The Windmills of his Mind

People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it — you've been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it's funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the electoral college. Big, big, big advantage. I've always said the popular vote would be a lot easier than the electoral college. The electoral college — but it's a whole different campaign (unintelligible). The electoral college is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall, they want to see security. Now, it just came out that they're 73 percent down. ... That's a tremendous achievement. ... Look at this, in 100 days, that down to the lowest in 17 years and it's going lower. Now, people aren't coming because they know they're not going to get through, and there isn't crime. You know the migration up to the border is horrible for women, you know that? (Unintelligible.) Now, much of that's stopped because they can't get through.

The Washington Post's annotators flag the braggadocio and dishonesty in Trump's AP interview; what's striking, though, is how disconnected, stereotypical, and obsessive his thinking is, and how inadequate his language is to express it. It would be an interesting exercise to ask a psychiatrist to compare this to an interview transcript from a year ago, and another from five years ago.If you think Pence looked resolute staring down North Korea, just imagine how steely he's going to look when he transmits "to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives [a] written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." Of course he'll need "a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress" to sign on to it, but if you read the excerpt above (or better yet, the whole thing) it's not so hard to imagine that happening.