Donald Trump claimed high-profile campaign trail gaffes, in which he seemed to think Barack Obama was still president and mistook Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi, were deliberate, the result of his being “sarcastic” in the first instance and choosing to “interpose” names in the second.
“When I say ‘Barack Hussein Obama is the president of the United States’, [I am] meaning there’s a lot of control there because the one guy can’t put two sentences together,” the former president told supporters in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday.
“So I say ‘Barack Hussein Obama’.”
“The one guy” to whom Trump referred was Joe Biden, once Obama’s vice-president, who soundly beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election but whose fitness for office and a possible second term is now the subject of fierce speculation, given his age, 81, and allegations about his memory and performance.
Trump, who is 77, is also the subject of fierce speculation over his mental state and fitness for office.
Regardless – and despite his facing 91 criminal charges, attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection and civil suits including one in which he was adjudicated a rapist – the former president dominates the Republican primaries.
Having won in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, Trump enjoys huge polling leads over Haley in South Carolina, the former governor and UN ambassador’s home state which will be the next to vote.
In North Charleston, Trump repeated his racist and Islamophobic dog whistle about Obama’s middle name, itself an echo of the “birther” conspiracy theory Trump helped spread (and which he recently sought to direct at Haley), which contended that Obama was not qualified to be president because he was supposedly not born in the US.
“Remember Rush?” Trump asked, referring to Rush Limbaugh, the divisive rightwing talk radio host the comedian and senator Al Franken famously called a “big fat idiot” but whom Trump honoured with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020, not long before Limbaugh died of cancer.
Impersonating Limbaugh’s habit of stressing Obama’s middle name, Trump said: “He used to go, ‘Barack Hussein Obama’. ‘He’d go ‘Barack Hussein Obama’. But he did that, Rush. Do we miss Rush? Yes.
“But when I say that Obama is the president of our country, bah bah bah, they go, ‘He doesn’t know that it’s Biden. He doesn’t know.’ So it’s very hard to be sarcastic.
“When I interpose, because I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan, and when I purposely interposed names, they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki, from Tricky Nikki. Tricky Dicky. He didn’t know.”
In remarks in New Hampshire last month, Trump appeared to think Haley had been responsible for security at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
In fact, Pelosi was speaker of the House on the day Trump sent supporters to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Biden, a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and an attempt to remove Trump from the ballot which reached the US supreme court last week.
“I interpose and they make a big deal out of it,” Trump continued. “I said, ‘No, no, I think they both stink, they have something in common. They both stink.’”
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “interpose” means “to place in an intervening position, or to put (oneself) between”.
Trump possibly meant to say he “interpolated” Pelosi’s name for Haley’s – in the sense of “to alter or corrupt … by inserting new or foreign matter”.
