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‘Incomprehensible’: Trump Decimated for ‘Word Salad on Crucially Important Policy Question’

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The Biden campaign blasted Donald Trump on Monday after a short clip of the ex-president’s remarks calling for cutting Social Security and Medicare received hundreds of thousands of views, but the full text of his remarks, which include at best inaccurate or misleading claims about inflation and the stock market are raising red flags. Some political and policy experts are saying Trump “has no idea what he’s talking about,” while others are calling them “basically incomprehensible,” a “word salad,” and “gibberish.”

This is the first part of the quote from Donald Trump, posted by NBC News’ Vaughn Hillyard, that is getting social media responses like the ones above, but it’s not even half of the “unofficial” CNBC transcript of Trump’s response to the question, “Have you changed your, your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President?”

TRUMP: “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak. And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is 50%. They say 32 and 33%. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50%, that means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50% more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy.”

“Lots of gibberish,” is how Jim Manley, the leadership aide and communications director to then Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, characterized the above quote.

READ MORE: Trump Praised Hitler While He Was in the White House: Ex-Official

“Trump spent 4 years in office and he still has no idea what he’s talking about, and he still can’t hold a single thought for more than 10 seconds,” observed The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, the international affairs expert and retired U.S. Naval War College professor.

MSNBC political analyst and Bloomberg Opinion Senior Executive Editor Tim O’Brien pointed to Trump’s claim we have “cumulative inflation of over 50%,” and wrote: “No, we don’t.”

University College London Associate Professor in Global Politics Brian Klass said: “This answer doesn’t make any sense. Word salad on a crucially important policy question. And yet this won’t get a big NYT headline or profile on how Trump is confused about how the government works and can’t string a coherent sentence together when asked about what he will do.”

Semafor Washington Bureau Chief Benjy Sarlin: “This is basically incomprehensible but that first line about cutting is going to end up in tons of ads if it’s at all coherent enough to clip.”

Award-winning journalist David S. Bernstein noted, “I cannot fathom a candidate for major federal office, at this stage of the campaign, not having a stock answer—even a transparently stupid one!—on Social Security and Medicare.”

Elizabeth Pancotti, Director, Special Initiatives at the Roosevelt Institute remarked, “we, uh, do not have a cumulative inflation of over 50%.”

Conservative U.S. economic policy analyst James Pethokoukis asked: “Does Trump have even a *very* rough idea of what how big, basic government programs work? How does he think Social Security is ‘managed?'”

READ MORE: Sex Trafficking Survivor Debunks Katie Britt’s Claims in CNN Interview

“The worms are eating his brain,” said political columnist Dick Polman. “Trump on CNBC today, verbatim, discussing the inflation rate: ‘I believe that number is 50 percent. They say 32 and 33 percent. I believe we have cumulative inflation of over 50 percent.’ It’s 3.2 percent.”

Here is rest of Trump’s answer to that one question, unedited, via the CNBC transcript, which is part of the remarks above but was not posted to social media. It includes Trump’s claims about COVID, the economy, America’s energy independence, and more. Many of the remarks are disputable if not false. Nor do they include that Trump shut down the very agency that was designed to offer early warnings on pandemics months before COVID.

TRUMP: “When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil but we were going at a much higher level oil and gas. We were doing, you know, we were third when I started and when they ended we were one by a longshot and we were very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi Arabia and Russia were doing. And we were on that path. We were gonna be paying down debt. We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with Covid. I guess China found that out because they also really got hit very hard also, but nobody wins with Covid. And so we had to get to we had to do other things. We had to help. You know, if I didn’t do the expenditures that we didn’t do the kinds of things we did for the economy, we would add in 1929 type depression. And I had to say out in front of it, and we did we did a great job on that and we did with all of the things we’re coming up with Regeneron doing so much else, getting all because you know we had empty when I came in, we had empty, I call them empty cupboards. We had empty shelves, we didn’t have equipment, we didn’t have the gowns, we didn’t have the ventilators. We didn’t have anything. This country wasn’t prepared for a thing like that. And I’m not even blaming anybody in that. Because, you know, when when it came, nobody thought the pandemic would ever happen again. It sounds like an ancient’s problem, not a problem that you’d have you know at that time, you know, in modern, very modern age. It was like an ancient thing. We you know, who, who would ever show I’m not blaming anybody, but we had empty cupboards, and I got them stocked and I got them stocked fast. And we did a great job with it. Never got credit. I got credit for the greatest economy. I got credit for foreign policy. I got credit for knocking out ISIS and not going into wars. But we beat ISIS, but I never got the credit for having done a great job with that.”

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‘Absolutely No Clue’: Trump Roasted Over Unique Declaration of Independence Interpretation

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52 minutes ago

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May 1, 2025

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On Constitution Day in September 2020—less than two months before his re-election defeat—President Donald Trump staged a White House Conference on American History at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

He called the National Archives, an institution he would later battle over classified and top-secret documents he would remove from the White House months later and refuse to return, “the sacred home of our national memory.”

“In this great chamber,” Trump said, “we preserve our glorious inheritance: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.”

Trump used the occasion to attack “the left” multiple times, and his political opponent, Joe Biden.

After winning a second term four years later, President Trump ordered the Declaration of Independence to be displayed in the Oval Office—the same revered space where he also chose to hang the police booking mug shot from his criminal arrest.

READ MORE: ‘Out of Order!’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Triggers Shouting Match Between Comer and Top Dem

“The Nationals Archives [sic] delivered the Declaration of Independence to the White House at the President’s request,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, according to the Associated Press. “It is displayed in the Oval Office where it will be carefully protected and preserved.”

The AP suggested the version hanging in the Oval Office may not be an original copy (there are about 25), since its words are “clear and legible,” while the original, centuries-old document, is faded.

Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that it has “been in the vaults for many, many decades.”

“Think Joe Biden would do this? I don’t think so,” Trump asked the Fox News host. “Do you think he knows what it is?”

Last month, President Trump told reporters, “See the Declaration of Independence? You should all read that before you leave. That’s the real deal.”

This week, during Trump’s first 100 days interview with ABC News, senior national correspondent Terry Moran asked the President of the United States what the Declaration of Independence means to him.

READ MORE: ‘Please Chill This Is Going Great’: Trump Mocked for Blaming Biden Amid Poor Economic Data

But the President appears to have forgotten that the Declaration of Independence, an actual act of high treason against Britain and King George III, is a literal declaration of the 13 colonies’ independence. Detailing the founders’ grievances against the Crown, it led to the Revolutionary War. It has been said it contains “the most potent and consequential words in American history.”

Instead, Trump told Moran, “Well, it means, exactly what it says. It’s a declaration, it’s a declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot, and it’s something very special to our country.”

HuffPost reported that “‘Daily Show’ correspondent Desi Lydic mocked President Donald Trump on Wednesday after he revealed what the Declaration of Independence means to him.”

“But what makes Trump’s remarks ‘even more sad,’ Lydic said, is that the document is about the 13 colonies “filing for divorce” from Britain,” HuffPost added. “’It’s the one thing Trump should absolutely recognize,’ Lydic joked in a nod to the president divorcing Ivana Trump and Marla Maples prior to marrying first lady Melania Trump in 2005.”

Others also mocked the President of the United States for appearing to not know what the Declaration of Independence is.

“Laughing through my tears,” wrote former U.S. Congressman John Yarmuth (D-KY). “The President of the United States has obviously never read the Declaration of Independence. He’s obviously never read the Constitution either.”

“Trump has absolutely no clue what the Declaration of Independence is or what it says,” charged Ron Filipkowski, an attorney and the editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch News.

“If the Democrats were better at this game, they would take Trump’s ‘explanation’ of the Declaration of Independence and run it as a 30-second ad, without comment, on every station they could find,” said journalist and columnist Jay Bookman.

The White House apparently took no issue with the President’s apparent lack of understanding of one of America’s most important founding documents. The official White House Rapid Response team posted the video from his ABC News interview that includes Trump’s unique explanation of the Declaration of Independence.

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: As US Economy Shrinks Trump Appears Unaware of Crisis: ‘This Is Biden’s Stock Market’

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‘Out of Order!’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Triggers Shouting Match Between Comer and Top Dem

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18 hours ago

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April 30, 2025

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Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene ignited a heated confrontation during a budget bill hearing Wednesday by claiming that budgets have nothing to do with policy — a stance that top Democrats have long argued contradicts core American values. Her assertion drew an immediate rebuttal from one of the committee’s top Democrats, but Oversight Chairman James Comer jumped to Greene’s defense, attempting to cut off the correction and escalating the exchange into a shouting match, while mocking Democrats’ efforts to preserve and honor American values.

After U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) made an impassioned plea to not cut the budget of the Veterans Administration, or Social Security, or Medicare in order to produce a $4 trillion tax cut largely for the wealthy — a top Trump priority — Congresswoman Greene lashed out.

“I’d like to point something out that our Democrat colleagues know this, because they did reconciliation before when they are they were in charge and, you know, it may be hard for some of the freshman Dems to understand, but this is not a policy debate,” the Georgia Republican alleged. “That’s not what reconciliation is. This is a budget process.”

“And so for the American people watching at home, our Democrat colleagues are sitting here trying to score points and spread more lies and divisiveness about Republicans in order to spread more garbage across the country,” she charged, calling Democrats’ pleas “entertainment.”

READ MORE: ‘Please Chill This Is Going Great’: Trump Mocked for Blaming Biden Amid Poor Economic Data

That’s when U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat in Congress for nearly a quarter century and possibly next in line for Ranking Member of the Oversight Committee, slammed Greene’s interpretation of the Committee’s work.

“Mr. Chairman, I just want to say, our federal budget reflects our values,” Lynch declared, a statement many budget experts would affirm, and one that has been by President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

“When we fund the VA,” Lynch continued, “it’s not just about numbers. It’s about, it’s about the mission, and the purpose of our budget.”

Chairman Comer appeared to grow angry.

“You do understand our federal budget is $2.5 trillion?” Comer declared, appearing to suggest details like how much spent on veterans was not worth the Committee’s time. “We can’t have ‘values’,” Comer insisted, with the amount of debt the federal government is carrying.

“Reclaiming my time — you don’t get to just interject, Mr. Chairman,” Lynch charged.

You know what? I think you’ve already spoken, so you’re out of order,” Comer declared, hitting his desk with his gavel.

“I will speak,” Lynch, now heated, told the Chair. “You’re about to put our country $4 trillion more than debt.”

“I don’t think you all could find a billion dollars in savings,” Comer alleged.

“Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time. Reclaiming my time,” Lynch again declared.

“You can talk all you want. I want everyone in America to see how much — ” Comer snapped.

“Mr. Chairman. You’re out of order. You’re out of order. You’re the chairman, you’re out of order,” Lynch again charged.

READ MORE: ‘Prices Go Up’: Economist Mocks Treasury Secretary’s ‘Empty Shelves’ Position

“Now, without interruption,” Lynch continued, “what we decide here in the budget is what I’m the point I’m trying to make is it’s not just dollars and cents. It’s about where, where that money goes, and what, what purposes and what, what priorities it reflects. And those, you know, governing is about making decisions, and we we choose to fund things that in this country, we have honored for a very long time, and that, you know, I have to say, in my 25 years in Congress, we have had very little disagreement on funding veteran benefits.”

Lynch went on to lament that “now we’re fighting tooth and tongs — and nail — about whether we’re gonna lay off 80,000 employees at the VA. What I’m saying is that, sure, it’s about the budget, but underlying that budget is is our priorities as a country. What we consider to be worthwhile . And I feel that veterans’ benefits are worthwhile. Veterans, healthcare is worthwhile. The way we treat our federal employees is important. It is intrinsic to be the work of the federal government and how we help the most vulnerable, as well as, you, average everyday Americans on Social Security, on Medicaid.”

Watch the videos below or at this link.


RELATED: As US Economy Shrinks Trump Appears Unaware of Crisis: ‘This Is Biden’s Stock Market’

 

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‘Please Chill This Is Going Great’: Trump Mocked for Blaming Biden Amid Poor Economic Data

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21 hours ago

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April 30, 2025

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President Donald Trump, the Trump White House, and top administration officials are insisting Wednesday’s first quarter negative GDP numbers — showing a contracting economy for the first time in almost three years, since COVID — are actually good news but also the fault of President Joe Biden.

The New York Times characterized President Trump’s first quarter results as “a stunning reversal from the strong growth at the end of last year.”

Speaking at a televised Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, President Trump, reading from notes on the GDP results, said, “you know, you probably saw some numbers today. And I have to start off by saying, that’s Biden. That’s not Trump, because we came in on January just the quarterly numbers, and we came in and I was very against everything that Biden was doing in terms of the economy destroying our country.”

Later, at that same meeting, Trump continued.

The stock market, Trump insisted “in this case is it says how bad a situation we inherited.”

READ MORE: ‘Prices Go Up’: Economist Mocks Treasury Secretary’s ‘Empty Shelves’ Position

Leading economists say President Biden handed President Trump a robust economy — which is now in crisis, much like when President Barack Obama handed Trump a robust economy, which Trump reportedly handed over to Biden in “shambles.”

“I took place, this is a quarter that we looked at today. And I took place, we took, all of us together, we came in on January 20th,” said, Trump, appearing to stumble over his words. “So this is Biden, and you can even say the next quarter is sort of Biden, because it doesn’t just happen on a daily or even hourly basis.”

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg challenged Trump on those points.

“You frequently took credit for the stock market highs. You said it was a reflection of how well you were doing in the polls, and then after you were elected, you said the stock market highs were a reflection of how well the transition’s going and the American people’s confidence in your incoming administration,” Feinberg declared. “Now, the stock market’s not doing so well, and you’re saying that’s the Biden stock market, yet you are the president. Can you explain that?”

“No,” Trump replied. “I’m not taking credit or discredit for the stock market.”

The negative GDP numbers are for the full months of January, February, and March, so about 20 days short of the full three months took place on President Trump’s watch.

RELATED: As US Economy Shrinks Trump Appears Unaware of Crisis: ‘This Is Biden’s Stock Market’

But even Trump claimed credit for strong stock market numbers before he was sworn in to office — nearly one full year before he was sworn in to office, as political scientist Ian Bremmer noted:

Trump earlier on Wednesday had posted to his Truth Social account, “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th. Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden ‘Overhang.’ This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!”

As the Times noted, Peter Navarro, Senior Counselor to the President for Trade and Manufacturing, and a convicted felon who served in the first Trump administration, claimed that the G.D.P. figures “really should be very positive news for America.”

The Times remarked, “Few economists agree.”

It is not just President Trump and his trade architect Peter Navarro, attempting to “spin” the negative numbers.

“Well, look,” Trump White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told C-SPAN on Wednesday, “if you break it down, there is an outsized influence of January in that [GDP] report. Remember, this president wasn’t elected until January 20th. The GDP is a backward looking indicator, but all the other indicators that what we do have from that report and others show that there is a really positive trend for this president’s new golden age that he is unleashing.”

At President Trump’s Cabinet meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent praised the president’s “momentous” first 100 days and asserted that “American families are finding their financial footing again”—a claim at odds with recent consumer confidence reports, which have fallen to their lowest levels since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bessent also stated that “energy costs are down, mortgage rates have plummeted, and food costs are moving lower.” However, each of those claims is subject to challenge, with data and examples that suggest the opposite in many cases.

In a statement, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed “New Data Reveals Strong Economic Momentum.”

“It’s no surprise the leftovers of Biden’s economic disaster have been a drag on economic growth, but the underlying numbers tell the real story of the strong momentum President Trump is delivering. Robust core GDP, the highest gross domestic investment in four years, job growth, and trillions of dollars in new investments secured by President Trump are fueling an economic boom and setting the stage for unprecedented growth as President Trump ushers in the new Golden Age.”

Aaron Fritschner, Deputy Chief of Staff for U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), observed, “The White House statement on the GDP report simultaneously takes the positions that the economy contracting in the first quarter is both a good thing and Biden’s fault.”

Meanwhile, critics are blasting Trump and his administration.

“If you’re keeping track, Candidate Trump claimed credit for a booming stock market a year before he would ultimately take office, but here President Trump blames his predecessor after 100 days of his stewardship of the economy,” wrote NBC News senior White House correspondent Garrett Haake.

And in an all-caps post, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), the Democrats’ Chief Deputy Whip, appeared to mock Trump: “Last year when the stock market was booming that was because of me but now that I am president the problems are Bidens fault please chill this is going great I’m making deals be patient shortages are fine aaaaahhhhhh.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Great Jobs of the Future’ Are Generations of Family Factory Work Says Commerce Secretary

 

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