Ross Sorkin: CEOs Know that Trump Is Incoherent, But He Is Using Autocratic Tactics and Bullying Them

SORKIN: “You’re very correct, but I want to actually — and I think what you just said speaks, though, to the answer that you were even raising about the double standard issue, about some of the things that we saw him say yesterday that seemed incoherent, and yet the coverage didn’t seem to reflect that in many ways. You know, I don’t know if you remember, I came on your broadcast, this was maybe two or three months ago after this business roundtable meeting that he had with a whole bunch of CEOs, and I’d said there were questions about whether he was meandering or incoherent at the time. I think it sort of went viral and was a little crazy at the time. The number of CEOs who were at the meeting who originally said to me he was meandering and incoherent, not that they changed their mind, but the — and this maybe goes to the bullying piece of it and the sort of autocratic piece of it — I started to get calls from other people in the room afterwards saying, ‘Oh my goodness, Andrew, no, no, no, you don’t understand, he wasn’t incoherent.’ They saw it, but they were being told that they didn’t see it, and they were being told, ‘You’ve got to get the message out.’ And I think there’s an argument to be made that the Republicans and the Trump machine have become very good at trying to bully people into submission to some degree, to believe something that they don’t even believe because they’re seeing it with their lying eyes and they’re unwilling to recognize what’s in front of them.”