Thursday morning in the White House, Donald Trump found an entirely new way to confuse not just members of the press, but the American public in general when he was asked by a reporter about his immigration policies — specifically his administration’s policy of separating families at the border, even if they’re legally seeking asylum.
“Are your immigration policies cruel?” a reporter with a faint accent shouted out. The familiar “Say it?” from Trump followed, asking him to repeat his question.
And when the President began to answer, he almost seemed confident in what he was about to say. Then the whole thing went wildly off the rails, into a tirade so incoherent that it’s hard not to conclude that Trump is either suffering from the onset of dementia or he is so lost in the myriad lies his administration has spun that he can barely pull one policy apart mentally from any other, and he just had no idea what the reporter was talking about.
No, I don’t think they’re cruel, I think they’re the opposite of cruel.”
I feel like I need to pause here because “cruel” actually has an antonym — it’s “kind.” If Donald Trump thinks his immigration policies are “kind,” then he’s a sociopath who should never be let outdoors. Anyway, he continued:
They become cruel because they’re so ridiculous and it hurts people. It actually does the reverse of what they’re supposed to be doing. But no, they’re actually meant to be the opposite and they’re hurting people, they’re really hurting people, a lot of people. I think that we have done an incredible job. We’re apprehending record numbers of people, but if we had border security, if we had the wall, if we had a proper wall which we’re building now as we speak — and we’re getting a lot more funding for it, as you know, in what we’re talking about and the vote today — whether it’s positive or not, I’m vetoing it, unless I don’t have to veto. I think that’s sort of likely, I’ll do a veto, it’s not going to be overturned. But we have done a great job at the border through apprehension.”
Watch the clip here:
WHEW. That’s hard to get through. Not a lot of punctuation in there, really — I kind of had to add some to my little transcript here because Trump just doesn’t pause between thoughts.
I get some of what he means, but it’s still hard for me to believe he’s saying it out loud. What the President means is that he thinks his policies would not be cruel if there were no one coming through the border to be affected by his policies. He doesn’t want to destroy children’s lives and rip families apart, and if only all those brown people would stop coming here entirely, he wouldn’t have to be so cruel to be kind. Get it?
Okay, no, me either.
Featured image via screen capture
