Positively in terms of Per Capitas

Pres. Trump on his coronavirus test today: "I tested very positively, in another sense, this morning. I tested positively toward negative, right? No, I tested perfectly this morning -- meaning I tested negative. But that's a way of saying it: positively toward the negative." pic.twitter.com/Jylltw0JXs

— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) May 21, 2020

Sure, I can get that people will say snarking on this is jumping all over what could be charitably construed as a realization that a negative test is a positive news, so this was almost like a joke, but by now, isn't it clear that Trump talks in a weirdly jumbled way all the time?

Like, take his "per capita" ramble. From the statement:

And, you know, when you say “per capita,” there’s many per capitas. It’s, like, per capita relative to what? But you can look at just about any category, and we’re really at the top, meaning positive on a per capita basis, too. They’ve done a great job.

is it even clear what he's trying to say? My internal editor rearranges the words to say something concrete and eliminate the inaccurate superlatives, like, maybe: "There are many metrics (categories) you can use to define success, and testing per capita is just one way of looking at it." But what he said comes out in a way that implies he is not sure of what "per capita" means. (Is he?) It's not even a gaffe, really, because he isn't misspeaking, he's just blathering. The low level of his speech pattern (the vocabulary of an 8-year-old) has been pointed out before, as well as its annoying informality. But more and more, the oddness of Trump's language appears to be not so much how he uses it, but the content behind it--he sounds like he simply doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. The things he "knows" simply aren't right.

Although if you get him on a subject he's interested in, by gosh, you can tell exactly what he's on about.