Now the first time the reporter asked convicted felon President Trump if he’d had any comment on his buddy disgraced former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s arrest it was, admittedly, hard to hear over the wash of Marine One’s rotors. Watching on TV with subtitles off you probably would not have made out what the guy was saying. Trump did not and asked the reporter to repeat himself.
There’s no mistaking what the reporter then said, much more clearly. “Do you have any comment about Bolsonaro’s arrest?” he said and then even louder and specifically “The former Brazilian president!” to which Trump started “So I spoke last night to the gentleman you just referred to, and we’re gonna be meeting I believe in the very near future.” The press corps then raised their hackles and the reporter asked “Sir any comment on the former Brazilian president being arrested today?!?”
Trump then realized what he was said, switching to “No I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t heard anything about it. Is that what happened? That’s too bad. No I just think it’s too bad.”
Did Trump somehow get Bolsonaro confused with current Brazilian President Luiz Lula? If he spoke to Lula on Friday to plan an in-person meeting in the future there’s no public reporting on it. In fact there’s no reporting on Trump speaking with ANY foreign leader on that evening. Sure this is “The most transparent administration in history,” but you know sometimes even they slip up and forget to list a record of the president’s calls to foreign leaders. So maybe it was Lula or some other Latin American leader and the White House neglected to put it in the public ledger then Trump got a little more than mildly confused and spoke too fast when a reporter brought up Bolsonaro.
That’s the best case scenario here.
The other one is that Bolsonaro really did call Trump right before trying to saw off his ankle monitor, talking with Donald to arrange for asylum at a US diplomatic mission or with some other friendly regime like Hungary, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, so he could then be flown to the US to escape justice. Then Jair got arrested and Trump’s handlers purposely neglected to inform him this morning, hoping reporters wouldn’t ask about it until the team got a chance to fully brief the Orange Slob.
Or Trump knew because Fox News reported on it while he was watching and he caught himself after saying he had conspired with a would-be fugitive from Brazilian justice, but that’s six of one half-dozen of the other vs simple senescence. What sucks is that this could really go either way given the ambiguity of Trump’s words and his tendency to ramble anodyne nonsense while pretending to have listened to a reporter’s not-at-all-ambiguous question. Bad look no matter what though.