The other night I was double screening it, reading an article on my phone while sitting in front of the TV. The author of the article made the point that Fox News has to be watched to be believed: people who only form an idea about it, second-hand, cannot possibly imagine that it's as ridiculous as it is. Since the TV was on and the remote within reach, I switched to Fox, and, what do you know, Sean Hannity was interviewing the President of the United States! Hannity was in the middle of a long question concerning whether, in Trump's opinion, Biden has the "stamina" for "the toughest job in the world." I watched till the end and all Hannity's questions were long, the better to cue Trump about what his answer should be. But on the stamina question, Trump went off the script, rattling on about how he had "aced" a "cognitive test" he'd recently taken. The doctors couldn't believe how well he'd performed! They'd never seen anything like it! As he droned on it occurred to me that he thought a screening for dementia was actually something like an IQ test. I trust he's smart enough not to brag about knowing the answers to the questions in a dementia screening. So it must be that he just didn't have a clue about the purpose of the exercise. Presumably the test is supple enough to distinguish disease from just ordinary dumb fuckery.
Hannity also asked Trump about his agenda for a second term. The long buildup for this one related to how he had recently asked Trump the same question, and that his answer had elicited a lot of criticism from "the left." Here is what Trump had said in Take #1:
It was pretty widely recognized, not just on "the left," that this was more dumb fuckery, and so in a subsequent interview with Sinclair, another right-wing "news" outlet, Eric Bolling gave him a chance for a do-over. Here's what Take #2 looked like:
And so now here was Hannity again, in the director's chair, ordering up a Take #3. This time Trump had some bullet points, which he recited in that flat, unconvincing way he has when reading from a TelePrompter. After the set speech was done, he began edging into another unmowed linguistic pasture, causing Hannity to cut him off on the pretext that the interview was running long and he had to hand off to Laura Ingraham. He and Ingraham then indulged themselves in some cute idle chatter about how great the guest before Trump had been.
State TV can't make him look like an able person, but you sure notice the effort.
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