Why Donald Trump Can’t Stop Talking About the Pallets of Cash

The speech that Donald Trump gave on Wednesday in Daytona Beach, Florida, was not his most menacing or self-destructive, but, like many of his recent public addresses, it was confusing. Trump gave a distracted account of the Saudi intervention in Yemen that did not come to a point: “So they’re fighting, for Yemen, back and forth.” He said he saw a documentary showing that the U.S. Air Force was using such old equipment that it was raiding museums for spare parts. When speaking about a payment that the government made to Iran in January, he claimed to have seen a video of piles of cash being unloaded from a plane in Tehran. The video was shot from the “perfect angle, nice and steady,” Trump said, warming to his story. Later, his campaign explained that Trump was speaking about footage of Americans who had been held hostage by Iran leaving a plane in Geneva, which had accompanied a Fox News report about the payment coinciding with their release. That was the part of the speech that made the news. But there were plenty of other pieces of conjecture, stories that broke off, and lines of thought that seemed to amble off into the distance. Even the most obvious political arguments tended not to reach a point. “If Hillary puts her people on the Supreme Court,” Trump told his supporters, “like, who knows?”