I found Donald Trump’s interview in Time to be both utterly maddening and deeply disturbing. Trump is seemingly incapable of completing a thought. He self-interrupts, backtracks, repeats himself, and goes off on digressions. Kudos to Time for allowing that to come through in the transcript. (And for fact-checking his statements, even though it would have been even better if it had been both more extensive and presented inline.)

There are several jaw-dropping moments in the interview, but I wanted to highlight two. The first for the political ramifications; the second as a stark example of Trump’s Swiss-cheese mind.

First is Trump’s refusal to state that he won’t invoke the Insurrection Act (or deploy ICE) ahead of or during the midterm elections. Steve Benen at MS Now covers Trump’s hedge pretty well. As Benen writes, “when asked whether he would rule out declaring a state of emergency in the run-up to the midterms, the correct answer should have been, ‘Of course I’d rule that out.’” Trump can’t do that because, as is obvious to anyone paying even partial attention, he wants desperately to affect the midterms, and invoking this Act, either as a means of intimidation at the polls or to disrupt the election, is being seriously considered by him and his administration. He can’t stop talking about it. He understands his regime screeches to a halt the moment Republicans no longer control Congress and that he’d quickly face serious calls for both impeachment and prosecution.

The second section worth highlighting starts early in the interview, when Trump is asked about the U.S. debt, which reached $40 trillion and for which he, naturally, blamed Joe Biden (please excuse—and prepare yourself for—the extensive exposure to Trump’s words):

You haven’t lowered the debt because of President Biden?

No, because they keep paying higher interest rates. We had great job numbers two weeks ago, right? What do they do? Raise the interest rate. Because today…I say it all the time because I want to try and get these people to do what’s right for the country. When we did well years ago, they lowered the interest rate. Now, when you do well—in fact, I had great job numbers, 162,000. It was four times bigger than projected. And I said, “Oh, that’s not good news because they’re going to raise the interest rate.” It used to be they’d lower the interest rate, so we have great—because we’re better credit.

So you say if they’re going to do that all the time, how do you ever pay off the debt? Now you can do it through other means. I know I’m the best in the world. The best—I don’t want to tell you what those means are, but you can pay off the debt through other means. But the one thing that you can do is pay it off through growth, and we’ve never had growth like this.

Then later:

What’s driving this growth is AI, so we’d love to ask you a few questions about that.

No, what’s driving the growth is automobile plants are opening, many plants, Pfizer, all of the drug companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars. How about Apple? Apple’s spending $600 million. The great chip company from Taiwan is spending $500 billion. Jensen Huang is spending. No, it’s not—look, we’re building more automobile plants in the United States, and bigger ones, than we’ve ever built before. […]

It’s not just AI.

Then, after a question about a recent OpenAI attempt to access government websites, he opines on the artificial intelligence—sorry, super intelligence—industry:

I don’t have to destroy the industry. We’re making a lot of money with that industry. That industry is the industrial revolution, but bigger. It’s the internet, but much bigger. I don’t have to destroy that industry. By the way, you know, I had a very good meeting with President Xi. We get along, right? We talked about it not much, but a little bit. But I told him, I said, we don’t want—you know, we’re leading them pretty good. He knows that. And I said, “We don’t want to take this thing that we’ve done so well with and turn it off. I don’t want to turn it off. It’s tremendous amounts of money.”

Now, when you talk about the debt, the growth is going to pay off the debt. Growth will pay it off. Now, it’s pretty bad when they keep raising interest rates, and they only raise them because they have Trump derangement syndrome. And I don’t blame Kevin. In fact, when he took the job, he’s got mostly people from Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden on the board. And I don’t know what he’s—I actually said, “What are you going to do?” But they would rather see the country do badly because I’m President. But we’re blowing through interest rates because it’s got—we got this thing going. If the interest rates were—even, if they were low, we should be paying the lowest interest rate of any country in the world, because all these countries that are making money, almost all, are only making money because of this.

Switzerland. They sell billions of dollars of watches. We didn’t take their watch, and they’re considered [unintelligible]. They have the lowest interest rate, one half of 1%, and we’re paying much more than that. And yet, if I said to Switzerland, “Sorry, I don’t want to lose $40 billion a year in order to have your watches.” We just picked up $40 billion. I could do the same thing with 50 countries, more than that, much more than that, and we would make more money than any country has ever dreamed of. We should be the lowest interest rate with the most prime country—we should be the lowest interest rate in the world. In the old days, that would happen. When you did well, the interest rate used to—you could check. You did well, you announced good numbers. Now you announce good numbers, we’re going to rock and roll and raise interest rates to try and kill it.

I don’t even know where to begin. It’s a turbulent ride through Trump’s unencumbered mind as his wildly misfiring neurons grab hold of any snatch of seemingly relevant data and regurgitate it.

You can pay off the debt through growth which is because of automobile plants and drug companies and Apple and has nothing to do with AI but we’re making tremendous amounts of money with AI driving interest rates too high because countries are making money off us and we’re losing $40 billion a year buying Swiss watches and we could make so much money if we stopped buying stuff from other countries and lowered our interest rates. Sleepy Hussein.

His screed about Switzerland is especially illuminating because it exposes Trump’s complete lack of understanding of how trade works. You don’t “lose money” when you buy something you want or need. That’s called “spending money.” It doesn’t imply a trade deficit, it has nothing to do with interest rates, and it isn’t addressed with tariffs that raise the price of the very thing you’re buying. And you definitely aren’t “making money” when you stop buying stuff. At best you’re saving money—but then you don’t have the thing you otherwise wanted to buy.

Kudos again to Time for letting Trump ramble and then just transcribing him in a way that is reflective of how he actually speaks. They seemingly only added punctuation to make it passably readable.

No word on whether he spoke that punctuation out loud.