Donald Trump Cut Off by Interview Host Mid-Answer

Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait interrupted former President Donald Trump during an event on Tuesday as he was discussing wars, with the interviewer saying that the question was about tariffs.
While speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump said that the country “has a great military,” to which Micklethwait stopped the former president to reiterate that he “was asking about tariffs.”
“With great respect, I was asking about tariffs,” Micklethwait said. “You’ve gone off about that. Seeing that you’ve brought up tariffs and foreign policy, many people would say the biggest problem with your tariffs is actually geopolitics.”
Micklethwait went on to compare the U.S. approach of rallying allies against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. He asked about the overall effects of “slamming” allies with tariffs, prompting Trump to “answer first about policy.”
“You’re talking about slamming allies with 20 percent, 30 percent tariffs. Isn’t this time, you’re going to end up trying to rally the West and you’re dividing it instead,” Micklethwait said. “How does it help you take on China, turning all of your allies against you?”
The Republican presidential nominee said it helps him “tremendously” because “China thinks we’re a stupid country.”
“Not one president charged China anything,” Trump said, again not noting the allies and policy, which Micklethwait pointed out for a second time.
“Our allies have taken advantage of us more than our enemies,” Trump said after being prompted for a third time.
A spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s opponent, said the lack of focus “showed exactly why Americans can’t afford a second Trump presidency.”
“An angry, rambling Donald Trump couldn’t focus, had to be repeatedly reminded of the topic at hand, and whenever he did stake out a position, it was so extreme that no Americans would want it,” Joseph Costello said in a press memo sent to Newsweek. “This was yet another reminder that a second Trump term is a risk Americans simply cannot take.”
Trump boasted last week about his abilities to “weave” during speeches. Many critics have accused the former president of “rambling,” with The New York Times recently publishing a story with the headline “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.”
“He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought—some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical,” Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman wrote. “How much his rambling discourse—what some experts call tangentiality—can be attributed to age is the subject of some debate.”
Psychiatrist Richard Friedman wrote in The Atlantic in September that Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline, pointing to the presidential debate. While Friedman wasn’t offering a specific medical diagnosis, he said that by watching Trump’s vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence, as well as his ability to adapt to new topics, his expressions were “alarming.”
In his appearance on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast, Trump was asked about the two assassination attempts against him. He admitted he tried to “get out of” answering questions about the attempts this election season.
“I do a thing called the weave,” Trump said on the podcast last week. “And there are those that are fair that say, ‘This guy is so genius.’ And then others would say, ‘Oh, he rambled.’ I don’t ramble.”
Trump said a person needs to have “an extraordinary memory” to be able to accomplish his “genius” move of “the weave.”
“You need an extraordinary memory, because you have to come back to where you started. A weave is only good if you can go back,” Trump said. “I can go so far here or there. And I can come back to exactly where I started.”
Trump brought up his “weave” tactic in Chicago on Tuesday as well, saying it’s OK “as long as you end up in the right location at the end.”
Update 10/15/24, 5:48 p.m. ET: This story was updated with comment from Harris spokesperson Joseph Costello.