AP uses the word “Unintelligible” sixteen times in its interview transcript with Donald Trump

| 3:42 am EDT April 24, 2017
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Over the past week Palmer Report has documented a rapidly increasing number of mental lapses on the part of Donald Trump. He’s forgotten names, people, gotten confused about which country he bombed (link). But in a new Associated Press interview, Trump all but confirms our hypothesis that whatever is wrong with his cognitive function, it’s deteriorating sharply.

The AP has published a lengthy transcript of its new Donald Trump interview, and a number of things stand out. For instance he compares the ratings of one of his campaign television appearances to the ratings that were garnered by 9/11. In another instance he claims he doesn’t “support or unsupport” Julian Assange, even though his administration just called for Assange’s arrest, and “unsupport” isn’t really a word. But his offensive and nonsensical remarks ultimately take a backseat to his unintelligible remarks. And we have to take the AP’s word for it when it comes to the word “unintelligible” because the AP used that word sixteen times during the course of the transcript.

The Associated Press does say at the beginning of the story that “Where the audio recording of the interview is unclear, ellipses or a notation that the recording was unintelligible are used.” But these cannot be instances of the AP simply not being able to hear what Trump said due to audio issues. In the one instance where that happened, they labeled it as “inaudible” instead. No, these sixteen instances of the word “unintelligible” can only be a result of Trump making noises that weren’t real words – or perhaps not even fake words.

In fact in one instance where Trump used the word “impalatable,” whose legitimacy as a word is questionable, the AP simply added “(sic)” after it. Instead this harkens back to when the CNN closed captioner got sick of the Republican primary debate candidates all screaming over top of each other, and merely put the words “unintelligible yelling” on the screen.

So what the hell was Trump doing during those sixteen “unintelligible” instances? We suspect the AP may end up having to offer further explanation, or perhaps even end up releasing portions of the audio. Because in addition to the sheer absurdity of what Trump said that was actually included in this transcript, the repeated use of “unintelligible” gives the impression that he was just making noises that he hoped would be mistaken for words. You can read the entire lengthy AP transcript here.