I Read Trump’s Stupidest Quotes So You Don’t Have To

I have been doing quite a bit of serious work lately. Proper research. Money trails. Christian nationalism. Project 2025. The cult machinery around MAGA. All the dark stuff. All the “sit at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and quietly wonder whether civilisation has maybe eaten a bad mushroom” stuff. Not Andrew Tate, we’re in The Matrix type stuff, more a “Dude, I am trippin’ my tits off right now” vibe.

So today I wanted something lighter.

Not less political, obviously. Everything is political when the most powerful man on Earth keeps saying things that sound like they were assembled by toddler with fridge magnets. But lighter in the sense that sometimes you do have to step back from the horror, read a collection of Donald Trump’s most stupid quotes, and allow yourself the simple democratic pleasure of taking the piss.

Indy100 has pulled together a list of 52 of Trump’s stupidest lines, and I have done the public service of reading them so you don’t have to. Not all fifty-two, because even I have limits, and because there are only so many times a human brain can absorb the phrase “windmills are driving whales crazy” before it starts looking for a quiet place to lie down. I’ve lived the nightmare of bad local spoken word nights, I still have flash-backs to awkward words juxtapositions. But Trump takes it to a different level.

So I picked my favourites.

Not the most evil. Not the most dangerous. Not the most historically important. Just the ones where Donald appears to leave the known world entirely and wander off into that little orange dream-space where geography, maths, science, medicine, foreign policy and the English language all stand around looking embarrassed.

Let’s start with Spain.

Donald Trump apparently claimed Spain was a BRICS nation. Spain. The country in Europe. Spain of tapas, flamenco, paella, Real Madrid, Barcelona, NATO membership, the European Union, and absolutely no known involvement in the founding acronym of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

And the beautiful thing is not just that he was wrong. Donald being wrong is not news. Donald is wrong with the dependability of gravity. The beautiful thing is that he said it with that Trumpian confidence, that “I alone have just discovered geography” glow. He even added something along the lines of, “Do you know what a BRICS nation is? You’ll figure it out.”

Yes, Donald. We did figure it out. That is the problem. You didn’t figure it out.

This is what he does. He explains things he does not understand to people who do understand them, then acts as if their confusion is caused by their ignorance rather than his. It is not a mistake. It is a whole personality structure wearing a red tie. He doubles down of dumb. That’s dumb, with a “b”. But we’ll get to that later.

Then there is the drug-pricing quote, where he claimed prices could come down by “1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 per cent.”

This one is special because it is not merely stupid. It is mathematically impossible in a way that feels almost artistic.

A 100 per cent price cut takes something to zero. That is it. That is the bottom of the lift shaft. A 1,500 per cent price cut would mean the pharmacist hands you the tablets, gives you your money back, pays your mortgage, sends your mum some flowers, and apologises on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.

But Donald does not use numbers as numbers. He uses them as noises. Big noises. Manly noises. Tremendous noises. A number is not there to measure anything. It is there to make the sentence look like it has muscles. Big numbers. Manly numbers. Donald sized numbers.

So a normal politician might say, “We reduced costs.” Donald says, “One thousand five hundred per cent,” because in his head bigger is always truer, even when maths itself is standing nearby with a migraine and a nosebleed.

Then we have paper straws.

Donald says paper straws “explode.”

Not bend. Not collapse. Not go soggy. Explode.

Somewhere in the deep personal trauma archive of Donald J. Trump, there is clearly a paper straw incident. A moment. A wound. A betrayal. Perhaps he once tried to drink a Diet Coke through one, it softened slightly, and from that day onwards environmental policy became personal. The paper straws were out to ruin Donald’s life.

A paper straw did not perform masculinity correctly in front of him, and now the whole planet has to suffer.

This is the absurdity of it. The world is burning, seas are rising, democracies are collapsing, billionaires are strip-mining the future, and Donald is standing there like a toddler in a McDonalds declaring war on biodegradable drinking tubes because one of them got damp, and ruined his sucking experience. It’s okay Donald, you suck massively, no-one sucks like you, people, important people, they look at you Donald, with tears welling in their eyes, and say, you suck Donald.

Moving on, we come to the whales.

“The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”

Obviously.

That word is doing so much work it should be paid overtime. There is no argument. No evidence. No marine biology. No serious environmental analysis. Just Donald looking at offshore wind and deciding that whales are psychologically distressed by turbines.

In his mind, somewhere beneath the waves, a whale psychiatrist is presumably saying, “I’m afraid it’s the windmills again.” A pod of whales is sitting in a support group, trying to process renewable energy. One of them has started smoking. Another can no longer listen to Fleetwood Mac without wailing.

This is what happens when a man builds his worldview out of golf-course planning disputes and cable news graphics. Windmills annoy Donald, therefore they must be evil. And if they are evil, they cannot merely produce clean energy in a way he finds visually displeasing. No, they must also be driving whales mad, ruining television, lowering property values, killing birds, stealing wind and possibly teaching dolphins about communism, through the medium of low vibrations.

Then there is the election claim. Donald said he probably won all fifty states.

He won thirty-one.

Now, I am not a trained American electoral scholar, but I do know that thirty-one is not fifty. Even in Britain, where our democracy was clearly designed by a drunk aristocrat trying to make sure nobody normal understood it, especially not the unwashed masses, we can still count to fifty.

But Trump does not lose in his own mind. He is not capable of it. If Donald loses, the world has made an administrative error. The ballots are wrong. The judges are wrong. The states are wrong. The maps are wrong. The machines are wrong. The dead Venezuelan communists are wrong. Everyone is wrong except the man who looks at a defeat and announces it was actually a clean sweep because his feelings have certified the result. I mean is numbers are pliable in Donald’s world of maths, statistics have no chance. The percentage sign % is just something Donald adds to numbers to make them sound powerful.

That is not politics. That is a toddler declaring he won Monopoly because he likes hotels, while stuffing as many as he can up his nose.

Then came possibly the most Trumpian definition of a ceasefire ever attempted.

A ceasefire, according to Donald, can mean shooting “in a more moderate manner.”

Ceasefire. Cease… Fire… Oh for fuck’s sake Donald.

The word is doing everything it can to help him. It has arrived with instructions built in. It is not a difficult diplomatic term buried inside a treaty. It is two plain words standing there in a high-vis jacket waving little flags, with “STOP KILLING PEOPLE” emblazoned across it.

And Donald still gets to: “shooting, but politely.”

Moderate shooting. Civilised bombing. Missiles with manners. A lovely little peace process where everyone keeps firing, but perhaps with a softer tone and better lighting, and an armour tipped apology delivered with every bomb dropped.

It is foreign policy as explained by a man trying to negotiate with a toaster.

Then we have spelling, where Trump announced that most people do not know the word “dumb” ends with a B.

Most people do know that, Donald. Just because you just worked it out, doesn’t mean it’s a revelation to the rest of us that learned that when we were in first grade.

Children know that. Teachers know that. People who once glanced at a cereal box know that. The silent B in dumb is not ancient forbidden knowledge handed down by monks. It is not the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is primary school spelling bee, ironically.

But this is another little window into the Trump mind. He discovers an ordinary fact late in life, mistakes his own delay for public ignorance, then announces it as if he has cracked the code of human language.

“Most people don’t know dumb ends with a B.”

Yes they do, Donald. Most people with a brain also know Spain is not BRICS, a ceasefire means stop firing, and paper straws do not detonate.

Oh and, there is no “Islamic Republic of Japan.”

This one sounds like a diplomatic emergency falling down the stairs.

Japan is not the Islamic Republic of Japan. Iran is not Japan. These are not niche confusions. This is not mixing up two obscure subcommittees at a trade conference. This is confusing a major East Asian country with a Middle Eastern Islamic republic while somehow remaining the person allowed to speak on behalf of American foreign policy.

Imagine being the aide in the room. Imagine having spent your morning preparing briefing papers, regional maps, military notes, threat assessments, trade figures, pronunciation guides, and then the President opens his mouth and invents halal Tokyo.

At some point the adults in the room must just stare at the carpet and wait for the sentence to end.

Then we get “I love the inflation.”

Now, this is a man whose entire act depends on blaming inflation on everyone else. Migrants. Democrats. China. Windmills. Electric cars. Paper straws. Judges. Postal ballots. Whales. Possibly Spain joining BRICS.

And then out comes: “I love the inflation.”

It is magnificent. It is like an arsonist launching a campaign called Big Fan of Fire.

Of course his defenders will explain it. They always explain it. He was joking. He was being sarcastic. He meant something very sophisticated about macroeconomic pressure. He was speaking in coded genius. You simply do not understand the eleven-dimensional chess of a man who thinks a ceasefire is moderate shooting.

No. He said the stupid thing. Again. He does it almost daily.

Then he claimed people call him the president of Europe.

No they do not.

I can help here, as someone sitting on this side of the Atlantic. Nobody in Europe calls Donald Trump the president of Europe. Nobody is walking out of a meeting in Brussels saying, “Thank God the orange emperor has spoken.” Nobody in France is putting down a croissant and whispering, “At last, Europe has a leader.” Nobody in Germany is updating official documents to reflect the new continental arrangement under President Spray Tan.

This is imaginary nickname syndrome. Trump write himself autobiographical fan fiction in his head, then quotes it as diplomacy.

Then there is Maine lobster.

Donald said you had to go to Japan to get a Maine lobster.

A Maine lobster. From Maine. Yes that place on the USA famous for lobster.

This is such a beautifully stupid sentence that it almost becomes poetry. Maine lobster, famous mainly for being from Maine, apparently required trans-Pacific travel until Donald personally reopened a geography book, and thought of food.

And finally, there is the golden dome and the “SS Abraham Lincoln.”

This one has everything. War. Gold. Ships. Missiles. Wrong terminology. Big strong man noises. The smell of a half-remembered action film being narrated by someone eating KFC chicken off a silver tray in the War Room under the White House.

Trump talks about a golden dome over America because of course he does. In Donald’s mind, safety must be gold. Defence must be gold. Buildings must be gold. Toilets should probably be gold. The country itself, if it is lucky, might one day be covered in a massive gold lid like a casino butter dish.

Then he talks about the Abraham Lincoln and calls it the “SS Abraham Lincoln,” because why learn naval terminology when you can simply make sounds with authority?

This is the thing that still gets me. It is not just that he gets things wrong. It is the confidence. The full-body confidence. The absolute absence of shame. A normal person mispronounces something and feels a small internal collapse. Donald misnames a ship, rewrites a war, invents a dome, moves Spain into BRICS, turns ceasefire into moderate shooting, and walks away believing he has once again improved reality.

And that is why these quotes are funny, but not only funny.

They are funny because they are absurd. They are funny because the most powerful man in America often sounds like someone reading half a headline while falling asleep in a golf cart.

But they are also revealing.

This is not ordinary stupidity. Ordinary stupidity can be humble. Ordinary stupidity can learn. Ordinary stupidity can say, “Oh, I got that wrong.”

Trumpian stupidity is different. It is stupidity with power, with applause, with sycophantic staffers, with nuclear codes. Stupidity with a fanbase trained to treat every correction as an attack and every error as secret wisdom.

That is the cult bit. Not simply that Donald says ridiculous things. Ridiculous people say ridiculous things all the time. There are men in pubs across the world right now explaining that speed cameras are a covert Russian communist surveillance plot and that oat milk is lowering testosterone.

The danger is that Donald says ridiculous things and millions of people immediately gather around the ridiculous thing to protect it. So we get the pushback against reality, that Spain is BRICS because Donald said so. Drug prices can fall by 1,500 per cent because Donald said so, he knows his numbers. Windmills are upsetting whales because Donald said so, he’s like Dr. Doolittle, he talks to the animals.

A ceasefire can involve shooting because Donald said so, and Donald wrote The Art of War. Well someone ghost wrote The Art of The Steal, but it was going to be called The Art of War, if that ancient Chinese bloke hadn’t stolen Donald’s title.

And don’t forget he probably won all fifty states because Donald said so. That is not politics. That is reality being asked to kneel, and swear an oath never to question Donald.

So yes, laugh at him. Please laugh at him. Mockery is not a distraction from authoritarianism. It is one of the ways we puncture it. These people want majesty. They want fear. They want flags, gold, eagles, motorcades, anthems, uniforms, giant letters, giant numbers, giant lies.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is point at the emperor and say:

Spain is not in BRICS, you ridiculous orange tit.

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