Trump's brain exposed as a 'series of hazy corridors filled with dead ends': analysis

Time Magazine this week published a lengthy interview with former President Donald Trump this week that analyst Noah Berlatsky believes exposes a cracked and fragmented psyche.

Writing at Public Notice, Berlatsky says that Trump's talk about deporting 11 million people living in the United States and about purging the civil service of anyone deemed insufficiently loyal is alarming.

However, those individual policy ideas don't capture what Berlatsky says is even more unnerving about the interview.

"Reading the whole interview, though, it’s clear that Trump does not know anything about anything," he contends. "His mind is a series of hazy orange corridors filled with dead ends, open pits, and trip wires. He stumbles through the maze, thunking gently off the walls, every so often belching forth a random quasi-anecdote or catch phrase."

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Among the weirdest passages, writes Berlatsky, comes when Trump explains why he wants to eliminate the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which Berlatsky believes is the point where the former president's "motives and cognition fall into a semantic black hole."

"Despite the devastating covid pandemic, which killed over a million Americans, Trump insists that there’s no reason 'to spend a lot of money on something that you don't know if it's gonna be 100 years or 50 years or 25 years,' and argues that the office is just 'giving out pork,'" he writes. "He adds that the experience of the pandemic means that 'I think we've learned a lot and we can mobilize, you know, we can mobilize' — missing the obvious point that one of the things the pandemic taught us is that you need to have systems in place before the pandemic begins if you want to 'mobilize.'"

Taking stock of the interview, Berlatsky concludes that Trump wants to be president again simply to exercise power to glorify himself rather than enact any coherent program aimed at helping Americans.

"You don’t want to be ruled by a tyrant," he argues. "You don’t want to be ruled by a fool. But God help us if we put ourselves again in the hands of this orange, hateful, bloviating tyrannical fool."