Self-Dunk

Via.

Required reading, the best thing I've ever seen on Trump's speech style and its relationship, if any, to his belief system, by David Roth for Deadspin:

It is a problem for President Donald Trump that it’s often impossible to tell what the hell he’s talking about. This is not one of those signature Trump defects that can readily be spun into a secret strength or as a subtle bit of advanced dealcraft that only experts and initiates can appreciate. His mind is a television that changes channels every three seconds and where every channel has an infomercial on it; it cycles day and night without ever quite cohering into a signal. There is plenty of noise, though, and because Trump so utterly lacks discernment he is constantly interrupting himself with some new bit or blurt. As a result, his average sentence is a parade of wild upstage moves in which whatever thought he’s had most recently is forever blundering into and past the one he had just begun to express—imagine one of those halftime shows at a NBA game in which people throw down wild dunks after leaping off trampolines except there’s a new guy jumping on the trampoline every second and there are frequent midair collisions. Trump also only knows about a hundred words, about a third of which refer to volume or size....

And much, much more.


The example Roth takes a close look at is from the Zelenskyy call memorandum, in fact one of the bits with the ellipse dots that some more paranoid observers have seen as indications that the text is a censored one, and it occurred to me as a clear example of the authenticity of the memo text, which commenters have been quarreling about, starting around here. I'm not going to redo that discussion in this post, but I'd like to post the passage itself, and talk about how I think I know and what Trump is doing.

Attention has focused here on the "though" with which Trump transitions from Zelenskyy's discussion of Ukraine's desire for more Javelin antitank missiles (which the Ukraine is to buy with the funds appropriated by the US Congress for the purpose, which money Trump hadn't yet released at the time of the call, a lot of people don't seem to get that) to his own ask for some return favors, starting with an investigation of the imaginary computer server that the Democratic National Committee hid from the FBI, according to some strains in rightwing mythology, and is literally physically somewhere in Ukraine, according to the version Trump has been told.

But something else that stands out for me is that Trump himself doesn't know the story he's alluding to, and that's why he can't find an intelligible way of letting Zelenskyy know what story it is, except that it has something to do with the Crowdstrike firm, which handled the DNC's cybersecurity and is thought in the mythology to be Ukrainian-owned. It's understandable, by the way, that he shouldn't have understood the story from whoever told it to him, because it doesn't in fact make any sense, it's psychotic babbling, but he doesn't know that either. His chief anxiety is to mention the thing, on instructions from Giuliani or whomever according to the prepared talking points he's reading from, without revealing that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

And this is the reason for the ellipses in lines 4 and 5 of the paragraph. He can say "Crowdstrike" but can't think of a verb to go with it that he can be confident of; he can refer to the imaginary owner of Crowdstrike ("one of your wealthy people") but can't fill in his relevance to the story. He can suggest the server in Ukraine (in the talking points perhaps) but can't identify what server he means or what it's doing in his sentence.. The note takers, like as not, don't know the story either and just indicate the hesitation with the three dots, and the editors can't think of a way of reassembling it.

Nothing has been cut out of there that would make what he's saying any clearer to us than it is to him.  He's dunked himself into the net of his own story, and if anybody had been cutting the text to hide something, they would have tried to hide that.