‘That is gibberish’: One monologue, from Donald Trump, that sums up the media’s unsolvable problem
Asked a simple question, by a friendly voter, Donald Trump embarked on an eight-minute rant. It demonstrates a real problem in the media’s coverage of him.
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Let’s peek behind the curtain for a moment. Play some inside baseball. Or whatever insufferable political cliché you prefer.
We, as a news site, generally try to be as succinct as possible.
We know you, as a reader, have limited time, and quite limited patience for waffling.
So part of our job is to condense a politician’s remarks to the essentials. That way you can get the gist of what they said in 800 words or so, rather than 3000. A nicer experience for everyone involved.
(Some writers are better at this than others, as the editors who have suffered through some of my more longwinded stories over the years would attest.)
Something is lost in the process, though. When you take a politician’s minutes-long monologue and reduce it to just three or four of their most important quotes, a reader gets no sense of their cadence or thought process.
It’s rare to find a politician who does not, to some extent, resent the media and the scrutiny it brings to bear, but this is one area in which we do them a significant favour.
By summarising and paraphrasing and picking out their most salient remarks, we inevitably make them sound snappier, and more coherent.
Politicians all enjoy this luxury, regardless of their place on the political spectrum.
But no one in recent years has benefited from it more than Donald Trump, a man whose rambling, meandering rhetoric is almost always thoroughly, and quite kindly, compressed. That 15-second snippet you see on the 6pm news, reporting on one of his rallies, is a lone, tiny excerpt extracted from a 90-minute-long stream of consciousness.
If you sit and watch the entire rally, or the entire interview, or the whole speech, you get the true Trump experience: long, sometimes hard to follow, and full of barely related tangents.
So the reporting ultimately changes your impression of the man.
When his comments are summarised, you might find him agreeable, objectionable or even quite repulsive, depending on your own views, but he does at least sound like a person making a coherent point.
Hearing him in full, unfiltered and unparsed, is a jarringly different experience.
That is all a prelude to what we’re doing here. I’m going to give you a basic question Mr Trump received, from a friendly voter, during one of his campaign events yesterday, and then transcribe his answer in full, without editing it or cutting it down in any way.
The question came during an event in Flint, Michigan, which was moderated by another Republican politician, the Arkansas Governor (and Mr Trump’s former White House press secretary) Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
She was as tough an interviewer as you would expect, given that resume.
Barbara, a retired nurse who described herself as a mother of three, grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of three, wanted to know how Mr Trump planned to bring down the cost of living for Americans who have struggled under the pain of high inflation.
“I know, of course, what goes into raising children and running a household. People just can’t survive now,” Barbara said.
“How are you going to bring down the cost of food and groceries?”
A routine question for any politician in a Western democracy. Here is Mr Trump’s answer, which ran for about eight minutes.
“Good. Very good. Thank you. So we have to start always with energy, always,” he said.
“I don’t want to be boring about it, but there’s no bigger subject. It covers everything. If you make donuts, if you make cars, whatever you make, energy is a big deal, and we are going to get that. It’s my ambition to get your energy bill, within 12 months, down 50 per cent. If I can do that, I’ve done a hell of a job. Not 15. Fifty.
“Interest rates are going to follow, and actually they’re going to follow for another reason. The economy is now not good. And interest rates, you’ll see they’ll do the rate cut and all the political stuff tomorrow, I think. And, you know, will he do a half a point? Will he do a quarter of a point?
“But the reason is because the economy is not good, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do it. But we’re going to get interest rates down and we have got to work with our farmers. Our farmers are being decimated right now. They’re being absolutely, absolutely decimated. And, you know, one of the reasons is we allow a lot of farm product into our country. And we’re going to have to be a little bit like other countries. We’re not going to allow so much come. We’re going to let our farmers go to work.
“And I don’t know if you remember. I love the farmers because, you know, I had many meetings as president. I had this gorgeous room with this beautiful table that seats about 35 people. And I was with the farmers.
“I, usually, everybody wants something. They all want subsidy. But I was with the farmers and I think you might have been there, actually, Sarah. I said, ‘Look fellas, we’re going to get you such a beautiful subsidy.’ Meaning I’m going to do things. And one of the people raises and says, ‘Sir, honestly. We don’t want a subsidy.’
“This is the first time this ever happened to me! Everyone wants, they want money. They want windmills. We want money with these windmills. Ay ay ay.
“Anyway, but you know what was amazing? He said, almost tears in his eyes, ‘We don’t, we’re getting decimated. We don’t want a subsidy. We just want a, you know, a fair, level playing field. And I said, I said, ‘Nobody’s ever said that.’
“And I have many industries and many groups of people from different things. You know, they do all different things. It’s probably the most dramatic I’ve ever seen. He didn’t want anything. All he wanted was to be able to compete fairly.
“And the reason, the problem we have, is other countries. They treat us very badly, in that way also. They really are. And, you know, sometimes the worst countries are our so-called allies. I say ‘so-called’, because in many ways they are not allies at all. They take advantage of us. They really take advantage.
“But we’re going to do, with the farmers. We’re going to do what we have to do with the farmers. We’re going to put our farmers. And do you remember the expression, when I was negotiating with China? China said, ‘Well, we’re not going to deal with this.’ Because they never had anybody negotiate. They did whatever they want. They just took us like, you know, for a bunch of suckers.
“But I told the farmers, ‘It’s going to be, they’re very good negotiators. You’re going to suffer for six months and then they’re going to fold.’ And that’s exactly what happened. They folded and they agreed to buy $50 billion.
“You know, you might have heard the story. I said, ‘How much?’ I went to the secretary of agriculture. I said, ‘How much did they buy?’ He said 15. I thought he said 50. So when they’re ready to make a deal at 15 billion, I said, ‘No, I want 50.’ That’s what they’ve been buying. They said, ‘No, it’s 15.’ I said, ‘You said 50?’ And he said, ‘No, we said 15.’ I said, ‘That’s OK, ask for 50 anyway.’ And we got it. We got it.
“And they buy a lot of our products.
“So we’re going to, just a great, interest rates, energy and common sense. A lot of it’s common sense, everything. You know, I like to say we’re the party of common sense.
“We want to have a strong border. How about that? We want a strong, you know all of a sudden, they’ve changed. They didn’t want any border. They said walls don’t work. Two things work. What are the two things? Wheels and walls.
“You know, if I do, there’s a gorgeous computer down here. In about two weeks, it’s going to be obsolete. A friend of mine is in that business. He hates it. He said, ‘We come up with a new model and it’s the greatest.’ About three-and-a-half weeks later, the damn thing is totally obsolete. The only thing that never gets obsolete is a wall and a wheel.
“And the wall is what we’re talking about now. And you know, we built hundreds of miles of wall. We then added more than I ever said I was going to do. And then we had that bad election result, that disgusting result. And they never put it up.
“You know what they did with it? They sold it for five cents, and it was expensive wall, it was exactly what the Border Patrol wanted, with the anti-climb plate on top, which I always hated because I didn’t like the look of it.
“But, you know, they demonstrated. We had mountain climbers, and a couple of drug climbers too. These guys are amazing. They can they put 100 pounds of drugs on their back and they go up the wall like it’s nothing. But they couldn’t get over the plate. So all of a sudden they said, ‘OK, I’ll put the plate on.’ I didn’t like it. I liked it better without the plate, but it didn’t work quite as well.
“So this is what we did. We had it. We had the best. We had a thing called Remain in Mexico. You don’t have to be a genius to know Remain in Mexico is a very good thing. And you think that was easy to get?
“I think Tijuana, Mexico was probably the fastest growing city in the history of the world. OK? They had hundreds of thousands. They couldn’t come in. When they got in, they let everybody pour into our country, the border.
“Just to finish with the border. When I talk about energy, to me it’s exciting. But to a lot of people it’s not. But it gets exciting, because we’ll bring down your costs, all that.
“But what people want to hear, and I believe, when I got elected, I believe it was the border that was the biggest thing. And I fixed it, and I did a great job. And I wanted to mention it in 2020. And my people would say, ‘Sir, nobody cares about the border.’ They don’t care because I had it fixed. Now I got to fix it again. I believe the border is of the greatest interest.
“When you look at, when you look at, when you look at what’s happening in Aurora. OK? Take a look at Aurora. When you look at what’s happening in Ohio, the great state of Ohio, I love it. I’m way the hell up. I wish I was up 18 points in your state. But we are up. We are up. I think when people hear what I have to say, I don’t know how you can possibly lose it.
“You. I’ll tell you this, and I’ll say this for Michigan. If I don’t win, you will have no auto industry, within two to three years it’ll all be gone. And I know you got a little bit of an increase. It doesn’t mean, that’s the small stuff, because it’s just a temporary thing, because you will not have any manufacturing plants.
“China is going to take over all of your business, because of the electric car, and because they have the material. We don’t. What we have is a thing called the gasoline. We have gasoline. We have so much gasoline, we don’t know what to do. They don’t have gasoline. So why are we making a product that they dominate? They’re going to dominate.
“You will not have a car industry left, not even a little bit of a car industry. So, and you’re going to have electric cars, but you’re going to have 7 per cent. You’re going to have 9 per cent, whatever it may be. And maybe some day, the technology becomes so good that you can do more.
“I mean, you know, it’s fine. But right now, the battery technology isn’t there for long term. I always say, ‘I love the electric car, but they don’t go far enough, and they don’t do well.’
“You know, in Iowa, it was 20 degrees below zero, when we had our great success in Iowa, we had a great, and there were cars all over the place. I said, ‘What’s wrong with those cars?’ They don’t work well in cold and they don’t work very well in heat.
“But Elon’s going to figure it out, because he’s great. He gave me the greatest endorsement. He figures everything out, and right now, he’s got, he’s got other things. He’s got to get a rocket up to get those two people out of there.
“I said, ‘Elon, let’s get going.’ No, they’re relying on Elon to get the two people. Who would like to be up there right now saying, ‘We’re coming back home maybe in February?’ So that was not so good. But Elon will solve the problem.
“He’s a great, great guy. And he loves this state and he loves your whole, everything you’re doing here. And he’s done a fantastic job. He really has. And if he didn’t endorse me, I would not be saying that. OK? I have a problem. I wouldn’t be saying.”
So it ends.
To remind you, the question Mr Trump fielded was: “How are you going to bring down the cost of food and groceries?”
One could pull out several quotes, from that monologue, that mean absolutely nothing. For example: “We’re going to do, with the farmers. We’re going to do what we have to do with the farmers. We’re going to put our farmers.”
That is, on its face, gibberish.
But say I was the unfortunate reporter who had to file a straight, non-judgmental report on this event, and I had to summarise Mr Trump’s response on how he would bring down the cost of groceries, I might come up with something like this.
“We have to start always with energy. Always,” Mr Trump said.
“There is no bigger subject. It covers everything. If you make donuts, if you make cars, whatever you make, energy is a big deal.
“It’s my ambition to get your energy bill, within 12 months, down 50 per cent.”
That’s an accurate reflection of about 20 seconds from an eight-minute answer.
You can see the challenge, yes? How do you succinctly describe Mr Trump’s answer without editorialising? How do you sum up the thousands of words above without noting that most of them had nothing whatsoever to do with the question?
Point out that Mr Trump was rambling, at times so strangely that “incoherent” seems a charitable description, and you are accused of unconscionable bias.
It’s a problem the media has been confronting for almost a decade. And still, if we’re frank, we have yet to find a solution.
Twitter: @SamClench
Originally published as ‘That is gibberish’: One monologue, from Donald Trump, that sums up the media’s unsolvable problem
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