"The president of the United States, ladies and gentlemen, was in full Mad King mode, rambling, confused, disjointed, parading his grievances..."

"... with barely a wave from afar at coherence. It was as if a hive of buzzwords exploded in his head: statues, boats, vandalism, socialism, suburbs. It is hard to write this display without using the word 'impaired.' Because it wasn’t just the disjointed word salad. It was the delivery. Trump was somnolent, as if he’d pulled an all-nighter watching Fox & Friends or maybe his VCR tapes of Shark Week. Imagine the covfefe tweet come to life. The Rose Garden event was ostensibly about China, but quickly disintegrated into something between one of his improvisational stump performances, a stream of broken consciousness, and a rambling oppo dump. Perhaps the president really misses campaign rallies. Or maybe he just got confused. Someone on his staff gave him a summary of horrible things that he might someday be able to craft into a campaign attack on Joe Biden . . . and so he just stood there and read the whole thing...."

Writes Charles Sykes at The Bulwark. The full video of Trump's press conference is embedded over there. I could embed it here, but instead, I'll link to the transcript — a much faster, easier way to check Sykes's characterizations. It seems to me Trump has a way of speaking, and it's idiosyncratic but enjoyably listenable if you get into its groove but weird and chaotic if you resist. That's nothing new.

Let me pick something out of the transcript for discussion. Well, the first thing he says may explain the somnolence — it was hot (over 90°): "Too hot, but it’s pretty warm." Right off, that's crazy, no? What's with "but"? It's hot, but it's warm! I get a "Walrus and the Carpenter" vibe, you know:

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

That's not word salad. That's genius!

I've got to pick out something else. That was too easy. Here's the part where he transitions from talking about China — the lead-off topic — to Joe Biden. That is, it becomes a campaign speech with a forced-to-be-polite captive audience, broiling in the hot-but-warm sun:

America lost nearly 10,000 factories while Joe Biden was Vice President, think of that. 10,000 factories. He wrote something today and he made a statement today that I wrote down. It’s pretty accurate. So Biden was here for 47 years. Eight years, the last eight years, not long ago as Vice President he said, “One in five miles of our highways are still in poor condition.” Well, we’re doing a good job on highways, but why didn’t he fix them three years ago? Why didn’t he fix them? Tens of thousands of bridges are in disrepair and on the verge of collapse. Well, that’s probably not a right number, but we have bridges that should have been fixed. Why didn’t he fix him? He was here for eight years with President Obama. Why didn’t they fix them? Tens of thousands of bridges. This is what he wrote. High speed broadband. We want high speed… well, why didn’t they get it? Three years ago is not a long time and he didn’t do any of the things, but now he says he’s going to be president and as president, he’s going to do all the things that he didn’t do. He never did anything except make very bad decisions, especially on foreign policy. So Joe Biden and President Obama freely allowed China to pillage our factories...

That links the discussion of factories back to the initial topic, China. If Sykes liked Trump, he could just as well marvel at the complexity and nuanced flow of interwoven topics.

... plunder our communities and steal our most precious secrets. And I’ve stopped it, largely, but I’ve stopped it and it wasn’t easy because you talk about a certain power of the telephone and the calls where they would call and say, “No, we don’t want to do that.” And other countries would call on behalf of China, but I did it. I did what has to be done. And you just take a look at what’s gone on and take a look at the numbers where they devalued their currency in order to pay the tariffs. Now, the Democrat party is calling for defunding of our military, think of that. Defunding, they want to defund our military when China is building a massive military. They’re building a massive military and Biden wants to defund our military and the world needs American strength right now, more than ever. And we’ve got it. We’ve got now, soon as all this equipment comes in, all made in the USA, we’ve got the newest, most incredible weapons anywhere in the world. We have the best tanks, the best ships, the best missiles, rockets. We have the best of everything. We have the best fighter jets, the F-35, the F-18. All of these assets are being built, tankers, incredible tankers, bombers. Hope we don’t have to use them, but we have the most incredible military. When I came in the military was totally depleted. It was at a level that was just absolutely incredible. You know the statements, I made the statements before. I told you what generals told me about our military and I’ll make them again.

If somebody needs them, we’ll give them to you. Very well documented. As Vice President Biden opposed tariffs, and he was standing up for China. He didn’t want to do anything to disrupt the relationship with China even though China was taking us to the cleaners.

He's still on the China topic, even as he's criticizing Biden and extolling himself.

He opposed my very strict travel ban on Chinese nationals to stop the spread of the China virus.

On to the coronavirus topic, still interwoven with criticism of Biden and amassing credit for himself:

He was totally against it. Xenophobic, he called me. Xenophobic. A month later, he admitted I was right. We would have had thousands of people additionally die if we let people come in from heavily infected China, but we stopped it. We did a travel ban in January. Nancy Pelosi was dancing in the streets of Chinatown in San Francisco a month later and even later than that and others too. They all thought what I did was a terrible mistake. We would have lost… in fact, Dr. Fauci said we would have lost thousands of additional people if President Trump had to do that. And I was a crowd of one, because even experts didn’t want to do it. They thought it was a mistake....

But if we had listened to Joe Biden, hundreds of thousands of additional lives would have been lost. And if you look at the job he did on swine flu, I looked at a poll. They have polls on everything nowadays and they got very bad marks on the job they did on the swine flu. H1N1, he calls it N1H1. H1N1 got very poor marks from Gallup on the job they did on swine flu. And they stopped very early on, testing. They totally stopped it. They just said stop. And frankly, if we didn’t test, you wouldn’t have all the headlines because we’re showing cases. And we have just about the lowest mortality rate. But if we did… Think of this, if we didn’t do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing, we would have half the cases....

This is completely coherent. He's saying that Biden did a bad job with swine flu and it's hard to see because they stopped testing, meanwhile the numbers on coronavirus are as high as they are because of all the testing. Skipping ahead a little, past what looks like a coherent discussion of coronavirus, he weaves Biden back in — with plenty of China:

Joe Biden didn’t just side with China on the virus... He called me, again, xenophobic. That’s what he said. You all heard it many times. He described the rise of China as “a very positive development”. It’s not a positive development. Not for us it’s not. He said that the idea that China is our competition is really bizarre. He’s really bizarre. He said, “China is not a problem.” No, nobody’s ripped us off more than China over the last 25, 30 years, nobody close. And he says China is not a problem. Now he takes it all back. Now he wants to be Mr. Tough Guy.

But for years, 47 years, he never came out against China, never say anything bad. Just the opposite. His son walked out with $1.5 billion of money to invest where he’ll make hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions of dollars a year, walked out with $1.5 billion. I asked one of the biggest people on Wall Street, maybe the biggest, “Is that possible?” He said, “No,” he’s never seen it. They don’t do that. But Hunter, where’s Hunter, where is Hunter by the way? Hunter Biden walked out with $1.5 billion. In Ukraine he got $83,000 a month and I guess an upfront payment of $3 million. So he went from not having job to getting $83,000 a month with a lot of money paid up front to work for Burisma. And you all know about Burisma, but nothing happens, nobody cares. And he was unemployed as you know, he was unfortunately forced to leave the military. He was forced to leave. Didn’t have a job and all of a sudden he’s making a fortune, but nobody talks about that. Indeed Biden expressed more fawning praise about China on an ordinary day than about America. On the 4th of July, the last Independence Day, Biden attacked the United States and said we had, “never lived up to the ideals of our fathers, our forefathers, or our founding fathers, those founding ideals.” And yet he enthusiastically stated that China is a great nation and we should hope for its continued expansion. Well, we all wish well to China, but what China has unleashed on the world, it’s hard to even fathom. I see people now, friends of mine, they walk up, they want to say hello, and they have to keep their distance and they’re all covered up like you’re all covered up with face masks. It’s a different world, but we’re coming out on top.

Biden sides with China over America time and time again. And he said on the 4th of July, “American history is no fairytale.” And yet blindly celebrates China saying few nations in history have come so far so fast. He’s so proud of them. He’s so proud of them. Now, Joe Biden is pushing a platform that would demolish the U.S. economy, totally demolish it. So we built the greatest economy in the history of our country, greatest in the history of the world....

This seems perfectly coherent to me. The main objection is that he's in the Rose Garden setting, and he's making the case against his political opponent. To present this as "disjointed word salad... the covfefe tweet come to life.... disintegrated... a stream of broken consciousness... a rambling oppo dump... confused" — come on. That's completely biased.

Imagine a transcript of Joe Biden speaking extemporaneously for over an hour — and don't even impose the difficulty of standing and wearing a suit and tie in 90+ degrees of hot warmth. What would that sound like? If it was anything like the transcript you see above, I guarantee you the press would laud him as a magnificent genius.