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D.Trump said that Nancy Pelosi was "not operating with a full deck". Does it mean the same as not play with a full deck?

I searched in some dictionaries but didn't find the first phrase there.

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Don't make the mistake of assuming Trump is using English correctly.

"Not operating with a full deck" is not a saying.

He probably meant to say "not playing with a full deck".

Or

He may have started saying "not operating at full capacity" but then mixed up the two phrases which mean the same thing.

If he did mix up the two phrases, then it is called a malaphor!

A Malaphor is a phrase made from two popular phrases, often unintentionally. Here are some more examples of malaphors like what Trump said: Malaphor Examples

Here's one:

An early bird gathers no moss!

That is a blend of two idioms:
1. The early bird catches the worm.
2. A rolling stone gathers no moss.

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Yes. The idiom is "not playing with a full deck" (which Google's dictionary defines as North American slang for "mentally deficient"). Trump made a mistake (as Jay has pointed out here, Trump's version is a malaphor, a blending of two idioms), but he almost certainly meant the same thing.

Some idioms are fully frozen and others are more flexible. What I mean is that some idioms lose their special, idiomatic meaning if you make any changes to their wording, but other idioms can be slightly changed and still mean the same thing. To operate with, in this utterance, means something very general, like to use. (It has nothing to do with operation as in a surgical procedure, if that's what was confusing you.) We use cards by playing with them, so people who are familiar with the idiom "playing with a full deck" can easily understand Trump's version "operating with a full deck" to mean the same thing.

Trump's not the first person to say "operate with a full deck" (if you Google the phrase and poke around in the results, you can find some examples), but it's not the common/accepted idiom. If you want to use this idiom, you should use the "playing" version.

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    Be careful judging the frequency of language use simply by checking Google results because they cast a very flexible net so not all of them will match the phrase, and the fact that Trump said it will have created thousands of those hits by itself because of people repeating his exact words. The phrase cannot be found in a dictionary, nor in a corpus such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English: english-corpora.org/coca I'm willing to be wrong if you can find other times the phrase "operating with a full deck" has been used, but I believe it was a malaphor.
    – Jay A. Little
    Commented Jan 25, 2020 at 11:35
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    Good points. I agree that it's a malaphor (though that doesn't mean it can't become common and accepted), that Google results must be interpreted with caution (which I'm usually better at doing! whoops), and that Trump's use of the phrase inflated the number of hits for it. Where I really screwed up was not realizing HOW MUCH it inflated the number. Wow. (I just poked around in the results...) I've edited my answer accordingly. Thank you! I'm a huge COCA fan, by the way; it's just that, for rare things (the "playing" version appears only five times in COCA), I sometimes resort to Google.
    – Linguist Lindley
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 23:43

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