Last night, through a thick whiskey and opium haze, the Rude Pundit's bedtime reading was the full transcript of Republican presidential candidate, and man most likely to challenge you to a thumb war, Donald Trump's interview with the editorial board of the Washington Post (motto: "No, really, people want to read what Joe Scarborough has to say about shit"). He was alternately appalled and amused by the rambling, incoherent series of non-statements, bullshit, braggadocio, and ego that passed for "answers" to the questions. How can you not laugh when a buffoon who wants to be president seems to think that good foreign policy has to do with surprising people, saying, "President Obama, when he left Iraq, gave a specific date – we’re going to be out. I thought that was a terrible thing to do," as if no one would notice tens of thousands of troops packing up?
And then he awoke this morning, and Brussels had been attacked by fucking savage assholes so deluded by religion and hatred (towards them and against others) that they blew themselves up in crowded spaces. And the fact that Donald Trump is going to be a nominee of his party, with a sizable chunk of Republicans saying that they will support him in a general election-- 82% said they support him enthusiastically, with reservations, and only because he'd be the party's nominee-- isn't funny. It's fucking frightening. At this point, Trump has revealed himself to be so stupid that he makes George W. Bush look like a fucking sage.
Asked about how he would deal with ISIS, which murdered people in Belgium today and Turkey last week, and whether he would use nuclear weapons to prevent a ground war, Trump responded that he would handle them like he did his political opponents: "I don’t want to use, I don’t want to start the process of nuclear. Remember the one thing that everybody has said, I’m a counterpuncher. Rubio hit me. Bush hit me. When I said low energy, he’s a low-energy individual, he hit me first. I spent, by the way he spent 18 million dollars’ worth of negative ads on me." The problem with being a counterpuncher, of course, is that the first punch might knock you out.
And then, after telling them how good looking they all are, Trump actually told a group of journalists, sitting in a newsroom in Washington, D.C., "We lost the World Trade Center, we lost the Pentag – you know, we had a plane go into the Pentagon, etc." Yes, you micro-fisted twat mite, they're aware that a plane went into the Pentagon.
The last question to Trump was about climate change. He outright denied it exists due to human causes and said, "The biggest risk to the world, to me – I know President Obama thought it was climate change – to me the biggest risk is nuclear weapons. That’s – that is climate change. That is a disaster, and we don’t even know where the nuclear weapons are right now. We don’t know who has them. We don’t know who’s trying to get them. The biggest risk for this world and this country is nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons." That's someone who is living in the 1970s, which seems about right for a man who called a female reporter "Beautiful." Yeah, suitcase nukes are scary, especially if you get most of your foreign policy from TV shows. Hopefully, people won't be able to swim with them to the Capitol when DC is underwater.
The rest of the interview was just like a Trump speech. It was a high-wire stream of consciousness that stupid people will take to be down-to-earth and meaningful. With a bunch of shit about his goddamned hands. Like it says above, 82% of Republicans said they will vote for him, even if they have to hold their noses. If that happens, Trump will still lose. But it means that a significant number of Americans don't give a fuck if a dumb, oblivious, deranged asshole is president.
That part is scarier than ISIS ever could hope to be.
