by Soma Oj.

We don’t know how else to say it. President Donald Trump is different.

From when he announced his Presidential ambition in 2015 through that movie-script-like campaign he ran, we knew there was hardly anything Presidential about this man that has now become the 45th President of America. Not a single strand of Presidential hair (all pun intend).

Even here in Nigeria, where our leaders are often prime material for comical screenplays (think Dino Melaye, Fani-Kayode, Wendell Simlin, or anyone of them really), the only terms of reference we had to digest Trump’s drama were the jokes and quotes from @RobertMugabe social media parody accounts.

But he’s President – has been for all of 96 days, can you believe that? – and it’s finally sinking in that we are just going to have to live with all that weirdness and pick whatever substance exists in whatever he says or does apart from the weirdness.

Nothing proves this more than the very interesting (and we don’t mean that in a completely bad way) interview the just had with the Associated Press. It’s extremely long so we’ve extracted 5 quotes from the United States President that prove our point. Enjoy!

President Trump has his own vocabulary; a totally different one from what men his status use

Like when he says things like “biggly”. Check out this dialogue between Trump and his interviewer. Look oput for the way he uses the word “zippo” casually.

TRUMP: Did you see Aya (Hijazi, an Egyptian-American charity worker who had been detained in the country for nearly three years) …

AP: Can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?

TRUMP: No, just — you know, I asked the government to let her out. … (Yes, we know. Just like that. Because that how this Presidenting thing works.)

TRUMP: You know Obama worked on it for three years, got zippo, zero.

 

He’s not about the life of the boxes you all are trying to put him

When Julie Pace, the AP interviewer tried to press him about his achievements within the first 100, a hot topic this week, see how Trump responded at two different points in the conversation:

AP: Do you feel like you have changed the office of the presidency, how the presidency can be used to effect change?

TRUMP: I think the 100 days is, you know, it’s an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful.

And when Julie tried to remind him that he campaigned based on a “100-day plan”, here’s the classic he responded with:

“Somebody, yeah, somebody put out the concept of a hundred-day plan. But yeah.”

Somebo-who?

Trump has no fears praising himself

That ego! As huge as the wall. Check this anecdote:

A little before I took office there was a terrible article about the F-35 fighter jet. It was hundreds of billions of dollars over budget. It was seven years behind schedule. It was a disaster. So I called in Lockheed and I said, “I’m sorry, we’re going to have to bid this out to another company, namely Boeing,” or whoever else. But Boeing. And I called in Boeing and I started getting competing offers back and forth. … I saved $725 million on the 90 planes. Just 90. Now there are 3,000 planes that are going to be ordered. On 90 planes I saved $725 million. It’s actually a little bit more than that, but it’s $725 million. Gen. Mattis, who had to sign the deal when it came to his office, said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.” We went from a company that wanted more money for the planes to a company that cut. And the reason they cut — same planes, same everything — was because of me. I mean, because that’s what I do. Now if you multiply that times 3,000 planes, you know this is on 90 planes. In fact, when the Prime Minister (Shinzo) Abe of Japan came in because they bought a certain number of those … The first thing he said to me, because it was right at the time I did it, he said, “Could I thank you?” I said, “What?” He said, “You saved us $100 million.” Because they got a $100 million savings on the 10 or 12 planes that they (bought). Nobody wrote that story. Now you know that’s a saving of billions and billions of dollars, many billions of dollars over the course of — it’s between 2,500 and 3,000 planes will be the final order. But this was only 90 of those 2,500 planes.

If you are already thinking that was the drop mic moment, wait for what he said when Julie asked if he expects that the savings will be made across all the orders:

More. I’m gonna get more than that.