If there is a national emergency at the border, Donald Trump wasn’t in any rush to declare it. The president showed up about 40 minutes late to his planned speech Friday morning in the Rose Garden and immediately began rambling about trade negotiations with China. He proceeded to go on a long tangent about trade, Brexit, Syria, and his plans for a second summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, all without the use of a teleprompter. Eventually he got to the point. “I’m going to be signing a national emergency,” Trump said. According to White House officials, the declaration will allow Trump to redirect $3.6 billion from the military, $2.5 billion from counter-narcotics programs, and $600 million from the Treasury to build a border wall that Congress refused to fund.

Trump appeared resigned to being sued for what both Democrats and Republicans have denounced as an unconstitutional power grab. “We will have a national emergency, and we will then be sued,” he explained, breaking into a strange sing-song voice. “And they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit, even though it shouldn’t be there, and we will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we’ll get another bad ruling, and then we’ll end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully we’ll get a fair shake, and we’ll win in the Supreme Court just like the ban.”

The government lawyers who will inevitably have to argue that case were surely appalled by what came next. “We have so much money. But on the wall, they skimped,” he said, complaining that Congress had not given him the $5.7 billion in funding he wanted. “I didn’t need to do this,” he added, potentially undermining any legal justification for an emergency declaration. “But I’d rather do it much faster.”

It is hard to capture in text the utter strangeness of the entire incoherent, self-defeating monologue. As always with Trump, the full video needs to be seen to be believed. But for those who can’t bring themselves to watch 50 minutes of the president praising himself and berating reporters, here are the most absurd highlights:

On other emergency declarations:

It’s been signed many times before. It’s been signed by other presidents. From 1977 or so, it gave the presidents the power. There’s rarely been a problem. They sign it; nobody cares. I guess they weren’t very exciting. But nobody cares. They sign it for far less important things in some cases.

On executing drug dealers: