Time just released an interview with Trump. Read the entire thing and tell me he does not sound like a crazy person.
To be fair they seem to have used the common trick of stating exactly what he said, rather than editing out the verbal tics and hesitations and stuff like is normally done in journalism to make it easier to read, the purpose of which is unquestionably to make him look dumber.
I don't see any verbal tics or hesitations included in the transcript. This is just the way that Trump talks, which has always been a key part of his brand. It carries the advantage of sounding endearing and honest when spoken (at least to his supporters), and the disadvantage of sounding like gibberish when written down.
I can't help but disagree. Obviously he tends to meander when he's speaking, and that's not what I'm talking about. Perhaps I expressed it wrong but this line from early on:
But there will be, we are forming a committee.
I can't help but think if it was Obama they would have shortened it to "But we are forming a committee". Everybody talks in a way that doesn't look good to some degree in print, and except in cases when they are trying to make the interviewees look like idiots a journalist will clean it up for the sake of clarity and aesthetics. Otherwise most newspaper articles featuring man-on-the-street interviews would be as unreadable as this. I see no reason to think this interview was cleaned up in such a way.
Now obviously the whole purpose of the article is to focus on the ways Trump manipulates or distorts facts to the extent that they come out as outright lies, and I suppose this kind of on-the-fly restructuring of a statement could be seen as an example of that. I still can't help but think that the way Trump is presented is to some degree the verbal version of
this Time Magazine cover from 1994 featuring OJ Simpson, which despite its stated justification is almost universally seen as an attempt to instantly create a negative impression of him.
You know. For the propaganda.