This story originally appeared in Vox.com Nov. 15, 2018
https://www.vox.com/2018/11/15/18096700/donald-trump-daily-caller-interview

Trump’s latest interview shows a president who’s in way over his head

He has no idea what he’s doing, but what else is new?

By Matthew Yglesias | @mattyglesias | Nov 15, 2018, 1:10pm EST

In some ways, the friendliest Donald Trump interviews are the most revealing. Given the opportunity to ramble and free-associate without any pushback whatsoever, you can see what channels his mind naturally follows.

His latest interview with the Daily Caller shows a president who’s fundamentally out to sea. The sycophantic interviewers can’t get Trump to answer a policy question of any kind, no matter how much of a softball they lob at him. The only subjects he is actually interested in talking about are his deranged belief in his incredible popularity and how that popularity is not reflected in actual vote totals because he’s the victim of a vast voter fraud conspiracy.

It’s the kind of thing that would be a bit sad if it were just your elderly uncle ranting about his past glories, but Trump mixes it in with authoritarian asides and the fundamental reality that whether he cares to do the actual job or not, he is ultimately the president of the United States.

Trump slips on Whitaker and Mueller

An extremely telling moment comes early in the interview when the Caller asks him a basic question: “Could you tell us where your thinking is currently on the attorney general position? I know you’re happy with Matthew Whitaker, do you have any names?”

They are hoping here that Trump will say something about potential candidates for a permanent appointment to the AG job. And there is nothing in this question about special counsel Robert Mueller or the presumption that Whitaker was brought in to stymie his investigation. But Trump starts answering a question he hasn’t been asked, explaining that the Mueller inquiry is for some reason an “illegal investigation”:

TRUMP: Matthew Whitaker is a very respected man. He’s — and he’s, very importantly, he’s respected within DOJ. I heard he got a very good decision, I haven’t seen it. Kellyanne, did I hear that?

WHITE HOUSE ADVISER KELLYANNE CONWAY: 20 pages.

TRUMP: A 20 page?

THE DAILY CALLER: It just came out right before this, sir.

TRUMP: Well, I heard it was a very strong opinion. Uh, which is good. But [Whitaker] is just somebody who’s very respected.

I knew him only as he pertained, you know, as he was with Jeff Sessions. And, um, you know, look, as far as I’m concerned this is an investigation that should have never been brought. It should have never been had.

It’s something that should have never been brought. It’s an illegal investigation. And you know, it’s very interesting because when you talk about not Senate-confirmed, well, Mueller’s not Senate-confirmed.

THE DAILY CALLER: Right.

TRUMP: He’s heading this whole big thing, he’s not Senate-confirmed.

This is a complete non sequitur. The issue with Whitaker is whether a person who holds a DOJ job that isn’t Senate-confirmed can serve as acting attorney general. Nobody is suggesting that Mueller should serve as acting attorney general, so the fact that he isn’t Senate-confirmed has no relevance to anything. Though the sheer quantity of untrue things Trump says is so large that to be merely irrelevant is almost refreshing.

Trump tells weird lies about polls

A certain amount of dissembling has been a part of politics for thousands of years, but Trump is relentlessly dishonest in a very odd way.

In the midst of a rambling diatribe about CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, Trump engages in a lot of name-calling about major television networks and makes some wild misstatements about polling:

So, I think he’s very disrespectful to the media, I think he’s very disrespectful to the office, and I think he’s bad for the public. You know, when I say that the fake news is the enemy of the people, it really is. A lot of the animosity that we have in our country is because of fake news. They’re so angry at the news. They get it. You guys are at my rallies all the time, you see the anger when I mention the words “fake news” and they turn around. And they use CNN because they — it just sort of works for them, I guess.

But it’s ABC, it’s — NBC is maybe worse than anybody. I mean, NBC’s a total fraud as far as I’m concerned. Their news is disgusting. But I think NBC is as bad as anybody. You look at — and CBS — you look at what’s going on with the fake news and the people get it.

Now they get it, and you know they had a very high approval rating before I became president, and I think it’s actually a great achievement of mine. Their approval rating now is down as low as just about anybody. And much lower than your president. I actually have good approval ratings, which nobody ever writes. I was at 51, I guess, with Rasmussen the other day.

Rasmussen last had Trump at 51 percent approval back on November 2, and his numbers have gone down since then. In FiveThirtyEight’s broader polling average, he’s at 42 percent, which is literally worse than any other president on record in the history of polling. Meanwhile, a July Mediapost survey showed that CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS are all more trusted than Trump, and Poynter’s surveys show that confidence in the media is rising during Trump’s time in office as part of a backlash to his anti-journalism rhetoric.

The Caller staffers, of course, don’t push back on any of this nonsense and are in fact so in the tank for Trump that he winds up needing to push back against them and observe that Acosta’s behavior in the briefing room isn’t actually as unusual as they think. This broadly follows a template that ABC’s Sam Donaldson set decades ago:

THE DAILY CALLER: Which is an important follow-up question, why this administration? This doesn’t seem to be the norm — it certainly wasn’t the norm in previous administrations — that reporters behave in this capacity.

TRUMP: Well, I think they behaved badly. I remember Sam Donaldson was terrible at two presidents, and, you know, we tend to forget. I think that now it’s become, with cable television playing such a role, although, you know, cable television was supposed to be a dying medium. And because of me, it’s now hotter than it’s ever been. But someday I won’t be here and it will die like you’ve never seen.

Trump rants on and on for a while about how good his presence in politics is for the media business (this is true, though of course it undercuts his argument that the media is trying to undermine him), while the Caller flails around trying to get him to talk about something important.

Trump is utterly unable to discuss policy

A unique aspect of Trump as a politician is that he can’t talk about the substance of any policy issue in a remotely coherent way. Tough interviews can sometimes obscure exactly how bad he is at this because they become combative. But here is he grappling with a softball:

THE DAILY CALLER: Sir, I do want to turn to policy.

TRUMP: That’s why I always joke when I say they’ll all be endorsing me. ’Cause I don’t know what happens to their business after I’m gone.

THE DAILY CALLER: Sir, right now, in 2010 we saw several pieces of major legislation passed in a lame-duck Congress. What can we expect your and the Republican agenda to be in this Congress? Is it going to be an immigration fix? What about criminal justice reform? What are the two to three things you’re looking at?

TRUMP: We’re working on many things. Criminal justice reform we’re working on very hard. We have a meeting today, did you know about that? We have a meeting today.

THE DAILY CALLER: We heard about that.

TRUMP: Get these two in, all right? I think we have a chance at that. We should be able to fix health care. We should be able —

THE DAILY CALLER: Just one second, sir, on that criminal justice bill. Is that the Jared Kushner-backed bill that you want to focus on?

TRUMP: The answer is I’m looking at it very closely, okay? I am. It’s a good thing. You know, Texas is backing it, if you look at Mississippi and Georgia and a lot of other places, they believe in it, those governors, and they’re conservative people. Rick Perry’s a big fan.

You know, a lot of people are backing it. Look at the people that are backing it. Even, you know, like Mike Lee, he votes against a lot of things and we respect Mike and Mike is backing it. We have a lot of people that are backing this.

If you haven’t been following this issue, you might be curious as to what the content of the bill Trump is backing is. What does it do? How will it impact your life and your community? Trump has nothing to say about this, nor does he seem up to speed on what the actual state of play in Congress is. He just knows he has a meeting and also that his energy secretary likes the bill and that Utah Sen. Mike Lee “votes against a lot of things.”

Of course, nobody in politics is an expert on everything that crosses his desk, but when Trump gets a question on his signature issue of immigration, he starts ranting about Mueller again:

THE DAILY CALLER: What about immigration, sir? Are you willing to shut down the government if you don’t get a certain set of policies?

TRUMP: I may be. I may be. I’ll have to see how it plays out. But I may very well be willing to shut down the government.

I think it’s horrible what’s happening and, you know, building the wall, it’s in smaller stages, we can build it very quickly. I’m building the wall in smaller stages and we moved the military there, we put up barbed wire, we did all sorts of things. You have to have a barrier. You have to have a barrier.

Look, we have a chance of, they can do presidential harassment, put very simply, and I’ll be very good at handling that, and I think I’ll be better than anybody in the history of this office. And in a certain way, I look forward to it because I actually think it’s good for me politically, because everyone knows it’s pure harassment. Just like the witch hunt, the Mueller witch hunt. It’s pure harassment. It’s horrible. It’s horrible that they’re allowed to get away with it.

Again, not Senate-confirmed but, you know. You have 17 people, half of them worked for Hillary Clinton, some on the foundation. The Hillary Clinton Foundation. I mean, you think of it.

Where Trump does have detailed, albeit entirely made-up, beliefs is on the subject of voter fraud — a phenomenon he claims to believe is widespread despite all evidence to the contrary.

Trump tells a lot of lies about voter fraud

At the intersection of the Caller’s sloppy, dishonest journalism and Trump’s egomania and disdain for the truth, you get a long dialogue in which Trump makes a range of false assertions about voter fraud, egged on by his interviewers.

One part of this starts with Trump asserting that Republicans lose elections in California because of “illegals voting” and ends with him saying you need to show ID to buy breakfast cereal:

This is a problem in California that’s so bad of illegals voting. This is a California problem, and if you notice, almost every race — I was watching today — out of, like, 11 races that are in question, they’re gonna win all of them.

The Republicans don’t win, and that’s because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I’ve been saying for a long time. I have no doubt about it. And I’ve seen it, I’ve had friends talk about it when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.

The disgrace is that, voter ID. If you buy, you know, a box of cereal, if you do anything, you have a voter ID.

Trump is presumably rich enough that he hasn’t actually done his own grocery shopping in a long time and maybe thinks what he’s saying about cereal is true. But the next thing he says about Massachusetts residents crossing over to vote illegally in New Hampshire and then staying in New Hampshire is so incoherent, it’s a bit hard to know what he’s even trying to say:

If you look at what happened in New Hampshire, where thousands of people came up and voted from a very liberal part of Massachusetts and they came up in buses and they voted. I said, “What’s going on over here”; my people said, “You won New Hampshire easily except they have tremendous numbers of buses coming up.” They’re pouring up by the hundreds, buses of people getting out, voting. Then they’re supposed to go back within 90 days. And of the people that are supposed to go back, almost none of them do.

In other words, they go back after the vote is over. They go back — and I think it’s like 3 percent — I mean, almost nobody goes back to show that, you know, that they were allowed to vote. And so what do you do? Recall the election. Recall the election. I mean, there, you should be able to recall the election.

Having previously lived in Massachusetts, I can tell you that one thing that happens during election season is that lots of liberals take buses to New Hampshire to volunteer as canvassers and phone bankers, which is obviously not illegal. You can’t come up from Massachusetts and vote in New Hampshire because, obviously, you need to live in New Hampshire to register there. What’s more, New Hampshire already has the kind of voter ID law that Trump says would stop the fraud he claims to believe is happening.

Later, Trump and Conway team up to get confused about time zones:

TRUMP: Had I not been winning Florida by more than they could — I mean, you can’t produce — if you have a million people, you can’t give 1,200,000 votes, okay? So actually, what happened is they went with fairly accurate numbers because whether I won by 10 votes or by half a million votes, it didn’t matter.

But I had, fortunately, enough votes, and they were sitting there waiting. They said, “Broward County is not reporting.” This went on for hours.

CONWAY: The Panhandle came in an hour later.

TRUMP: Well, the Panhandle was so devastating to Crooked Hillary, that, frankly, it didn’t make any difference, okay? Because the Panhandle was so — it was, like, 98 percent. That thing came in, then all of a sudden Broward came in. And I won by, you know, I won by a lot of votes. I call it four Yankee Stadiums.

Polls close an hour later in the Panhandle than in the rest of Florida because it is farther to the west and in a different time zone from the rest of the state. There’s no big mystery here.

The various forms of dissembling about vote fraud, however, at least have a clear tactical purpose. Trump later offers some backward-looking misinformation about 2018 that serves no obvious function whatsoever.

Trump can’t count or remember what campaign events he did

Asked, “What’s your takeaway from the 2018 election and what do you think that means for the 2020 election for you?” the president can’t even muster a brief acknowledgment that a large majority of Americans voted to put a check on his power.

Instead, he says “we picked up three or four Senate seats depending on how it all goes,” when the right number is two. He also says they “almost picked up Arizona,” when in fact they previously held Arizona and then Trump personally drove Jeff Flake out of office, which let Democrats pick up the seat.

He says that “in the history of politics, nobody’s ever gotten crowds like that or close because you were in those stadiums and those arenas, but outside you had many more times — you know, in Houston we had 109,000 people sign up for 22,000 seats.” In fact, a Beto O’Rourke rally in Texas had almost twice that attendance. He bizarrely says Ted Cruz is an example of a politician who “wouldn’t have won without my helping them,” as if a Republican incumbent getting reelected in Texas is a huge political triumph.

Last but by no means least, he says “the only congressman I went for was Andy Barr,” which I think is supposed to be a boast because Barr won his race. But Trump actually rallied for lots of House Republicans who were running in red states, and while some of them lost, plenty won, so it’s not clear what Trump’s motive would be in forgetting about this. Note also that it would be total political malpractice for Trump to have just forgotten to try to help House Republicans, and despite the impression he sometimes gives, Trump is not nearly stupid enough to do that.

Indeed, a few minutes later, Trump has changed his story on this:

I mean, the truth is, every place I went, we either won or did well or did really well. If I didn’t go, if I didn’t do those stops — I did 31 stops in 30 days or something like that. If I didn’t do those stops, I think we would’ve lost 10 Senate seats, seven to 10 Senate seats, and we would’ve lost 60 to 70 House seats or more.

By doing the stops, then again, a lot of times I’d have the congressmen in the room, so they wouldn’t be the prime focus, but I’d get up and I’d be able to talk about them for a couple of minutes apiece, right?

Note that there were only nine GOP-held seats up for election, so it would have been literally impossible for Democrats to gain 10 seats.

The two faces of Trump peril

As David Brooks tries to reassure us that Trump is too inept to be a scary authoritarian, the Caller review is a reminder that it’s really a both/and situation.

There’s no clear line between Trump’s dishonesty and his sincere lack of information, or between his tendency to engage in vain but pointless boasting and his alarming efforts to overturn legitimate election results.

The main throughline is that even though Trump makes no sense, tramples on basic values routinely, and has no grasp of the actual substance of his job, he does have a large, well-financed, and fairly relentless conservative propaganda apparatus at his back that tries to obscure his failings from their audience while trusting that keeping him in power is broadly beneficial for the goals of the conservative movement — even if he is only dimly aware of what those goals are.

So we’re left with a president who is both relatively likely to blunder us into some catastrophe and likely to respond to catastrophe in inappropriate or illegal ways.