An interview with Donald Trump on Sunday should serve as a reminder that he is unfit for office.
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Donald Trump has largely been out of the public eye since his election victory last month, and the prevailing theory is that Americans like him best when they don’t have to see or listen to him.
Well, that post-election holiday is over.
On Sunday, he did an interview with NBC, and it was everything you’d inspect: dishonest, uninformed, vague, and often just plain weird.
And, as we have come to expect, his interviewer, in this case, Kristen Welker, only made half-hearted attempts to correct some of his lies.
It all started with Trump’s very first answer.
“Well, we’re going to do something with the border, very strong, very powerful,” the president-elect said when asked about what he wants to accomplish.
What does it mean? Trump didn’t tell, and Welker didn’t ask.
When he did offer specifics, they were usually lies.
On immigration, for example, Trump claimed that 13,099 murderers were released over the past three years.
“They’re walking down the streets,” the president-elect said. “They’re walking next to you and your family.”
Every part of that is false.
Don’t listen to us, though, listen to the Cato Institute, which is hardly a progressive organization.
To her credit, Welker made a half-hearted attempt to correct Trump, but he then just insisted that he was right and she moved on.
When he didn’t act like a stubborn toddler not wanting to admit to some wrongdoing, the incoming president often sounded like a mobster ordering a hit without trying to implicate himself.
Trump was asked repeatedly whether he would ask his attorney general or FBI director to prosecute his perceived enemies.
Each time, he claimed that he would not, but also hinted that they probably should.
For example, Trump said he would not instruct Pam Bondi, his nominee for attorney general, to go after special counsel Jack Smith, the man who built two solid criminal cases against the incoming president.
“I want her to do what she wants to do,” Trump said. “I’m not going to instruct her to do it, no.”
However, he also said that he believed Smith was “corrupt,” and had said earlier in the interview that his Department of Justice should go after anybody who was corrupt.
The same thing happened when Welker brought up former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who was the vice chairman of the committee that investigated Trump’s January 6 insurrection.
Claiming that Cheney and other members of the panel committed “a major crime” and “should go to jail,” he once again said he would not ask Kash Patel, his nominee for FBI director, to make that happen.
The thing is this: You don’t have to expressly tell a blind loyalist like Patel what to do; he’ll get the message when the boss says he believes somebody should go to prison.
Speaking of January 6, Trump also hinted that he is going to look into pardoning most (if not all) of the people convicted for their roles in the deadly attack on the Capitol.
Whenever Trump wasn’t rambling, he also discussed some policy initiatives, if you want to refer to his vague ideas as such.
He was most specific when it came to the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants.
Here, Trump said he wanted to deport all of them, not just convicted criminals, and also overturn birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Constitution, while he is at it.
In the meantime, he suggested that, in order to avoid separating families with mixed legal statuses, he’d just send all of them back to the country where they came from… “humanely,” of course.
After lying that he “saved” Obamacare (even though he tried to kill it), Trump also riffed on a very special word in the English language.
“Very simple word, ‘groceries.’ Like almost — you know, who uses the word? I started using the word — the groceries,” he said. “When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.”
Probably not when he institutes tariffs and deports all of the food workers.
But let’s just see how it plays out.
In any case, Trump is back, and Americans better start paying attention again.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
