'Full of meaning’: NY Times writer highlights ominous message behind Trump’s ‘gibberish’

Donald Trump’s speeches, interviews, debates and Truth Social posts are “incoherent” and nonsensical, a New York Times columnist wrote Tuesday.

And yet, he added, they’re packed with ominous meaning.

Jamelle Bouie hit Trump as being unable to “follow a train of thought from beginning to end.”

“An always ignorant man now on the decline, he cannot form the kind of complex sentence you might find in a college term paper.”

Examples abound for Bouie. He hits the word-salad answer Trump gave last week at the Economic Club when asked about child care costs: “Look, child care is child care. It’s — couldn’t — you know, it’s something — you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”

Bouie summed it up with, “If there was anything of substance in this jumble of half-thoughts and unfinished sentences, it is suffocated under a heavy fog of thick gibberish.”

But, Bouie went on, it would be dangerous to dismiss Trump’s comments as simply “gibberish.”

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“He may rant and he may rave, but his rantings and ravings aren’t static,” he warned. “They carry meaning, even if the signal is hard to find in the noise.

He added, “These posts are still full of meaning.”

The messaging may have been jumbled, but Trump’s Economic Club speech was clear that he plans to impose tariffs and, as the Bouie put it, take the wealth of the world and give it to the USA.

And, in nonsensical posts over the weekend, Trump was very clear that he intends to seek retribution against his political enemies, Bouie wrote.

“Notwithstanding the cynicism of much of the public (and much of the press, for that matter), it is generally true that presidential promises translate into presidential action,” he wrote.

“And for the last nine years, it has been almost categorically true that the most reliable guide to Trump’s actions has been his own words. He wanted a Muslim ban; he tried a Muslim ban. He wanted to inflict pain on migrants and refugees; he inflicted pain on migrants and refugees. He said he would suspect and reject the results of any election he lost; he suspected and rejected the results of the election he lost.

“Donald Trump is deteriorating. He is incoherent. He can barely articulate a view on most issues. But on the question of his political opponents, he’s clear. He will punish them, if we give him the power to do so.”