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While much of the attention following Donald Trump’s interview with CNBC on Tuesday focused on the insanely racist things he said about both Hispanic immigrants and African Americans, it is important to point out that it also showed that the president of the United States is nuts.

Granted, we have highlighted this before, but we believe it is a big deal and therefore worth mentioning all the time. In fact, since Trump says and does crazy things every single day, we are showing great restraint in only writing about his fraught mental state every couple of weeks or so.

But before we get to that, we don’t want to deprive you of the quote everybody is talking about… because Trump isn’t just insane, he is also a racist.

After a rambling and fact-challenged rant on immigration, in which the president falsely claimed that 11,888 murderers came into the country under his predecessor (we explained before how every part of this is wrong), the hosts of the show Squawk Box were hoping to get the president to say that his mass deportation program would treat vital workers, like those employed in the agricultural sector, differently.

Trump started off well enough by emphasizing that he wants to work with farmers and create a system in which undocumented migrants are sent to their home countries before returning to the US (if you watched the interview or read the transcript, then you’ll know he didn’t say this nearly as coherently, so we apologize for sanewashing his answer a bit).

Then things went off the rails.

“We can’t let our farmers not have anybody. You know, these are very these people, they’re you can’t replace them very easily,” Trump said of the mostly Hispanic immigrants toiling on the country’s farms to ensure that Americans have food on their tables. “You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried, we’ve tried. Everybody tried. They don’t do it.”

Obviously, “people that live in the inner city” is code for Black people. And Trump is right that it has been tried. That was called “slavery.”

The president wasn’t done.

“These people do it naturally, naturally,” he said of the migrant workers. “I said, what happens if they get it to a farmer the other day, what happens if they get a bad back? He said, they don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die. I said that’s interesting, isn’t it?”

Actually, that’s not interesting, that’s just racist… and we are reasonably sure that these workers do get bad backs. However, since Trump and his Republicans don’t want them to have health benefits, they just have to work through discomfort or injuries if they want to provide a better life for their families.

And these are the people the GOP wants to summarily kick out of the country.

In any case, it would be a disservice to just focus on that part of the interview, because Trump said a bunch of other crazy stuff.

As per usual, most of it would be disqualifying for any other politician, but the media and the American people are so used to Trump saying things that are either incredibly dumb or insane that everybody just shrugs their shoulders when he does it.

Not us, which is why you are reading this right now.

For example, Trump said that he would “probably” not run for a third term in office, but he “would like to.” Seeing how there is a constitutional amendment prohibiting him from doing so, that’s like saying: “I’d like to own slaves, but I probably won’t.”

Obviously, if Barack Obama had ever said anything like this, we never would have heard the end of it.

However, what we really want to focus on is how detached from reality Trump is, and how bad that is for the country. On multiple occasions, he made up stuff and, when confronted with the truth, he shrugged it off and instead kept insisting that whatever lie he just told is right.

For example, Trump insisted that he enjoys the “best poll numbers I have ever had” and cited a figure of 71 percent. In reality, there isn’t a poll where he is within 20 points of that figure, and his polling average is at 43.8 percent right now.

When confronted with that information, the president said those were “fake polls.”

And that’s really the theme here. Anything he doesn’t like is “fake” or a “hoax.”

Poll numbers matter. Trump is driven by a compulsive need to be adored, so if he could acknowledge that the American people don’t like what he is doing, he might change some of his most unpopular policies, which could lower prices or ensure that people keep their health insurance or federal food benefits.

However, if he is convinced that everybody loves him, there is no reason to do so.

Another great example is his insistence that unemployment figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), both ahead of the 2024 election and last week, were “rigged” against him.

There is just one problem: Nothing Trump says on this subject makes any sense.

His main “evidence” is that the BLS sugarcoated the employment figures under Joe Biden to help Democrats win the election. However, those numbers were significantly revised downwards in August, i.e., months before the election. In addition, after the election, when more accurate data became available, they were revised upwards again (we wrote about this at the time).

In other words, Trump’s theory is that BLS routinely inflated the jobs numbers under Biden only to come clean at the most inopportune time for Democrats. And even when confronted with the truth, the president steadfastly clung to his erroneous belief that this happened around the election.

Speaking of elections, during the interview, he also tried to relitigate his 2020 loss to Biden and insisted that the people, who worked in his own Department of Justice, who found that his claims had no merit were wrong.

“Well, they were wrong, and [Trump’s attorney general] Bill Barr was wrong, and Bill Barr didn’t investigate, and he should have and why didn’t Bill Barr give the, why didn’t he give the Durham report?” the president rambled on. “Why didn’t he give that report, the stuff that’s in there, that’s all this stuff is coming out of it. Why didn’t he give it earlier? I mean, you know, why did it take so long to do it, and why didn’t he give it? Why didn’t they announce it earlier? Because it morphed, what happened is, it morphed into the Biden administration, and the Biden administration buried it so you know it’s too bad.”

The main takeaway from that word salad is that Trump thinks Barr should have released the Durham report, which was finished and published in 2023, ahead of the 2020 election.

But Trump isn’t good with numbers, dates… or facts.

For example, the arithmetically challenged president has been saying that he wants to lower drug prices by more than 1,500 percent, which is a mathematical impossibility (unless he wants pharmacists to hand customers cash along with every drug they give away for free).

However, on Tuesday, Trump also said that he wants to slap tariffs of 250 percent on pharmaceuticals, which would obviously make them more expensive, not less.

Finally, the president said that the vague promises Japan and the European Union made to invest in the United States, which they are already doing, are “signing bonuses,” and that he can do with that money whatever he wants.

Speaking of the $650 billion that the EU said its companies would invest in the US through 2028, Trump insisted that the money is “a gift.”

“That’s not like, you know, a loan, by the way. That’s not a loan that, oh, gee, three years comes up. We have to pay it back. There’s nothing to pay back. They gave us $600 billion that we can invest in anything we want,” he said.

When pressed on the details of this “deal,” Trump added that “there are no details. The details are $600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything.”

This will come as news to the EU — and will almost certainly lead to a continuation of his trade war with the world because, once Trump realizes that Europe isn’t just going to send him a $650 billion check, then he is going to want to increase tariffs again.

And that brings us back to the premise of this piece. Trump is living in a fantasy world, and his inability to acknowledge reality is shaping US policy.

That’s a real problem, especially because it seems as though the president’s mental state is deteriorating rather rapidly.

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