“I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed. They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

The president* said this to Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey of The Washington Post. Why neither man responded by leaping out a window, draining his bank account, selling off his investments, and moving permanently to Lapland, is a testimony to their professional durability, if not their instinct for self-preservation. The president* doesn't often give these kind of interviews. There is a reason for this. The reason is that, in these settings, the president* generally sounds like someone who should be confiding his opinions on world affairs to you after midnight in a bus station in Idaho.

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean.”

There was plenty of clean water to put out those fires in California, wasn't there? Also, it rains. Also, my feet have tiny golden wings. And, not to terrify you utterly, but here is the answer in full given by the Leader of the Free World to that question, courtesy of the WaPo 's official transcript of the conversation.

TRUMP: You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including – just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.

(Ed. Note: I just, y'know, I think I...but...yeah, I got nothing.)

TRUMP: Number two, if you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death, then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion. There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it — not nearly like it is. Do we want clean water? Absolutely. Do we want clean air to breathe? Absolutely. The fire in California, where I was, if you looked at the floor, the floor of the fire they have trees that were fallen, they did no forest management, no forest maintenance, and you can light — you can take a match like this and light a tree trunk when that thing is laying there for more than 14 or 15 months. And it’s a massive problem in California.



DAWSEY: So you’re saying you don’t see the —



TRUMP: Josh, you go to other places where they have denser trees — it’s more dense, where the trees are more flammable — they don’t have forest fires like this, because they maintain. And it was very interesting, I was watching the firemen and they’re raking brush — you know the tumbleweed and brush and all this stuff that’s growing underneath. It’s on fire and they’re raking it working so hard, and they’re raking all this stuff. If that was raked in the beginning, there’d be nothing to catch on fire. It’s very interesting to see. A lot of the trees, they took tremendous burn at the bottom, but they didn’t catch on fire. The bottom is all burned but they didn’t catch on fire because they sucked the water, they’re wet. You need forest management, and they don’t have it. Other places have denser leaders, too, but I can't think of one offhand.

Party on, folks. We're all doomed.

Sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Trump also threatened to cancel his scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin at a global summit this week because of Russia’s maritime clash with Ukraine. He said he was awaiting a “full report” from his national security team Tuesday evening about Russia’s capture of three Ukrainian naval ships and their crews in the Black Sea on Sunday. "That will be very determinative,” Trump said. “Maybe I won’t have the meeting. Maybe I won’t even have the meeting. . . . I don’t like that aggression. I don’t want that aggression at all.”

Getty Images

Nope. Don't like it. Don't want it. Ain't no cure for the summertime blues. Is this on? Hello?

Trump again questioned the CIA’s assessment that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a contributor to The Post, and said he has considered Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s repeated denials in his decision to maintain a close alliance with the oil-rich desert kingdom. “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” Trump said. “But he denies it. And people around him deny it. And the CIA did not say affirmatively he did it, either, by the way. I’m not saying that they’re saying he didn’t do it, but they didn’t say it affirmatively.”

I think he's looking for the word "definitively" here. But it's a slippery little devil and he can't quite grab it. (Let us pause here to recognize National Security Adviser John Bolton's Tuesday contribution to the discussion of this ghastly crime. He dropped in on Sarah Huckabee Sanders's suddenly irregularly scheduled Decept-O-Fest and he was asked if he'd heard the audiotape of Khashoggi's horrifying last moments. Bolton said he didn't want to listen to it because, hey, Khashoggi's death screams were in a language he doesn't understand, so they don't count:

"Unless you speak Arabic, what are you going to get from it?

(These really are the fcking mole people.)

Moving on, the president* was asked about Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation and he sought refuge in a burned-out thicket of what once was English.

“The Mueller investigation is what it is. It just goes on and on and on,” Trump said. When pressed on whether he would commit to letting the probe continue until its conclusion, he stopped short of making an explicit pledge. “And, in the meantime, he’s still there. He wouldn’t have to be, but he’s still there, so I have no intention of doing anything.”

Also, apparently, he thinks Janet Yellen is too short to be Fed chair. Maybe he thinks they work at elevated desks, the way they do at Gringott's, or did at Scrooge and Marley. At this point, he could bark his answers like a St. Bernard and it wouldn't surprise a soul.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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