You know because of a couple of them said, "He didn't call them a currency manipulator." Well, for two reasons. Number One, he's not, since my time. You know, very specific formula. You would think it's like generalities, it's not. They have — they've actually — their currency's gone up. So it's a very, very specific formula. And I said, "How badly have they been," ... they said, "Since you got to office they have not manipulated their currency." That's Number One, but much more important, they are working with us on North Korea. Now maybe that'll work out or maybe it won't. Can you imagine? ...

Well that's... reassuring?

It's painful to read this interview. Trump knows how to bully people by talking relentless nonsense.

The other day some random guy came up to me and started talking about how he had been on a team that invented the microcomputer. And about some secret satellites that he claimed to know by name, because he worked on some tech around their launch. I was thinking "maybe he's crazy, or maybe there's a grain of truth in it, or maybe he's a smart guy who has fallen on hard times." I didn't want to dismiss him out of hand. Talking to him for a few minutes I felt like some of the things he said were maybe true, others were elaborations, others were invented. But I couldn't quite tell which was which. So I felt at a disadvantage because I couldn't really give an honest response to anything. In the circumstances you're not an equal participant. You smile and nod when you can, you try to keep listening, you're on guard for inadvertently nodding to something outrageous. You can't fact-check on the spot. You can't relate any of the conversation to anything that exists in your world. If you try, he takes your point and runs with it right back into his jungle of confusingness. I guess that's what they call "gaslighting". So I get the same feeling off Trump as I did off this guy, except with the addition of feeling bullied. The guy I met wasn't malicious as far as I could tell, just in a world slightly more of his own making than usual. But at some level Trump knows what he's doing; however unconsciously, this is strategic for him - it's a weaponized form of rambling nonsense, from a guy who's now in charge of everything.