I request you people to please dissect what the underlined sentence mean word-for-word.

Trump's unscripted speech very rarely forms coherent sentences. It is a nightmare to try and transcribe. You should not try and copy this speech pattern. At best we just get a sense of what he is trying to put across.

It's not grammatical. Assuming it wasn't an error on the part of the news organization, and is an exact quote, it's not that surprising. Trump frequently fails to form grammatical sentences when he speaks (all native speakers digress, interrupt themselves, or make errors sometimes, but he does it more than most, and more than he himself did in interviews when he was much younger). This news organization is probably wrestling with its journalistic role. It's normal to clean up quotes to deal with the digressions and ellipses that happen in speech, but Trump benefits from it more than most because his speech starts out very disjointed. News organizations have been the targets of some complaints about how they do a lot of interpretive work on this level, and on more conceptual ones, to make him sound less, well, demented -- it gets called "sanewashing." And so they've perhaps decided to illustrate how he actually talks. What Trump is probably trying to say (now, in explaining this to you, I'm doing what the news organizations get criticized for) is that he believes that the US will make a lot of money every day collecting tariffs so the loss of even this one day was costly, but he didn't want an inauspicious date to cause any problems. In general, Trump is not a good model of grammatical speech; his speech is actively disordered.

Nonsense sentence. No idea what they're trying to say.

This makes absolutely no sense. Using quotes and interviews is a good way to learn spoken English, but using quotes from Trump is not. The only part I understand is that he didn’t want to announce his tariffs on April 1st, the rest is just incoherent rambling. I wouldn’t even bother trying to dissect the specific errors with the grammar, just know, it makes no sense, and you are right to think so. To answer your specific question too, that is not how you use the word ‘was’. This sentence is not in any way correct. If trump says something in a speech, news articles will quote it verbatim, but that doesn’t mean it will make any sense.

This is a pretty poor transcription of rambling speech. They haven’t used any of the punctuation that is usually used to indicate incomplete sentences and half-formed thoughts. In my opinion it should be along the lines of: “That’s what… that’s not… just one day was… Cost us a lot of money, but I wanted to do it in April.”

He's stopping and starting several thoughts and leaving out words. "That's what... That's not just one day. [That] was [going to] cost us a lot of money, but I'm going to do it in April." To translate: Trump will implement tariffs on April 2nd and not April 1st because he's superstitious. That one day delay will cost the US a lot of money.

That's a quote, meaning he probably started one sentence, and stumbled, or changed what he was saying half way through. In other words, it's not correct. It's a verbatim quote of someone who stumbled through an incoherent thought. Point being, it's incoherent nonsense and it's unclear exactly what he was trying to say. Without getting political here, I'll just say Trump is not the person to follow if you want to learn English. He tends to ramble incoherently a lot.

That is what we call 'word salad'. He's saying words, but they don't fit together to make a sentence.

In my mind, starting tariffs one day later would only cost them one days worth of tariffs? But I don't know much about that. The actual sentence itself is fairly nonsensical. I would think that "Just one day will cost us a lot of money, but we're going to do it April 2. I'm a very superstitious person," makes much more sense. I don't know if superstition has much to do with tariffs, probably more to do with people thinking the tariffs are not some kind of joke. "Was" meaning a day in the future is incorrect, "was" relates to something in the past, for example, "was costing us a lot of money."

r/Ihadastroke

"somewhat ungrammatical" is the understatement of the year 😂

There are some people who have a record of not speaking coherently and unfortunately some of those people have a lot of power

Trump…. Is a fascist without the ability to be a functional adult. He actually can’t speak proper English anymore and I’d be surprised if he wasn’t projecting when his party made all those disparaging comments on how Biden is running on aderal. If we ever get to see what his medicine cabinet had in it it would explain a lot of things. This sentence is not just ungrammatical it’s borderline nonsensical. None of what he says makes sense. And yet he claims to mean all of it. I will likely make it my life’s mission to figure him and the rest of the fascist world out. The best weapon against this is understanding and knowledge. And they(fascist leaders) know it.

uh yeah most of the things Trump says are incoherent nonsense.

Impossible ask. It's incoherent rambling.

That's a quote of Trump. You should not try to learn proper English from what he says.

Don’t listen to trump. He’s an idiot.

\*Me fervently trying to figure it out 🤔🧐 Article: "Trump said" Me: ah, that makes sense.

Forget this clown

Trying to understand Trump when he talks is pointless. He never says anything coherent

I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the term the embarrassment will have started to pop drool bubbles during “the best, the greatest, the biggest, speeches of humankind; you know it’s true, everybody knows it’s true”… You shouldn’t rely on its word sequences as examples of English language.

I can’t translate it because it doesn’t make sense.

Here's a video clip of him saying it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DBfypcIohFk&t=60s It seems they left out a bunch of critical punctuation. Here's my attempt at a better transcript of the part in question plus a bit of context: > This system is not fair to the United States and never was, and so on April 2nd — I wanted to make it April 1st, but I didn't wanna be accused of April Fools Day — that's what, that's not — just one day was cost us a lot of money, but we're gonna do it in April — I'm a very superstitious person. April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs kick in, and whatever they tariff us — other countries — we will tariff them. That's reciprocal: back and forth. Whatever they tax us, we will tax them. With this punctuation, and generous interpretation of the em dashes, I think the only really ungrammatical bit is the "was" in "just one day was cost us a lot of money"; I'd guess he probably meant either "would" or "was going to".

Like much of everything else that tumbled out of his mouth, a lot of gibberish. The highlighted sentence cannot be parsed.

His speech is typically just word associations within a general framework. That’s why there are so many tangents and confusing sentences.

There's pausing and restarting happening. This was speech that was transcribed, not a sentence someone wrote out and edited.

When Trump talks he speaks in fragmented sentences. He starts a thought and before he finishes the sentence moves to another thought and sometimes gets back to his original thought. So when you write what he says it’s really hard to understand. When he says it out loud, it’s a little easier to follow. But often he’s just bloviating loosely about his great he is, and how terrible his opponents are, so he’s not really saying much anyway. Here he’s talking about how he didn’t wanna plan to make the tariffs start on April 1 because people might accuse it of being a joke so he delayed it. That delay cost the United States money but he did it anyway on account of his dysfunctional level of superstition.

Gibberish.

Didnt listen to him say that, but I’m willing to bet he just stuttered and the quotes do not incorporate dashes to reflect this. You are right that this is very ungrammatical, though. Can’t really give you a translated version with dashes in the correct place because I didn’t hear him say it, but this is likely the case.