What did Donald Trump really say during his Person-of-the-Year interview with Time magazine? We will never know, because Time has published only edited excerpts of that interview. At the end of the “transcript,” Time includes this disclaimer: “This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.”

I strongly suspect that the disclaimer is an understatement. If the verbatim transcript of Trump’s earlier interview with the New York Times is an indicator, Time’s editors must have done a lot of editing, condensing and clarifying. The New York Times transcript included many shocking passages that were rambling and incoherent. With that as a yardstick, it’s hard to imagine—as Time magazine’s edited transcript would have us believe—that Trump was as cogent and paragraph-based as he seems in the Time magazine interview.

I will acknowledge that Time’s edited excerpts still manage to reveal a wandering thought process, a tendency to brag, and Trump’s trademark narcissism. Here’s an example:

HOW TRUMP WILL MEASURE SUCCESS

I think we’re going to have a lot of jobs brought back. I think we’re going to have a lot fewer companies leaving our country. I believe we will be successful with defeating ISIS or bringing them down to a level where it’s almost the same thing. And I hope I’m judged from the time of the election, as opposed to from January 20th, because the stock market has had a tremendous bounce. And people are seeing very good things for business in this country. So I think we’re going to have a lot of victories.

HOW TRUMP CONNECTS WITH AMERICANS

I’m sitting in an apartment the likes of which nobody’s ever seen. And yet I represent the workers of the world. And they love me and I love them. But when I was in Brooklyn I worked for my father on construction sites where he built houses or what he built, a building in Brooklyn. And I got to understand the construction workers and the police. These are great people. These are the people that built the country.

Others try to hide their wealth. I mean I could tell you other candidates that have money, they’ll go around and they’ll get into a bad car just before they get to a rally. I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe in that. Because I think aspiration’s a very important word. I think people aspire to do things. And they aspire to watch people. I don’t think they want to see the president carrying his luggage out of Air Force One. And that’s pretty much the way it is.

Having read the word-for-word transcript of the New York Times interview, and comparing it to the more succinct portrayal we get here from Time Magazine, I don’t believe that Trump’s speaking style could have changed this much in the past two weeks. For example, I really doubt that Trump’s answer to a question about prescription drug prices was this brief:

DRUG COMPANIES

I’m going to bring down drug prices. I don’t like what’s happened with drug prices.

So, I would very much like to see the un-condensed, unedited and unclear parts that Time’s editors left out. I know that it’s standard journalistic practice to use only the most quotable parts of interviews in the body of their reports. But a transcript should be a transcript–especially when it’s documenting a person known to be as temperamentally unfit and as unqualified for the job as is Donald Trump. As Trump assumes the most powerful office in the world, bringing with him a very vague and unfocused way of approaching issues, it seems important to avoid cleaning up his language and syntax—making him sound more reasoned than he is–and instead to pull back the curtain, so we can see what we really have.

Fair use prevents me from copying and pasting the entire, condensed transcript as published in Time. But you can read it here.

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One of the favorite targets of Republicans is the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s not just the Agency; it’s the concept of protecting the environment. Their mantra has become “drill, baby, drill,” as they want to extract every possible drop of petroleum out of the ground and use it as America’s and the world’s primary energy source.

But as Time Magazine of April 16, 2012 reports, what conservatives want to drill is not “your father’s oil.” No longer is it the relatively easy to reach oil from Pennsylvania in the U.S. or Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. It’s a conglomerate of “sandy, goopy oil” in Alberta, Canada, to oil located 7,000 feet below the ocean floor in Brazil to deep water oil in the Gulf of Mexico similar to what British Petroleum’s “Deepwater Horizon” was pumping when it had a disastrous explosion in April, 2010, to petroleum deep below the Arctic Ocean.

Despite efforts to conserve on petroleum, demand is still rising — set to grow 800,000 barrels a day this year despite a still sluggish global economy. Much of this has to do with emerging economies that are primarily concerned about production and transportation rather than global warming or a clean environment. The two largest consumers of increasing amounts of petroleum are China and India. The two countries are battling one another to become the world’s largest economy, including being the largest producers of manufactured goods in the world. Rickshaws and bicycles, which congested the streets not too long ago, were first replaced by relatively small automobiles and now by 18-wheel trucks as large as any in the United States or Europe.

The theories of conservation and protecting the world’s environment sometimes make sense in economies that are already well-developed. However, even in the United States there are millions of people, particularly Republicans, who either don’t believe in global warming or who have political and financial reasons to deny its existence. If the United States cannot fashion an energy policy based on reducing demand and moving toward cleaner sources of energy, then it is nearly an impossible task to convince other countries to do so.

The Deepwater Horizon was a disaster that primarily impacted the United States. For many or most nations to come to recognize the possible devastation that is happening to the world,  we may have to have a much larger occurrence. The most likely is an increase in the melting of the glaciers in both the Arctic and Antarctica, with a consequent significant rise in ocean levels. The consequences of this phenomenon is already being felt in islands scattered around the world. Scientists predict that it won’t be long until before water levels along the coasts of industrialized nations rise to a level where certain areas become uninhabitable and others simply need to be abandoned and relocated.

So kudos to Time for presenting a cover story that does not simply state that the world has the means of producing considerably more oil for burgeoning economies. We’re a long way from when John Rockefeller started the mass extraction of oil from Pennsylvania in 1870. In the 21st Century, when it comes to increasing the world’s supply of useable oil, it’s important that we remember the old adage from TV’s Hill Street Blues: Be careful out there.”

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