When Trump attempted to Address the Nation:
In the most scripted of presidential settings, a prime-time televised address to the nation, President Trump decided to ad-lib — and his errors triggered a market meltdown, panicked travelers overseas and crystallized for his critics just how dangerously he has fumbled his management of the coronavirus.
He always does decide to ad-lib. I guess that’s because no words written by mere Someone Else can ever match the divine elixir of what spills out of his golden head.
Even Trump — a man practically allergic to admitting mistakes — knew he’d screwed up by declaring Wednesday night that his ban on travel from Europe would include cargo and trade, and acknowledged as much to aides in the Oval Office as soon as he’d finished speaking, according to one senior administration official and a second person, both with knowledge of the episode.
Really. That is actually surprising. Notice that the only way Trump can surprise us is by getting something right, even if it’s only admitting that he got something catastrophically wrong.
Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser who has seized control over some aspects of the government’s coronavirus response, reassured Trump that aides would correct his misstatement, four administration officials said, and they scrambled to do just that.
Jared fucking Kushner has grabbed control over some aspects of the Trump admin’s epidemic response…which is terrifying.
Trump’s 10-minute Oval Office address Wednesday night reflected not only his handling of the coronavirus crisis but, in some ways, much of his presidency. It was riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the supremacy of the nation he leads.
Plus the manner of its delivery underlined yet again what an empty talentless worthless blue suit Trump is.
Trump — who believed that by giving the speech he would appear in command and that his remarks would reassure financial markets and the country — was in “an unusually foul mood” and sounded at times “apoplectic” on Thursday as he watched stocks tumble and digested widespread criticism of his speech, according to a former senior administration official briefed on his private conversations.
He believed he would “appear in command”…by sitting there like a whipped schoolboy, with his hands rigidly folded in front of him so that he wouldn’t endlessly flap them back and forth like a nervous squirrel, reading the teleprompter in a robotic monotone as if he were sounding out an unfamiliar language with a gun to his head.
Ben Rhodes, who served as a senior White House aide and helped former president Barack Obama script and manage his responses to numerous crises, predicted that Wednesday night’s address will stand as “the moment people associate with the fact that Donald Trump failed the biggest test of his presidency.”
“I think we’ll look back on this as a defining moment of the Trump presidency because it speaks to larger concerns that people already had about Trump — that he can’t tell the truth, that he doesn’t value expertise, that he doesn’t take the presidency seriously enough,” Rhodes said.
And that when he’s right up against it and trying to be reassuring he can’t even pretend successfully.
Trump’s speech contained at least two errors and a significant omission. He said the travel ban would apply to cargo; it did not. He said health insurance companies would waive patients’ co-payments for coronavirus testing and treatment; industry officials later clarified that they would waive payments for testing only. And he did not fully explain the details of his travel restrictions, leaving out the fact that U.S. citizens would be exempt.
Note the massive size of that second error – saying that insurance companies would waive patients’ co-payments for coronavirus treatment when of course they wouldn’t dream of doing any such thing. This is a discrepancy of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for patients, so yeah, it’s kind of a biggy.
The president’s remarks were devoid of much substantive information on other matters. Trump provided no update for citizens on the spread of the virus, nor on the availability and results of testing.
Public health experts have said testing citizens for the coronavirus is essential for identifying new cases and limiting its spread, but the nation has experienced a chronic shortage of test kits after weeks of missteps by the government. Trump devoted only two short sentences to the topic, and they were vague: “Testing and testing capabilities are expanding rapidly, day by day. We are moving very quickly.”
Not just vague, but also self-flattering, and in fact dishonestly self-flattering. Our testing capabilities suck, and it’s his fault for getting rid of Obama’s epidemic response team.
Stylistically, the president himself seemed ill at ease in the formal setting, offering a labored, monotone delivery from behind the Resolute Desk, twiddling his thumbs and even, in moments, struggling to read words on the teleprompter.
What I’m saying. Not like a grown-ass adult who at least cares what happens to us, but a sullen child forced to recite the tax code.
Kushner only recently became involved with the administration’s virus response, beginning to attend meetings in his capacity as a senior adviser, according to officials, but inserted himself more fully as he became increasingly convinced that more tangible action was needed.
But what does “in his capacity as a senior adviser” mean? What capacity is that? What’s “senior” about him? Certainly not expertise or depth of knowledge or intelligence or thoughtfulness or experience or age. He’s a callow young slumlord; that’s it.
Other than all that the address went well.
