Letting Trump's Words Speak for Themselves

The Washington Post ran Trump's rambling response to a question verbatim. It was brilliant.

Covering Donald Trump has always been a bit like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. His rambling, often nonsensical answers to straightforward questions present a challenge for journalists: How do you report on what he says without inadvertently making it sound more coherent than it is? Too often, the media falls into the trap of "sanewashing"—editing his words to make them seem more logical than they are, thus smoothing over the very incoherence that might give readers pause.

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Enter Stuart A. Thompson of The New York Times and Philip Bump of The Washington Post, who have taken a refreshingly straightforward approach: just print Trump's words verbatim and let readers see for themselves.

On Wednesday, Thompson shared his idea to Threads:

“I think it’d be fun to print Trump’s response to a simple question like ‘How to reduce grocery prices,’ and sign it from Donald J. Trump, and publish it like an Op-Ed and just run his entire comment with no explanation.”

He even made a little mock-up version of this to show what it would look like:

A mock-up of what this sort of piece might look like, via Stuart A. Thompson.

The point of this exercise is to highlight just how nonsensical Trump comes off when asked simple policy-based questions.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

At roughly the same time, Bump was busy implementing this concept. In a recent piece for the Post, he published Trump's full, unedited response to that question about inflation and grocery prices. Bump provided minimal commentary, adding only an introduction and 13 brief footnotes for clarification, letting Trump's words stand on their own—disorganized thoughts and all.

Donald Trump’s town-hall-style campaign event in Pennsylvania on Monday understandably attracted more attention for its conclusion than for its contents. But the actual question-and-answer period did provide useful insights that should not be overlooked.

One of the questions posed to Trump — apparently prescreened by the campaign — came from a Black woman standing behind him on the stage. Reading from a card, the woman said she had been raised in a Democratic, union household in Philadelphia before (as other question-askers said as well) seeing the light about America’s problems — and, in particular, how they affect the Black community.

“Like my fellow Americans,” the woman said, “my grocery bill has not gone down. Everything is still so very expensive. What steps will your administration take to help American families suffering from this inflation?”

What follows is Trump’s response in its entirety. Some audience feedback is indicated, and we’ve added some footnotes for clarification and correction. Paragraph breaks are placed approximately where Trump appeared to shift his train of thought.

By presenting Trump's words exactly as they're spoken, without the usual journalistic tidying up, Thompson and Bump allow readers to experience the full effect of his rhetorical style. It's a reminder of how often his responses are a tangled web of unrelated topics that leave the original question far behind—something Trump has taken to calling “the weave.”

Trump’s words:

So, you know, it’s such a great question in the sense that people don’t think of grocery. You know, it sounds like not such an important word when you talk about homes and everything else, right? But more people tell me about grocery bills, where the price of bacon, the price of lettuce, the price of tomatoes, they tell me. And we’re going to do a lot of things.

You know, our farmers aren’t being treated properly. And we had a deal with China, and it was a great deal — I never mentioned it because once covid came in, I said, that was a bridge too far because I had a great relationship with President Xi [Jinping]. And he’s a fierce man and he’s a man that likes China and I understand that. But we had a deal and he was perfect on that deal, $50 billion he was going to buy. We were doing numbers like you wouldn’t believe, for the farmer. But the farmers are very badly hurt. The farmers in this country, we’re going to get them straightened out. We’re going to get your prices down.

But you asked another question about safety and also about Black population jobs and Hispanic population in particular those two. So when millions of people pour into our country, they’re having a devastating effect on Black families and Hispanic families more than any others. I think it’s going to spread to a lot of other places.

I think it’s going to spread to unions. I think unions are going to have a big problem because, you know, employers are just not going to pay the price. They’re going to—and it’s going to be—it’s a very bad thing that’s happening.

So they’re coming in. Many are coming in from jails and prisons and mental institutions, insane asylums. That’s like, you know, step above, right? Insane asylum. And whenever I go, Hannibal Lecter, you know what I’m talking about. They always go—the fake news. That’s a lot of fake news back there, too.

They always mention—you know, it’s a way of demeaning, they say, ‘Hannibal Lecter, why would he mention?’ Well, you know why, because he was a sick puppy, and we have sick puppies coming into our country. I figured that’s a lot—that’s better than wasting a lot of words. You just say, ‘Hannibal Lecter. We don’t want him.’ But. But they always sort of say, ‘Why would he say that?’ I do it for a lot of reasons.

But I do it because we are allowing some very bad people into our country. And they’re coming as terrorists. You know, you saw the other day, last month they had the record number of terrorists. I had a month — and I love Border Patrol.

Did you see they gave me a full endorsement two days ago? Border Patrol.

The Border Patrol. And they’re great. And, you know, they want to do their job. They don’t want to let these people come in. They look at them. They can tell. They can look at somebody, say good, bad. They say what’s coming into our country now, it’s having a huge negative impact on Black families and on Hispanic families and ultimately on everybody.

And we’re going to close that border so tight. It’s going to be closed. And I said the two things I’m going to do, first, we’re going to close that border—and people are going to come in. You want people to come in. We need people to come in. People are going to come into our country legally.

You know, it’s so unfair. You have people that are waiting on a system, in a line and they’ve been waiting in this line. You know how long? For years, 10 years, 12 years and they study and they take tests. And then people come. I actually say, ‘Why don’t you just go and just come on across?’ I tell people that it’s terrible, right? I said, ‘Go out. You’re incredible.’ They say, ‘What can I do to speed up the process?’ I say, ‘You know what, go to the southern border. I’ll see you on the other side.’ It’s so unfair.

But we’re going to have them come in legally. You have to see what they have to do. They take tests on, you know, who was the first one here? What date was this? What does 1776 mean? All this stuff.

And these other people are coming in and they’re affecting the school systems and they’re affecting the hospital system. I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in Springfield, Ohio, a town of 50,000 people, they’ve just added 32,000 people. Illegal immigrants. And we’re not going to put up with it.

And we’re going to take care of your costs are going to come down, and you’re not going to have a problem with — because the biggest problem, and I’m hearing it from Black people and to a lesser extent right now, but it’ll be the same, Hispanic people.

And I’ll tell you what, our poll numbers have gone through the roof. With Black and Hispanic, have gone through the roof. And I like that. I like that. I like that. So we’re going to take care of it. You will be — I’ll tell you, if everything works out, if everybody gets out and votes on January 5th. Or before.

You know, it used to be, you’d have a date. Today, you can vote two months before, probably three months after. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing. But we’re going to straighten it all out. We’re going to straighten that out. We’re going to straighten our election process out, too. That’s going to be important, also. So thank you very much, darling. We’re going to get it straight. Thank you.

Importantly, this method respects the audience's intelligence. Instead of packaging Trump's statements into neat soundbites or attempting to extract coherent policy positions where none exist, they're essentially saying, "Here it is. You decide what to make of it." It's a level of transparency that's often missing in political coverage.

There's also a certain power in letting someone's own words serve as the critique. No amount of editorializing can match the impact of seeing unfiltered responses laid out plainly. It's a potent antidote to the sanitization that can occur when reporters unintentionally—or intentionally—make his statements seem more logical than they are. It cuts through the spin and lets the facts speak—or, in this case, ramble—for themselves.

So here's to Thompson and Bump. By letting Trump speak for himself, they've provided a public service and set an example that others should consider following.