Donald Trump said so many ridiculous and false things Wednesday night during his town hall or whatever it was that it’s difficult to know where to even begin responding to them. Among other things, he repeated numerous flat out lies that have been conclusively debunked, such as the lie that he opposed the Iraq War before it started, that he opposed intervention in Libya, and so on. Frequently, he exposed the fact that he has no clue what he is doing or talking about, such as his assertion that he has a secret plan to defeat ISIS but he would still ask the new generals he installed to give him a plan.

So I guess let’s start with the most absurd thing, first of all:

“We used to say, to the victor go the spoils, and there was no victor there, believe me, there was no victor, but I always said, take the oil. One of the benefits we would have had if we took the oil was ISIS would not have been able to take oil and use that oil to fuel themselves.

Donald Trump is now the leftist conspiracy theory version of a Republican. When they used to chant “no blood for oil,” and we said, “that’s ridiculous, no one believes we should go over there and get people killed for the purpose of confiscating oil,” we left Donald Trump out of the equation.

But even setting that aside for a second, if you are going to do something that is designed to spark a violent insurgency you could hardly have come up with anything better suited to the task than the forcible confiscation of the home country’s oil reserves. As Benjy Sarlin correctly noted, pretty sarcastically:

We definitely wouldn’t have had an Islamic insurgency problem in a country whose oil wealth we were siphoning away by brute force .

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) September 8, 2016

There’s also the fact that you can’t just immediately extract all the oil from the ground in either Iraq or Libya. It’s a process that takes years and decades. So as long as an insurgency continued to exist, the risk that it would seize areas where oil is produced and extracted exists. The United States could not physically have just removed all the oil from the ground and left, not even if they wanted to.

I’ve said this before, but it’s still true: Trump has exactly the same understanding of the world as your loudmouth uncle who always comes to family gatherings and has all the answers to all the world’s problems, and will tell everyone loudly about it. He’s totally persuaded that his simplistic solutions are the only answer and he’s genuinely befuddled at how the politicians and military are so stupid that they cannot see that his path is the only path to victory and peace. But if you push back against these simplistic solutions even a little bit and point out how they would with 100% certainty make the situation worse, he’s off on some other rambling tangent about how he would handle it in some way that people would behave in exactly the way he wanted, and definitely wouldn’t push back and fight for their own interests.

I can’t believe people are actually going to vote for this guy.