Annotated Edition

Imagine if the interviewer could freeze time while Trump was in mid-sentence

Image by Mark Wilson/Getty Images via Vox.

Annotated edition of the NBC interview with the president-elect, nearly all of his lengthy response to the first question, "What do you plan to accomplish in your first 100 days?"

Well, we’re going to do something with the border, very strong, very powerful.

But you won't tell us what?

That’ll be our first signal — first signal to America that we’re not playing games.

Oh, sending a signal. Something with the border, and it's going to be a signal. To America. So you’re marketing something?

We have people coming in by the millions, as you know, and a lot of people shouldn’t be here. Most of them shouldn’t be here.

It has not been anything like millions at the border since December 2023, and especially since Biden's executive order of last June.

And how do you know who should and shouldn't be here?

But we have jails being emptied into our country. We have mental institutions from all over the world being emptied into our country.

Nobody, including your own campaign staff, has ever been able to point to any evidence that there is any truth to this story—

Trump’s campaign was unable to provide any evidence of the existence of a news story about a no-longer-busy doctor at a South American mental institution – and the campaign also failed to provide any evidence that South American countries are emptying mental health facilities to somehow send patients into the US. Representatives for two anti-immigration organizations told us they had not heard of anything that would corroborate any of Trump’s story, as did three experts at organizations favorable toward immigration. CNN’s own search did not produce any evidence. The website FactCheck.org also found nothing.

—which is ridiculous on its face anyway, I mean, try to imagine the logistics of it, this international conspiracy of governments collecting prisoners and mental patients by the thousands and shipping them to our southern border, without even the Border Patrol knowing anything about it.

The only time anything like that has even been imagined was in 1980, when you were in your mid-30s, and it was just one country, Cuba, openly assisting the Cuban-American community with the Mariel Boatlift, that was accused of unloading prisoners and mental patients, and nobody's ever shown any proof of that one either, but I'm pretty sure that's where you got the idea. I wonder how your Florida voters would feel about that—a lot of them Marielitos or with Marielito family members, are they aware you believe they're all criminals and mental defectives?

Or isn't it more reasonable just to assume that these immigrants decided they wanted to come here, of their own volition, in the hope of finding a better life, just like your grandfather, grandmother, mother, and a substantial majority of your wives?

So we’ll be doing that.

Doing what? Wait, I just asked that, didn't I?

We’re going to be extending within that period or as soon as we can the Trump tax cuts, because you know they’re coming due and they’re very substantial for people. It would be very—and I think it will anger a lot of people, frankly, if we don’t get an extension of that.

What's with the German grammar of putting the time adverbial ("within that period or...") ahead of the sentence object?

By "people", I assume you mean people with household incomes over $308,900, that's who got enough money out of it to make a really serious difference. (Those in the top one-tenth of one percent, like you, it's an average cut of $252,300, way too much to fit in the graph.)

And corporations are people too, my friends, only quite a bit more so. (Thanks to the tax bill's provisions on pass-through income, you're a corporation yourself, so you would have gotten a huge cut out of the $434.9 million in income you reported on your financial disclosure form in 2018. Of course on your tax returns you reported a negative income of minus $47.4 million, so you didn't pay any income tax at all that year.)

That’s what led us to one of the greatest economies ever.

It was an OK economy up until the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, not that exceptional, and not so much because of the tax cuts, more because of increased government spending.

The U.S. economy grew by 2.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019, and by 2.3 percent for the full year. This was the slowest pace since 2016 and slightly below the 2.4 percent rate in 2017. All growth rates are “real,” that is, adjusted for inflation.

Growth was driven mostly by consumer and government spending. Consumer spending grew by 2.6 percent in 2019, a more modest pace than 2018’s growth rate of 3%. Still, it accounted for more than two-thirds of 2019’s overall growth. Real disposable income was up 3 percent, slower than the 4 percent increase in 2018.

The other major factor was government spending, which grew in real terms by 2.3 percent last year. Federal spending rose by 3.5 percent, due to increases in Social Security and Medicare, as well as in discretionary spending. Defense outlays grew by 4.9 percent. State and local government spending rose 1.6 percent.

And those two things are going to be very vital, very important.

The two things are the marketing thing, that signal you're going to send about the border, and the renewed tax cuts?

We’re going to be focusing on crime in the cities, and we’ll work with Democrat governors. Most of them are, as you know, if you look at the 25 worst places, they’re just about all Democrat-controlled cities and states.

Oh, shut up, Donald. Three of them are in Tennessee, two in Ohio, three in Missouri, one each in Alabama, Arkansas, Lousiana, South Carolina, and Utah, and two in Texas. "Democrat governors" only gets you to 40% on that list. And you're not planning to "work with" them anyway. You're just trying to change the subject because you're not personally planning to do anything, you're leaving that to other people. "As you know." Throwing in one of your improv statistics. Go away.

And we’re going to have a lot of other things. We’ll be working on nominations. We’re going to still be working on some nominations. I think they’re going very well. We have — for the most part, I think they’re going extremely well. It looks like Pete is doing well now. I mean, people were a little bit concerned. He’s a young guy with a tremendous track record, actually. Went to Princeton and went to Harvard. He was a good student at both. But he loves the military...

And Luigi Mangione got great grades at Penn. Is this the Weave? No, I'm serious, just go away.