Donald Trump answers questions about policy like a tenth-grade stoner amped up on Red Bull answers questions about last night’s reading — masking his ignorance in layers of confident blabber, before becoming too bored with his own bullshit to maintain any semblance of coherence.
This may not inspire much confidence in the GOP nominee’s qualifications for the Oval Office. But it does produce some of the most delightfully Dada sentences that mankind has ever heard. And on Tuesday, while discussing the importance of cybersecurity in the fight against ISIS, Trump took his gibberish-generating game to the next level.
“Now the cyber is so big,” it’s “becoming something … that wasn’t a word.” No writer in America is doing more exciting things with syntax than the Republican standard-bearer. And the “substance” of this passage is no less remarkable than its style.
Trump begins by informing us that the word cyber did not derive from the theory of cybernetics, popularized in the mid-20th century, but rather from the events of the last few years. He proceeds to conflate cybersecurity — protecting America’s digital infrastructure from hackers or physical attack — with combating ISIS’s digital recruitment efforts. And then he posits that the terror group has more success attracting new members when they spread the perception that they are winning — a “psychology” that he likens to that of his own supporters, who have been energized by a recent poll that shows him leading nationally.
This is a top-shelf performance from one of the all-time great masters of sputtering nonsense. And his abridged history of the Iran-Iraq War, which he also debuted on Tuesday, is nearly as good.
Trump begins by informing us that the word cyber did not derive from the theory of cybernetics, popularized in the mid-20th century, but rather from the events of the last few years. He proceeds to conflate cybersecurity — protecting America’s digital infrastructure from hackers or physical attack — with combating ISIS’s digital recruitment efforts. And then he posits that the terror group has more success attracting new members when they spread the perception that they are winning — a “psychology” that he likens to that of his own supporters, who have been energized by a recent poll that shows him leading nationally.
This is a top-shelf performance from one of the all-time great masters of sputtering nonsense. And his abridged history of the Iran-Iraq War, which he also debuted on Tuesday, is nearly as good.
