Trump's Hannity interview reveals a president out of touch with reality

Trump’s Hannity interview reveals a president out of touch with reality
He can’t explain what he’s trying to do or why.
By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Jan 10, 2019, 10:32pm EST


A Sean Hannity interview with President Donald Trump is always a curious spectacle: The interviewer has disavowed journalistic ethics, and the subject has no compunction about lying, so the entire affair has the atmospherics of a news program but the substance of a partially improvised drama. And what was so striking about the Thursday night Trump–Hannity interview at the US-Mexico border near McAllen, Texas, is how perfunctory the script and the performance is.

Even when faced with some of the most egregious softball questions of all time, Trump is barely coherent — unable to describe in any detail what exactly it is that he wants, unable to cite any specific legal authority for a potential emergency declaration option, and unable to describe what such an operation would actually let him achieve.

The one subject on which Trump displays any actual passion is the perfidy of the “fake news” media — perfidy that he tells Hannity he learned about by watching an earlier episode of Hannity’s show.

The man whose whims plunged the nation into a massive crisis that has air traffic controllers working without pay, FBI agents worried that ongoing investigations will have to be dropped, Joshua Tree National Park irreparably damaged, and food inspections curtailed seems to have no idea why.

Trump can’t explain exactly what he’s proposing

There’s one critical question in any political negotiation: What do the two sides want? Democrats’ view is fairly clear: They want to reopen the government and then let negotiations over any additional requests for wall-building to proceed on a separate track. Trump, by contrast, insists the government must stay closed until he gets his way.

But what is it he wants, exactly? Trump can’t quite say. He seems to acknowledge that he is not going to build the 2,000-mile wall he campaigned on by asserting that if the particular patch of border he is standing in front of was walled, then Border Patrol personnel could redeploy elsewhere. But how much wall are we talking about? And where? And at what cost? Trump doesn’t know.

more...

https://www.vox.com/2019/1/10/18177890/trump-hannity-interview-border-emergency