Normally, making fun of someone who is clearly suffering from age-related mental decline isn’t really a noble pursuit. But when it’s Donald Trump that’s sundowning, all bets are off.
On Monday, the former president went onto propoganda network Newsmax to give an embarrassingly incoherent interview, capping off a bad few weeks for him. While the one-time Apprentice host has made enough verbal gaffes to fill a particularly stupid museum, his recent comments about supply chains might just have entered the Trump eggcorn hall of fame.
In an interview with former Fox & Friends host Rob Schmitt (who resides in the liberal New York enclave of East Hampton), Trump was quick to slander current president Joe Biden, claiming that the country would cease to function if the Democrat was reelected to the highest office in the land. The fact that America is still functioning after four years of Biden was not discussed.
One of Trump’s reasons for the doom and gloom was the idea that supply chains would suffer under a second Biden administration, thus starving Americans of much needed goods and services. Like much of what Trump says, this didn’t make sense. Not because it was based on a lie (which it was), but because the former resident of the Oval Office referred to the concept as “supply change.”
Trump also claimed that the term wasn’t very well known, which is kind of true as he made it up on the spot. He stated:
“Look at even things like supply change…Things we never even heard about, you never heard that term. Everything worked under me. It all worked.”
The phrase “supply chain” is well known to anybody who has any modicum of business training, and many of those who don’t. It was also a key phrase during the COVID-19 pandemic, when supply chains were disrupted and rerouted so that more medicine, PPE, and other products deemed vital to combat the pandemic could be produced en masse for the U.S. and other countries.
As expected from a Newsmax presenter, Schmitt did not challenge Trump on his mistake, nor his lie that people didn’t know what supply chains were. He also didn’t have the backbone to point out that supply chains very much did not work well under Trump, with plenty of key supplies being hard to find during COVID, from toilet paper to medicines. Trump’s failed attempts to bully China by adding tarrifs to various goods, which led to a collapse in agricultural exports, were also not mentioned.