President Donald Trump offered a vague answer when asked about the timing of the $5,000 “Trump Dividend” checks he said his administration would send to Americans after the midterms.
The Republican, who outlined the plan last night at the GOP’s midterm convention in Texas, spoke with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham about the check plan after his speech.
During the interview, the president was asked why he was promising to send the checks after the midterms if the money was available now.
“Because the Democrats can’t do it. Because with them, it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive,” Trump said. “So, we’re taking in $21 trillion. No country has ever taken in anywhere near that. It’s four or five times higher than the next one. All because of that beautiful word you and I love more than most others, tariffs.”
(It is unclear what $21 trillion the president was talking about, but neither his tariffs nor investment commitments to the U.S. have brought in that much money alone during his administration.)
Since 2015 Japanese translators have had so much trouble figuring out what he’s saying. In the first presidency, his boisterous rhetoric filled with exaggerations was hard to put in words that would sound befitting to a leader, and not be mistaken as the translators making fun of him. In more recent years, it’s his frequent repetition, primitive words and even more frequent derailing into word salad tangents that he can barely finish a coherent thought that is the challenge for translators.
For years they’ve pretty much given up and cut it to a 2 sentence summary each time at best. Recent example article in Japanese Recent example video
Anything short of that is sanewashing him and thus a dereliction of duty on the translator’s part.
The thing is that it was totally novel and in Japanese news on international affairs especially unprecedented, virtually everything was sanewashed in the past, so it’s not surprising that media and diplomatic officials in Japan were shocked and taken aback in the first couple years.
My god that’s fucking hilarious. You could not pay me enough to be a translator.