‘They will say,
Donald Trump rants and raves,’ the US president told reporters in a
blistering 77-minute question-and-answer session that covered Russia,
intelligence leaks, the firing of Michael Flynn – and uncomfortable
encounters with reporters on the issues of antisemitism and race.
Donald
Trump's press conference is proof he'll never be presidential
Trump
spent his first solo press conference as president berating the press
and dodging any serious questions – and none of it is ever going to
be normal
Ben Jacobs in
Washington
@Bencjacobs
Friday 17 February
2017 07.13 GMT
It was an exhausting
77-minute extravaganza, and any five-minute segment would have been
enough to make front-page headlines around the world.
For the president of
the United States, the simple act of sneezing can be newsworthy. When
the president goes on a freeform monologue, occasionally interrupted
by questions, that is almost the length of a motion picture, as
Donald Trump did on Thursday, the news can be overwhelming. The
entirety represents a deluge that is difficult to process.
Trump said he wasn’t
“ranting and raving” during his press conference, and that was
correct. The president was confidently unhinged as he spent more than
an hour berating the press and boasting without any real basis that
“there has never been a presidency that’s done so much in such a
short period of time”.
The press
conference, nominally called to announce the nomination of Alexander
Acosta to be secretary of labor, represented the first opportunity
for reporters to ask the president about a series of stories about
his administration’s ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin. Trump
responded by focusing on the real enemy – the media. In fact, at
times, it felt that the press conference focused more on CNN
correspondent Jim Acosta than Alexander Acosta (Trump even made sure
to check with the CNN correspondent that the two weren’t related)
as the president prosecuted his case against CNN. Often, Trump seemed
to be in a time capsule, railing against Hillary Clinton and reusing
entire paragraphs of rhetoric that he had once directed against her
while campaigning for the White House.
The result was a
spectacle that was sheer entertainment if not terribly presidential.
It was more comedian Henny Youngman than president William Henry
Harrison as Trump needled reporters and engaged in a brand of insult
comedy that was familiar from the campaign trail. At times, reporters
couldn’t help but laugh at the president’s jabs despite their
best instincts, simply because Trump’s comments were just that
wacky and bizarre.
At times, the
interactions with reporters went beyond combative into a Twilight
Zone. Trump told an Orthodox Jewish reporter who asked him about an
upsurge in antisemitic incidents that he had asked “a very
insulting question”. He later suggested to an African American
reporter who had asked about whether Trump had consulted with the
Congressional Black Caucus about his plan for inner cities that she
should organize the meeting. “Tell you what, do you want to set up
the meeting? Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of
yours?” the president asked the reporter about an influential bloc
of congressmen.
Trump suggested that
“drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars”; insisted he only
claimed falsely at the beginning of the press conference that he had
won “the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan” (in
fact George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all won more
electoral college votes) because he “was given bad information”;
and opined in detail on CNN’s programming and ratings in its 10pm
hour.
And there was an
abundance of hard news. He insisted that “we had a very smooth
rollout of the travel ban” despite all evidence and announced a new
executive order on the topic was coming next week. He assailed all
reports on his aides’ ties to Russia as “a ruse” and “fake”
while conceding that the cascade of leaks on the subject was real. He
said he had fired his former national security adviser, Michael
Flynn, because “he didn’t tell our vice-president properly”
about his calls with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak but insisted
that there was nothing improper about making the calls. “I would
have directed him to do it if he wasn’t doing it, because that’s
his job.” And he hedged on Barack Obama’s controversial Daca
program for undocumented immigrants who entered the country as
children.
During the election
campaign, Trump would routinely make half a dozen statements at a
single rally that might prove fatal to any other candidate. It was
hard for the media to focus on a single issue then, when Trump was
still an outsider and an underdog.
Today, some might
focus on Trump’s statements on Russia or his attacks on the media.
Others might focus on his outright lies and bizarre claims. But there
can only be one takeaway from the press conference – Trump may have
become president, but he will never be presidential. It has only been
27 days since the president took office. There are still at least
three years and 11 months left to go, and it is never going to be
normal.
Trump's
anti-press conference would be funny – if it weren't so scary
Richard Wolffe
@richardwolffedc
Friday
17 February 2017 07.13 GMT
If
Donald Trump is qualified for any job – and that’s a rather big
if, based on this press conference – it’s clear that he wants to
be a media critic on Fox News
Watching Donald
Trump’s freak show of a press conference, it’s painfully clear
that we have all made a terrible mistake.
For the last several
months we all thought we were watching the presidential version of
Celebrity Apprentice. Trump was going to walk into our living rooms,
fire somebody at random, and then happily walk out.
In fact, we have our
shows all mixed up. This is actually a very long season of The
Office, with our new president playing the role of a self-obsessed
buffoon who clearly thinks he’s smart, funny, kind and successful.
Trump is the boss we
all know so well, and never want to see again. The one winging it at
every turn, in every sentence. The one who just read something, or
talked to somebody, and is now an Olympic-sized expert.
“I have been
briefed,” he declared, as he explained what passes for his
poodle-like policy towards Vladimir Putin.
“And I can tell
you one thing about a briefing that we’re allowed to say, because
anybody that ever read the most basic book can say it: Nuclear
holocaust would be like no other. They’re a very powerful nuclear
country and so are we. If we have a good relationship with Russia,
believe me, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Coming from the
mouth of Ricky Gervais or Steve Carell, this might be rather funny.
But as we know from the guests at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump travels
with military aides who carry real nuclear codes.
It’s great that
he’s reading the most basic books about that nuclear holocaust. Who
knew it could be so awful to obliterate the planet?
He’s also been
reading about uranium, which is cool. It’s best if he explains this
one in his own words: “You know what uranium is, right? This thing
called nuclear weapons, like lots of things are done with uranium,
including some bad things.”
But enough with all
the briefings about bad things. Let’s get to the important stuff
that President Trump wanted to tell us.
In theory, the press
conference was called to reveal the name of the all-important Labor
Secretary, whose identity will only get recalled on Jeopardy. He’s
replacing the guy who quit after a reporter dug up the video tape of
his ex-wife on Oprah. Talk about a bad hombre.
But all that was
just a bait-and-switch for the real subject of Trump’s obsession:
himself. In painful detail, the president took the trouble to explain
his thought process in real time, as problems bubble up to the thing
that sits under his combover.
Most White House
reporters and presidential historians long for this kind of insight:
how does a commander-in-chief deal with a crisis? What is his
decision-making approach to all the world’s challenges?
Sadly in Trump’s
case, it turns out the answers are astonishingly simple.
Let’s consider the
first big test of Trump’s management of this branch office of the
paper company: the strange firing of General Mike Flynn, formerly one
of his closest and craziest advisers, handling bad things like
uranium.
“As far as the
general’s concerned, when I first heard about it, I said huh, that
doesn’t sound wrong. My counsel came, Don McGahn, White House
counsel, and he told me and I asked him, he can speak very well for
himself. He said he doesn’t think anything is wrong, you know,
really didn’t think.”
So now we have two
people in the Oval Office who think, kind of: huh, nothing wrong with
talking to the Russians and lying about it.
But let’s hear
more from the 45th president: “I waited a period of time and I
started to think about it, I said “well I don’t see” — to me,
he was doing the job.”
So even after a
period of reflection, Trump still couldn’t see what all the fuss
was about. (Note to the nervous: good to know he waits before he
acts.)
“The information
was provided by — who I don’t know, Sally Yates,” he explained,
unclear or unimpressed by his acting attorney general, a career
official who earned her last promotion with bipartisan support. “And
I was a little surprised because I said “doesn’t sound like he
did anything wrong there.” But he did something wrong with respect
to the vice president and I thought that was not acceptable.”
So that’s clear.
Trump fired Flynn for doing something wrong to Mike Pence even though
he did his job well. That “something wrong” would be lying about
something totally fine, in Trump’s view. But why is Trump so
confident that this isn’t such a big deal? “As far as the actual
making the call,” he told the nation, “in fact I’ve watched
various programs and I’ve read various articles where he was just
doing his job.”
If Donald Trump is
qualified for any job – and that’s a rather big if, based on this
press conference – it’s clear that he wants to be a media critic
on Fox News.
In his considered
analysis, the state of the media today is just astonishing. “Russia
is fake news,” he declared, dismissing the investigations that will
engulf his entire presidency, if not a whole country. “Russia –
this is fake news put out by the media.”
This kind of fakery
is, Trump suggested, cooked up in part by Obama hangovers whom he
will likely root out of government in due course. In the meantime,
the great revelation for the commander-in-chief is that The Wall
Street Journal is just as bad as The New York Times. “I thought the
financial media was much better, much more honest,” he revealed,
before encouraging reporters to bypass his hapless press secretary.
“But I will say
that I never get phone calls from the media,” he said, sounding
more than a little hurt. “How did they write a story like that in
The Wall Street Journal without asking me, or how did they write a
story in The New York Times, put it on front page?”
How indeed. The
Guardian will happily accept the president’s help any time he can
fit us into his obviously empty schedule. We have another story going
out today, if that’s OK.
To be sure, there
are many pundits who think this kind of circus plays well in Trump
Country. The rust belt surely loves this kind of braggadocious
presidency combined with constant media bashing.
Of course, the
American version of The Office was set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, so
maybe there’s something to that argument. Much like the epic
mockumentary, it’s clear that President Ricky Gervais has no idea
how unintentionally funny he is. The only difference is that this
boss is armed with uranium and he has no idea what to do now. Which
means the joke is really on us.
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