Trump is demented - and other things they said

'It's this very interesting thing when the President of the United States calls you up, you're on the phone with the President of the United States and you assume, it's just something that clicks into you, that this is an incredibly busy man and he is going to get off the phone with you as soon as he says what he's going to say. Not true. In the end you're kind of a prompting him to get off the phone, because the world may need something. And he doesn't. He just opens up another thing. And on, on, on. I can't tell you how many occasions this has happened.' Donald Trump's chronicler Michael Woolf, who thinks Mr Trump is suffering from dementia. 'We come to the limitations of journalism, which is the New York Times can't say that. They somehow have to treat everything, their four hours with the President of the United States, as basically rational when it is not.' Nobody understands what is going on in the Trump administration, he says, least of all Mr Trump.

Michael Woolf is accused of being unreliable and the NYT interview lasted two hours, not four. Still a very long time.

'The few Iranians I reached said something chilling: they now fear a failed revolution more than the IRGC killing civilians in the streets. Things have gone too far to back down. If it fails, the consequences are catastrophic—so they risk their lives to ensure it doesn’t.' Yassi, an Iranian-Canadian with a TV chat show, on X.

‘The depiction of [Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false .... Iran may yet provide us with a desperately‐needed model of humane governance’. Richard Falk in the New York Times in 1979. He's a left-wing Jewish-American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and a big critic of Israel.

'Michel Foucault saw in the future [Iranian] revolution "the most modern form of government" and Khomeini "a saint man". Sartre believed he would lead an "anti colonialist and anti imperialist regime". French newspaper liberation called it a "Shiite socialism". The one French intellectual who somewhat saw through the BS was Simone de Beauvoir who saw that the regime's will to put every woman behind niqabs was incompatible with her feminist ideals.' François Valentin on X

'There were migrant rape gangs in England. They would run around and prey on young girls. Some people found that objectionable, and of course it should be objectionable, and were upset about that, they complained about it online and were sent to prison.' Elon Musk