Scott Gurvey's Public Offerings

The White House has decided to stop publishing transcripts of Trump’s public statements. They have also removed transcripts that were already posted and replaced complete videos of Trump speeches with excerpts, obviously edited. Why you might ask? The White House says the abridged video and audio provide a more complete representation of the president’s words and communication style. Yes, and I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

While the political wags seem mesmerized by a book which contains the “shocking” revelation that President Joe Biden was showing his age as the 2024 election approached, I’ll have more on reporting that obvious after the fact revelation in a future blog, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to obscure the fact that their head man is “cognitively challenged” himself.

His incoherent rants and stream of consciousness ramblings have been obvious for some time. But for some reason the media just edits around the craziness and tries to find the one cogent sentence among the ruins of the American language. The transcripts serve as an essential historical record and a definitive source for verifying the president’s statements. Removing the transcripts makes it harder to fact-check and analyze Trump’s remarks.

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Trump’s hour-long address began focused on the graduates and their accomplishments but soon drifted far afield as the cadets sat in embarrassed silence. Trump congratulated himself for completely restoring the American military to “greatness” and noted that “nobody joined the military during the last four (Biden) years”. Every graduating cadet in the audience had, of course, joined the military during the last four years. Trump claimed to have “liberated our troops from divisive and demeaning political trainings,” and said there will be “no more critical race theory or transgender for everybody.” This follows his January executive order that sought to deny the existence of transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people throughout government. As he rambled on, the content fell even farther off the rails.

On DEI:

“The job of the U.S. Armed Forces is not to host drag shows to transform foreign cultures, but to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun…. The military’s job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and anyplace. Our country was invaded for the last four years, and they’ve allowed people to come into our country that shouldn’t be, they shouldn’t be here…We’re getting them out and bringing them back where they came from.”

On trophy wives and real estate developer Bill Levitt:

“He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. But that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t it work.”

Trump has been married three times: Ivana Zelníčková, married in 1977, divorced in 1990. Marla Maples, married in 1993, divorced in 1999. And Melania Knauss, now Melania Trump, married in 2005. Each worked as a professional model before their engagement to Trump.

The West Point speech is not an isolated incident.

Prior to this excerpt, Trump claimed that the video showed

“Burial sites, over a thousand, of white farmers, and those cars are lined up to show love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things that you see is a cross, and there’s approximately a thousand of them, they’re all white farmers, the family of white farmers, and those cars aren’t driving, they’re stopped to pay respects to their family who were killed…. Both sides of the road you have crosses.”

In fact, these were pictures of a protest in response to the murder of a farm couple, Glen and Vida Rafferty, who were killed during a botched robbery of their farm in 2020. Nothing suggests that they were targeted for being white. The robbers broke into their home to get to a safe, couldn’t open it, and waited for the Raffertys to return home. After ambushing and shooting them, the murderers stole their car and other items. This was nothing like what Trump said about the video.

NBC reporter Peter Alexander interrupted Trump’s ramblings ask about his formal acceptance of the Qatari 747, giving Trump a chance to explode, and go off on another tangent.

“What are you talking about? You know, what are you talking about? You know, you’re oughta get out of here. What does this have to do with the Qatar jet? They’re giving the United States Air Force a jet, OK? And it’s a great thing. We’re talking about a lot of other things. Just NBC trying to get off the subject of what you just saw. You know, you’re a terrible reporter. Number one, you don’t have what it takes to be a reporter. You’re not smart enough.”

Trump wanted to embarrass a foreign leader using dishonest propaganda. Alexander ruined it and got a presidential attack in return. This is the kind of stuff that goes on every day in the Trump White House. This is what they do not want you to see. Or read about.

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