past nine years, it has been almost categorically true that the most reliable guide to Trump’s actions has been his own words. He wanted a Muslim ban; he tried a Muslim ban. He wanted to inflict pain on migrants and refugees; he inflicted pain on migrants and refugees. He said he would suspect and reject the results of any election he lost; he suspected and rejected the results of the election he lost.
Donald Trump is deteriorating. He is incoherent. He can barely articulate a view on most issues. But on the question of his political opponents, he’s clear. He will punish them if we give him the power to do so.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.