Hey, it's been a while since I talked about Donald Trump, hasn't it? I wonder what he's been up to? Oh, look, he just made possibly the most embarrassing interview of his entire three-and-a-half years in power. It was with Chris Wallace of Fox News, maybe the only TV channel with any respect for Trump, although Wallace is more critical, and less sycophantic, than most of their journos. I have no intention of fact-checking the whole interview, but it is worth watching if you have a strong enough constitution. CNN has identified the 55 most shocking lines from the interview, but you may choose others. And here's Lincoln Project version of it with a laugh track.
I was particularly struck by the language he used while showing off about "aceing" a cognitive test recently. From the evidence, it was probably the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test, which my wife, who has Parkinson's Disease, has done many times. It includes questions like: draw a clock face and show a time of ten past eleven; identify these animal pictures (camel, lion, elephant); connect the letters and numbers in order (e.g. 1, A, 2, B, 3, C, etc); count backwards from one hundred in sevens; remember and repeat five words (although he seemed not to be able to remember the actual five words during the interview, substituting "person, man, woman, camera, TV", which has generated a whole internet meme of its own); etc. It is designed to monitor cognitive decline over time, not to establish IQ, although Trump seems to see it as an indisputable proof of his "very stable genius".
The way Trump talked about it, though, shows that he really hasn't progressed much past kindergarten attitudes in some respects: "I'll bet you couldn't even answer the last five questions. I'll bet you couldn't. They get very hard, the last five questions. I guarantee you that Joe Biden could not answer those questions." He also challenged Joe Biden to take the same test: "Let's take a test right now. Let's go down, Joe and I will take a test. Let him take the same test that I took". And so it goes on.
This is the so-called Leader of the Free World talking on national television. Can you imagine Barack Obama or Shinzo Abe or Angela Merkel speaking in that kind of schoolyard bully phraseology? It's extraordinary.
But the whole interview is worth watching. Trump categorically denies all the recent polls putting him 8% - 14% behind Joe Biden: "I'm not losing, because those are fake polls" (all of them?) He repeatedly refused to confirm that he would accept the results of the election, even if it went against him, which is a scary prospect indeed. Regarding re-naming military bases: "I don't care what the military says". He repeated his claims that the US has "one of the lowest mortality rates in the world" from COVID-19, waving around a piece of paper to "prove" that all the evidence to the contrary is, you guessed it, "fake news". And of course the usual cases-are-up-only-because-we-are-testing-more fallacy. And his repeated claim that the virus will just disappear: "I'll be right eventually ... it's going to disappear and I'll be right". He does like to be right. "I've been right probably more than anybody else", as he says.
Like I say, it's a humdinger of an interview, on his favourite news channel, even though he says up front, "I'm not a big fan of Fox, I'll be honest with you". The day he is "honest" will be a news day indeed.
UPDATE
Fascinatingly, Trump's response to the interview, and the many incredulous press reports about in, was to say on Twitter, "Thank you for the good reviews and comments on my interview". It's not clear which "good reviews" he managed to find, and the conclusion by most is that this is Trump gaslighting again.
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