No One Knows What Donald Trump Is Talking About, and He Likes It That Way

Donald Trump is a difficult presidential candidate for the media to cover because, at bottom, he has no idea what he's talking about and doesn't care. He's the¯\_(ツ)_/¯ candidate, the avatar of the faction of the right that loves fake viral stories about Marines attacking atheist college professors. He speaks the way YouTube commenters type, putting one word in front of another until something resembling a sentence tumbles out. To a professional class of pundits whose whole thing is parsing those sentences for meaning, this is extremely frustrating.

Take Trump's recent statement at a rally that Barack Obama is "the founder of ISIS. He's the founder of ISIS. He's the founder." This is obviously not true, and on Thursday, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt gave Trump the chance to expand on that statement: "I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace," Hewitt said.

"No, I meant he's the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton," replied Trump.

Hewitt: "But he's not sympathetic to them. He hates them. He's trying to kill them."

Trump: "I don't care. He was the founder. His, the way he got out of Iraq was that that was the founding of ISIS, OK?"

Hours later, Trump was mocking people for taking him so seriously, prompting a whole new wave of stories. The circle of life!

Trump is unique among politicians for his ability to say things that he doesn't mean. He changes his positions on important topics like his proposed ban on Muslim immigration, he routinely denies saying things he did in fact say, and sometimes he'll simply claim he was just joking. His go-to move is to throw up a cloud of words that sort of resemble something someone might say, then move on.

Earlier this week, when he made his much-criticized remarks that many took to be a veiled threat (or not-so-veiled) at Hillary Clinton, what he actually said, according to a Time transcript, was:

"Hillary wants to abolish —essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know. But—but I'll tell you what. That will be a horrible day. If—if Hillary gets to put her judges—right now, we're tied. You see what's going on."

The logical way you would parse that is he's saying, If Clinton gets to pick judges—which means she'll be president—there won't be anything we can do about it. But wait, maybe the "Second Amendment people" can do something…

That interpretation, though, assumes that Trump is thinking more than two or three words ahead of himself. It assumes that Trump isn't making this up as he goes along, not even day by day but syllable by syllable, like a sitcom character inventing increasingly implausible and impractical lies in an attempt to weasel out of an embarrassing situation.

The embarrassing situation, of course, is that Trump has become the Republican candidate for president, which according to his former strategist was never part of his plan. But now he's here and doesn't know what to do, so he does what comes instinctively—he keeps talking.

Naturally, nearly every time he opens his mouth he says something not just controversial but outright wrong. On Thursday, he told the Miami Herald that he would be "fine" with trying US citizens charged with terrorism in Guantanamo Bay—which would be illegal, and likely impossible thanks to the Sixth Amendment. But it's also obvious that he hasn't thought for more than five seconds about the issue, and equally obvious that he'd probably give a different answer if you asked him about it today. So what do you do with that, if you're in the business of trying to figure Trump out, either as a member of the press or an interested voter?

Trump can't be reduced to the sum of the things he says. He brags openly about his inscrutability, the inability non-supporters have to explain or even define him. The language of politics is cautious, precise, and neutered, full of jargon and technicalities. When candidates speak it well, it makes it easy for the press—let's break down the details of Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan!—but Trump is appealing to a certain segment of the population precisely because he is a break from all that bullshit. He speaks bluntly, off the cuff, with a disregard for the facts, and every wave of outrage is just another chance for him to demonstrate how much of an outsider he is.

His habits of obfuscation, contradiction, and outright lying are not endearing to most undecided voters. But to his supporters, the words that come out of Trump's mouth are not the point; the point is that he is making the hated establishment upset, and nothing—not the media, not fellow Republicans—can shut him up.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.