Donald Trump made a big mistake this week and I don’t mean the desecration of the honored war dead at Arlington National Cemetery.
I’m talking about a mistake that’s so serious it could bring a lot of undesirable attention to a fatal flaw: his gibberish.
After two years of the press corps making a fetish of Joe Biden’s age, and what that meant in terms of his fitness to govern, the last thing Trump wants is for his gibberish to become the story of the election.
What was the mistake?
In an interview with NBC News, Trump was asked about abortion. Specifically, he was asked about his vote as a resident of Florida.
Florida law bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Voters there have a chance to overturn the law by approving a referendum that would enshrine abortion rights in Florida’s constitution. Other states have presented similar questions, including Republican-controlled states like Ohio. Voters there OK’d a ballot measure last November.
That was the question. Would he, as a resident of Florida, vote for or against the ballot measure? It was not about what he would do about abortion as president in the future. It was not about what he did about it in the past. It was about what he would do right now as a voter.
However, he didn’t seem to understand the question. Matter of fact, he didn’t seem to understand the difference between being a president and being a voter, between a state government and the federal government, or between a state’s law and a state’s constitution.
It all seemed to blend together to result in an answer that requires the rest of us to interpret his position on abortion – a very bad place to be for a Republican presidential candidate who’s already on the defensive.
He’s walking a line on abortion.
Now he’s added another.
The line between coherence and incoherence.
NBC News reporter: “You overturned Roe. You want abortion to be a state’s rights issue. In Florida, the state that you are a resident of, there’s an abortion-related amendment on the ballot to overturn the six-week ban in Florida. How are you going to vote on that?”Trump: “I think the six weeks is too short. There has to be more time. I told them that I want more weeks.”
NBC News reporter: “So you will vote in favor of the amendment.”
Trump: “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.”
Again, just to be clear, that’s not the question.
And that’s not the question, because that’s not the choice.
The choice in Florida is not whether to expand the number of weeks in the existing ban. It’s whether to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. An amendment would ultimately overturn the existing ban and any future ban, no matter how long they might be.
Trump’s answer is incoherent, and it’s incoherent, because it makes no sense to say “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks” when that’s not what residents are being asked to decide.
And again, that’s bad for a Republican presidential candidate who’s already facing pressure on all sides, from swing voters who want Roe restored to rightwing voters who want a national ban on abortion.
He needed to be precise. He should have said he opposes the ballot measure. That would have been consistent with his stated belief that abortion is a matter of state’s rights. At the very least, he should have avoided the slightest suggestion that abortion is a constitutional right.
But instead of speaking precisely, he spoke gibberish.
The result was news highlighting the fact that he said six weeks is “too short” and letting that suggest that he’ll support the measure.
Axios: “Trump: Six-week abortion limit is ‘too short’.” The New York Post: “Trump appears to suggest that he’ll vote to overturn Florida’s six-week abortion ban: ‘Too short’.” Miami Herald: “Trump says he’ll vote in November that Florida needs ‘more than six weeks’ for abortion.” And here’s Richard Hanania, a rightwing commentator: “Huge. Trump says he’ll be voting to make abortion a constitutional right in Florida. It needs 60 percent to pass. This might make the difference. He’s completely burying the pro-life movement.”
Trump is not burying anything, except sense.
Which is to say, he doesn’t make any sense.
The NBC News interview was incoherent, but it was a paragon of clarity compared to his speech yesterday. I mean, I don’t know if the whole thing was like this, but if the clip I saw, courtesy of the peerless Aaron Rupar, is any indication, it was bowlsbowlsbowls of word salad.
"She destroyed the city of San Francisco. And I own a big building there. It’s no … I shouldn’t talk about this, but that’s OK. I don’t give a damn, because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world! Sell and get the hell out of there, but I can’t do that. I don’t care. Billions of dollars. You know, someone said, 'What do you think you lost?' I said, 'Probably two-three billion.' That’s OK, I don’t care. They said, 'Do you think you’d do it again?' And that’s the least of it. Nobody! They always say … I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all – that he was treated worse than any other president. And I said, 'Do that study again,' because I think there’s nobody close to Trump. I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?That he mentioned getting shot is suggestive. Something has happened to him, mentally speaking. Every speech and presser since his attempted assassination has featured a level of incoherence that’s so impenetrable it’s like he’s speaking something other than English.
I don’t know why. He never released a doctor’s report. But I do know everyone, and I mean everyone, not just his allies, has been trying to make him make sense. Richard Hanania’s post is a case in point. We can hear what he’s saying but we aren’t really listening, because we can’t tolerate listening to a candidate who’s that incoherent. So we filter out the gibberish and insert whatever we think he meant to say.
There are a lot of reasons why he’s trailing his Democratic opponent, but one that hasn’t gotten much attention is the most obvious of all.
That could change with more mistakes like this.
Right now, the story is about the line between too many abortion restrictions and too few. But it could quickly turn to the line between coherence and incoherence. Voters are primed to think about a candidate’s age and his fitness. If they become fixed on Trump’s gibberish, his position on abortion may be the least of his worries.
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