According to my sister’s book (yes, that was a plug), the 200,000 tonnes of rock that Kalgoorie’s Super Pit blows up every day yields three or four bars of gold. As each bar weighs 12.4 kg, that’s a yield of about 0.00002%. The Great Confusicator’s ratio of information to words must be about the same.
Trump’s recent AP interview is typical (and a very funny account of reading it is here). Set aside the self-aggrandizement, blaming Obama for everything, and the rambling asides about how he, alone of the previous five Republican presidents, beat the electoral college system (which is a, er, pre-requisite to becoming president), and what’s left are stock phrases – “Great guy, done some wonderful stuff” – “We’re gonna have a plan and it’s gonna be a great plan.” As we never get to learn what wonderful stuff the great guy has done, or what the plan is, the yield of information content thus far is zero.
However, buried in the drivel, this interview does contains two nuggets.
The first is the slow dawning on Trump that the US government “is thousands of times bigger than the biggest company in the world.” Well, duh-uh. As it happens, his numbers are wrong: at UDS3.46tn / year, the federal government is about one thousand times as big as the total probable worth of Trump’s own company, but it’s only about ten times as large as Exxon. And his related statement that the Department of Defense is the second-largest is plain bollocks: the economies of China, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, California and India are all larger than the DoD.
The second nugget is “you know the human life that’s involved.” We do. He apparently is new to the concept. More telling yet: “Well in business, you don’t necessarily need heart, whereas here, almost everything affects people. … Here, everything, pretty much everything you do in government, involves heart, whereas in business, most things don’t involve heart.” Having had this epiphany, he goes on: “In fact, in business you’re actually better off without it.”
I know of a large number of businesses that take a different view, but that single statement is probably the clearest summing up of Trump’s own way of doing business.
Now, to be fair, our new-found convert to the strange concept of “heart” goes on to say “You have to love people. And if you love people, such a big responsibility…” But do you notice something about the locution? Trump doesn’t say “I love people.” He doesn’t say “I have heart.” No, he says “You have to love…”, “you know that humans life’s involved,” “everything you do in government.”
So heart, after all, is for others, not for President Trump.
I’m sorry, delicate reader, but is more proof needed that President Trump’s not only an idiot, but also a cunt of the first order?