You’ve heard of a stream of consciousness? This isn’t one of those. Donald Trump’s unabridged interview with the Wall Street Journal is a piece of surrealistic, wibbly, wobbly … word stuff. Like a conversation as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch; every little nook and cranny is filled with another disconnected phrase, an out of the blue flash of narcissism, a jaw-dropping expression of paranoia. It’s a conversation from which it’s almost impossible to draw reasonable excerpts, because it only really comes alive when you can see it in the terrifying whole. This is The Iliad of self-delusion. A primal scream of egotism. The Bayeux Tapestry of What. The. Hell.
It’s the kind of speech a Ritalin-soaked ferret might deliver … if he fell into a heap of uncut cocaine. And though any effort to extract anything that seems like a coherent bit of dialog is doomed to failure … Here. Just …. Look.
Mr. Trump: I have relationships with people, I think you people are surprised.
WSJ: Just to be clear, you haven’t spoken to the North Korean leader, I mean when you say a relationship with Korea—
Mr. Trump: I don’t want to comment on it—I don’t want to comment, I’m not saying I have or I haven’t. But I just don’t—
WSJ: Some people would see your tweets, which are sometimes combative towards Kim Jong Un...
Mr. Trump: Sure, you see that a lot with me and then all of a sudden somebody’s my best friend. I could give you 20 examples. You give me 30. I’m a very flexible person.
“I could give you 20 examples. You give me 30. I’m a very flexible person.” I’m telling you that Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs could not have crafted that with a bottle of tequila and a major stroke. What does it mean, man? What does it mean?
And that’s before Trump gets to America’s vicious rivers.
The only way to deal with the rest of the interview is to break it into … episodes. Not episodes like on television. Episodes. Like … somewhere between fits and seizures.