MSNBC host Rachel Maddow attacked the former president in a brief commentary on Tuesday, addressing comments he had made over the weekend.
The MSNBC host joined colleague Nicolle Wallace to discuss the speech Donald Trump gave in Las Vegas, Nevada, over the weekend that left even Republicans scratching their head.
Trumpretold a story he mentioned in October 2023, but this time, the comments were more disjointed and garnered more attention.
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The ex-president argued electric vehicles are dangerous because they can electrocute people if they contact water. The vehicles run on batteries — which are in all cars, gas, diesel, or otherwise. But in Trump's mind, batteries are dangerous. Think of a boat powered by batteries and not fuel. If the boat sinks, passengers could be electrocuted. Like all cars, boats also have batteries to run electronics on board, such as radios.
Read also: A neuroscientist reveals how Trump and Biden's cognitive impairments are different
Trump imagines a scenario where he has to choose between a sinking boat and a shark "10 yards away." He said he's eager to be electrocuted rather than face a shark.
The mockery was swift about him, as the comments were made in a landlocked, desert state during blistering heat that left six people hospitalized while standing in line for his rally. Eleven people were hospitalized due to heat at an Arizona Trump rally.
Maddow commented that for the cable news, there has never been a one-size-fits-all solution to covering Trump's speeches and rallies.
"I tried starting — started trying to do, is I tried to read the closed-captioning auto-generated transcripts of Trump's speeches," Maddow said. I don't think we should be carrying them live. It's knowing what he is saying. And it's worth conveying that when it is something dangerous, when it's new, when it's news-making and when it is nonsense. The Trump shark sinking-boat-battery thing was notable because it was completely gibberish. It's not the first time he has done it."
She said that those who were present for the event also didn't know what he was talking about.
"The fact that he chose to make this digression in land-locked Las Vegas telling people about the risk of sharks, like, where are the Las Vegas sharks? Are there freshwater sharks? Are they in the fountains in Las Vegas? Sharks, are they in the fountains in Las Vegas?" Maddow laughed.
Wallace noted that Trump has taken the MoCA Test and reminds people of it every time he does an interview.
"I think he's taken it two dozen times on TV — and we started cutting, and we found ten, and then we just stopped counting, I mean, he's obsessed withtalking about his own [mental] acuity in a campaign that seems obsessed with talking about Joe Biden's age," said Wallace.
She asked how people dealt with Trump during the first debate.
"The shark-boat thing, to me, I think it has two points of resonance," said Maddow. "And one of them is, what the heck is he talking about? This is weird. This doesn't make any sense. He's really, really, frequently incoherent. And when he's not incoherent, he's speaking in terms that are like pornographically violent when he is trying to rile up his audience. I mean, he speaks in ways that I think would be shocking to a lot of Republican people if they could stand to listen to him longer than they do and if news organizations could responsibly broadcast more."
The rhetoric is such a difficult nut to crack, she explained, that it may not even be possible. That said, Wallace noted that even Sean Hannity is encouraging Trump to pull out of the first debate.
See the full conversation with the hosts below or at the link here.
Rachel Maddow: Trump speaks in terms that are 'pornographically violent' www.youtube.com