Donald Trump gives too much away in answer to seemingly innocuous question

Donald Trump has accidentally exposed himself with his revealing answer to a seemingly innocuous question.

Comment

The most damning admission from any celebrity, which doubles as the most amusing, is the one in which they unknowingly tell on themself.

The key ingredient there is “unknowingly”. It’s the obliviousness, the lack of self-awareness, that makes the dish so delicious.

If The Daily Mail were to run a story saying Dame Judi Dench privately didn’t think Harvey Weinstein should be punished any further, citing anonymous sources close to her, it would be a mere blip of news.

If she herself were to clearly say, in a public interview, with the media, on the record, that she believed Weinstein had “done his time”? Well that would be an event, darling.

It’s the sort of distinction that could demote Dame Judi from actress “who played M in the Bond films” to actress “who played Old Deuteronomy in the ill-fated, critically panned live-action Cats adaptation” in her future press.

(I actually quite enjoyed the Cats movie.)

The point is: it’s not the thing you are bullied or tricked into saying that ultimately reveals who you are. It’s the thing you freely admit without realising how significant it is.

Enter Donald Trump, a man who is more than 10 years Ms Dench’s junior, but has a far longer record of accidentally impugning his own judgment.

The US President popped up for an interview with Politico this week, which proceeded in exactly the fashion you would expect. We are at saturation point for Trump interviews now; after ten years they all blend together. One exchange, though, merits discussion.

“You pardoned the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, and let him out of prison, even though he was convicted in a massive international drug trafficking scheme. How is that zero tolerance on drug trafficking?” asked interviewer Dasha Burns.

Dasha, whom I would immediately cast to play young Meryl Streep in a Devil Wears Prada prequel detailing how her character was deeply misunderstood, actually. Picture: Politico

The context here is that, while summarily executing people he alleges were low-level drug smugglers in the Caribbean, Mr Trump issued a pardon for Hernandez, who was convicted by a US court of conspiring with drug cartels to smuggle hundreds of tons of cocaine into the country. Hernandez also took millions of dollars in bribes from the cartels, and used his powers as president to protect them from law enforcement.

He was supposed to serve a 45-year prison sentence, but Mr Trump’s pardon out of the blue means he is now a free man.

(Temporarily. Honduras has since issued a warrant for its own former president’s re-arrest.)

“Well I don’t know him. And I know very little about him,” the President said.

“Other than – people said it was like an Obama-Biden type set-up, where he was set up. He was the president of the country. The country deals in drugs, like probably, you could say that about every country.

“Because he was the president, they gave him like 45 years in prison. And there are many people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know, and they think he was treated horribly, and they asked me to do it, and I said, ‘I’ll do it.’”

“They asked me to do it.” Right. OK. Sorry, who is “they”, in this situation? I mean exactly. Like, who was in the room lobbying you?

I don’t know him, I know very little about him, but some people told me he was set up, so I let him out of prison. Ooooookay. You didn’t think you should dress that up a little? Perhaps make it sound as though you had done even the most basic due diligence before deciding to send a convicted drug kingpin back into the world?

The part that makes this funny, and not just egregious, is the “unknowingly” bit we talked about earlier. Mr Trump genuinely doesn’t realise what he’s saying, or what it reveals about him. It is very Judi Dench.

I’ll grant you, this is not the sexiest of issues. It would be more interesting to talk about Mr Trump’s aforementioned dropping of bombs on drug smugglers, or of unqualified bombshells into important government positions.

But this one does speak, as well as anything from his second term, to the American President’s most glaring and exploitable flaws as a human being. Personality traits that are amusing in an acquaintance, merely annoying in a family member, and suddenly quite dangerous in a political leader.

FIFA awarding a new “peace prize” it just invented, for the sole purpose of massaging Mr Trump’s ego, to the US President is a thing that happened this week, by the way. That’s not relevant, but it is quite funny. Picture: Brendan Smialowski/AFP

One: I’m sorry, but he’s lazy. My god, the man is lazy.

I’m not talking about physical laziness. Mr Trump is actually active enough for his age, as evidenced by all the golf he plays, or his rigorous schedule of political rallies last year.

It would perhaps be ideal for him to exert more energy on his job than his hobbies, and to stop nodding off so much during his own cabinet meetings, but let’s not be fussy. Who among us wouldn’t struggle to keep the lids up while listening to those poor sods (America’s most powerful government officials) take turns hailing Mr Trump’s unparalleled greatness?

At least in North Korea you can make fun bets on who will be killed for disloyalty first.

So no, not physical vigour. Whole other conversation, that. At issue here is Mr Trump’s mental laziness.

He is permanently in the mode of a Year 10 English student delivering a book report without having read anything past the first chapter. This has been apparent since the very first primary debates in 2015, when Mr Trump’s Republican opponents were understandably annoyed to find he had no idea what he was talking about, but was spanking them anyway.

A great deal of that primary season boiled down to someone like Marco Rubio saying “well actually, if you understand the history of Cubans who fled to the United States, they ...” and then Trump saying “well shmackshually, if shyou shmunderstand the shmistory of the” in a mocking voice, waiting for applause, and getting it.

I do wish I were exaggerating more. The entire process operated under school bully rules. And you get it. Mr Rubio does look like a child whose face should be shoved into a toilet. Maybe you would vote for the shover rather than the shovee, in that scenario.

Still, we are dealing with a person who is endlessly treading water and, worse, has absolutely no interest in learning to swim.

Donald Trump got up there on that stage and pretended to be the foremost expert in everything, while offering absolutely no knowledge or insight about anything. A hot air balloon made of human flesh. It’s not really his fault that it worked.

Huh. He used to be less orange. Picture: Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP

But there is no rigour in the way he thinks. He never digs below the surface, or even acknowledges that anything exists below the surface. Which is why so much of what we hear from him in public is pure bluster.

Why do his remarks feature a rotation of about 13 claims, maybe 15 at a stretch, repeated over and over again? Insert metric, “like nobody has ever seen before”. Insert metric, “the fake news doesn’t want to talk about it”. And why do we have to quadruple check every statistic he cites, lest it prove to have been made up out of thin air?

Because the guy is winging it, and has been since about 30 years before I was born. You might even call him a con artist. And by “you” I of course actually mean the man currently serving as his Secretary of State.

Two: he’s strangely naive. Sounds weird, I know. One side of American politics thinks he’s a tough guy, the quintessential alpha male. The other thinks he is so scarily malicious as to be a potential dictator. There is no room in either interpretation for naivety.

The reality, lying somewhere in between, is of a ... quite sad old man who is incredibly vulnerable to being misled? A bit like your uncle whose Facebook algorithm has started to serve him nothing but slop.

Here is the quick breakdown of what happened with Hernandez.

A years-long US law enforcement investigation, which was active during Mr Trump’s first administration by the way, concluded Hernandez was guilty of serious drug trafficking crimes. He was indicted, and the US court system convicted him. Someone, an unnamed lobbyist, managed to get into Mr Trump’s ear and tell him the whole prosecution was a Biden-orchestrated witch hunt.

And Mr Trump, without inquiring any further, set Hernandez free.

That’s not a knowingly immoral act. It’s the act of someone who has been hoodwinked. Donald Trump isn’t the evil mastermind here, he’s the patsy.

Gives me a headache too. Picture: AFP

There are real consequences. One of the world’s most corrupt politicians, who has spent years victimising Americans for his own profit is, bizarrely, free thanks to the American President.

The law enforcement officers who invested years of their lives trying to put Hernandez away, only to have their own leader swoop in and render their work pointless on a whim, now know those years were wasted.

More significantly, it’s a signal to everyone else that Mr Trump can be manipulated like a child. As though more proof were needed of that, after his previous dealings with Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. That’s why this article is worth writing at all, in an Australian publication: it matters that the US President is an easy mark.

Any other person, in Mr Trump’s position, would have done something to check that he wasn’t being taken for an idiot. They might have ordered the Justice Department to conduct a formal review of the Hernandez case. They might have summoned the lead prosecutors to explain themselves. Something. Anything.

Not this guy. This guy heard his trigger word, “Biden”, and became malleable as clay. And then freely admitted to it on camera.

It’s not malicious. It is gormless. And that is somehow much, much worse.

Originally published as Donald Trump gives too much away in answer to seemingly innocuous question