In his first month
as president, Donald Trump made numerous false statements on subjects
that ranged from the extremely petty – such as crowd sizes – to
those of national and international significance. The Guardian
examines his most egregious falsehoods and considers what to do about
a serial liar in the White House
'They have their own
agenda': Trump attacks media at Florida rally – video
Donald Trump holds a
rally in Melbourne, Florida, five months after being elected
president of the US. Speaking in an airplane hangar in front of a
crowd of roughly 9,000 people, Trump continues his attack on the
“dishonest” media and likens his stance to that of former
presidents Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln. He says the media has
“their own agenda”, which is different to that of the American
people
Trump
attacks 'dishonest media' while making false claims at Florida rally
The
president returned to the speech lines of his campaign and insisted
that the White House is running ‘so smoothly’ despite reports of
chaos and infighting
Ben Jacobs
@Bencjacobs
Sunday 19 February
2017 00.23 GMT Last modified on Sunday 19 February 2017 03.10 GMT
In late September
2016, Donald Trump held a rally in Melbourne, Florida, where he
railed against the media and bragged about the size of the crowd.
Five months later, elected president of the United States and having
arrived in Air Force One to the music of the film Air Force One, he
did it again.
Speaking in an
airplane hangar in front of a crowd of roughly 9,000 people, Trump
returned time and time again to the speech lines of his campaign.
“Life is a campaign,” he told reporters before taking the podium.
“Making our country great again is a campaign. For me, it’s a
campaign. To make America great again is absolutely a campaign. It’s
not easy, especially when we’re also fighting the press.”
“When the media
lies to people I will never ever let them get away with it,” he
said.
With his speech,
Trump continued driving on his attack of reporters, newspapers and
news networks, generalizing them as “the dishonest media”.
“We are not going
to let the fake news tell us what to do, how to live and what to
believe,” he said. “We are free, independent people and we will
make our own choices.” Trump cited the press criticisms of Thomas
Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln as precedents in his
war on the media. All three had combative relationships with the
press, though Lincoln cultivated reporters and Jefferson once
declared he would prefer “without government” rather than the
reverse.
As in his campaign
speeches, Trump bemoaned the state of domestic and foreign affairs
claiming, “I and we inherited one big mess” and “we don’t win
in any capacity”. As in the campaign, he boasted about the size of
the crowd and his victory over the Democratic party, which he said
had suffered “the greatest defeat in the history of the country”.
The president was
especially eager to deny a steady stream of reports of chaos,
infighting and disarray in his first month in the White House,
culminating last week when his national security adviser, Michael
Flynn, was forced to step down amid scandal. “I promise you that
the White House is running so smoothly,” Trump said. “So
smoothly.”
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Trump also once
again continued his attacks on the ninth circuit court of appeals,
which suspended the travel ban on seven predominantly Muslim nations.
He claimed constitutional authority to make the ban – the courts
have not ruled on its lawfulness – and said the judges were “picked
by Obama”, though two of three were appointed by Jimmy Carter and
George W Bush.
The president added,
that the US knows “nothing” about refugees and visa-holders it
has admitted into the country although approved people are
extensively vetted through interviews and background checks. He said
that he would roll out a new executive order in the coming days in
order to address the court’s decision. “We don’t want people
with bad, bad ideas coming into our country,” he said.
Trump also used his
rally to repeat the claim that Intel was investing $7bn to build a
factory in Arizona, creating about 3,000 jobs. However, the company
had already announced the same factory back in 2011 when Barack Obama
was in power.
Trump’s speech
frequently echoed the nationalist rhetoric of his chief strategist,
Steve Bannon, who has railed against globalization, wealthy “elites”
and transnational trade deals. Trump yet again praised Britain’s
vote to leave the EU and claimed to be part of a worldwide
nationalist movement.
“Erasing borders
does not make people safer or more prosperous, it undermines
democracy,” he said. “Look at Brexit. Much smaller example but
it’s still something you can look at.”
The president
promised to bridge “chasms of distrust” with “bridges of
opportunity”, claiming: “The nation state remains the best model
for human happiness and the American nation remains the greatest
symbol of liberty.”
Trump is spending
the holiday weekend in south Florida but has continued to work,
according to White House staffers. On Saturday he met with candidates
to replace Flynn at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, but in Melbourne he
explained his unorthodox decision to hold a rally two hours north of
Palm Beach. “I’m here because I want to be among my friends and
among the people.”
The rally ended like
so many others during Trump’s campaign. A pledge to “make America
great again”, the Rolling Stones song You Can’t Always Get What
You Want blaring in the background.
Chaos
in the White House: 'There's never been anything like this'
After
the fastest, most furious week yet for the Trump administration,
America’s elder statesmen say they have never seen such turmoil or
ineptitude
David Smith and Ben
Jacobs in Washington
Saturday 18 February
2017 15.56 GMT
When press officers
at the White House glance up from their desks, they are constantly
reminded of their boss’s big day. On the wall, in thick dark
frames, are photos: Donald Trump taking the oath of office, giving a
thumbs up at his inaugural address, bidding farewell to Barack Obama,
waving to the crowd during his inaugural parade, dancing with his
wife at an inaugural ball.
Walking by last
Monday, Trump gestured towards an image of his inauguration crowd –
a point that still irks him – and told reporters there would soon
be an official statement about the future of his national security
adviser, Michael Flynn.
Trouble was, an hour
earlier, adviser Kellyanne Conway had appeared on television
declaring that the president had “full confidence” in Flynn. Soon
after, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer read a statement that
said “the president is evaluating the situation”. Six hours
later, Flynn was gone.
It was the fastest,
most furious week yet for an administration that, like a runaway
train, has Washington and America’s elder statesmen shaking their
heads, declaring that they have never seen such turmoil or
ineptitude.
“Our government
continues to be in unbelievable turmoil,” Gen Tony Thomas, head of
the military’s special operations command, told a conference last
week. “I hope they sort it out soon because we’re a nation at
war.”
Some of the malaise
can be attributed to the growing pains that plague any new
administration. Some is said to be down to the factional struggles,
imported to the White House from Trump’s businesses. And much is
believed to be on the shoulders of the capricious, egocentric,
volatile president, the first in US history to have been elected with
no political or military experience.
Yet both Trump and
his supporters deny the dysfunction, pointing to executive orders, a
supreme court nomination and the scrapping of a Pacific trade deal at
breakneck speed.
“Don’t believe
the main stream (fake news) media,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning.
“The White House is running VERY WELL. I inherited a MESS and am in
the process of fixing it.”
Sleeping just four
or five hours a night, Trump’s manic pace has made the world’s
head spin. He had an angry phone call with the prime minister of
Australia, a Twitter spat that convinced the president of Mexico to
cancel a meeting, and consulted the prime minister of Japan about a
North Korean missile launch in full view of dinner guests at his
Florida country club, Mar-a-Lago. He approved, over dinner, a
commando raid in Yemen that resulted in the death of a Navy Seal and
an eight-year-old girl.
At home, he was
caught on live television making a false claim about his electoral
victory, press releases have been littered with spelling mistakes,
and the president has fought Twitter battles with everyone from
senators to Arnold Schwarzenegger to a department store that dropped
his daughter’s products.
Then there were the
White House contradictions around the abrupt departure of Flynn, who
misled the vice-president over his conversations with the Russian
ambassador. Then Trump’s pick for labour secretary, Andrew Puzder,
withdrew his nomination after facing questions over his personal
background and business record.
Not even in his
fourth week, there was the president’s ban on travelers from seven
Muslim-majority countries, an order widely denounced and sowing
disarray and demonstrations at airports. Trump sacked his acting
attorney general for refusing to defend the ban, attacked the courts
for pausing it to weigh its lawfulness, and insisted this week that
it was “a very smooth rollout”.
“This
administration is running like a fine-tuned machine,” he said at a
rambling, impromptu press conference.
That
characterisation has provoked scorn. “From what I can tell, it’s
non-functional,” said Rick Tyler, a political analyst. “It’s
not firing on all cylinders, and the timing is off, and the
transmission won’t engage.”
‘The leaks are
real, the news is fake’: key quotes from Trump’s press conference
The executive order,
Tyler noted, “created havoc and turmoil. The communications team
are incoherent, inconsistent and contradictory to what the president
says.”
Bob Shrum, a
Democratic consultant and strategist, called the president’s
defenses “preposterous”. “It’s like a car where none of the
gears work and you’ve no idea if you’re going at 90mph or 30mph
and you’re just careening. It doesn’t remotely compare with
anything I can think of. There’s never been anything like this.”
One Republican with
ties to the White House blamed growing pains, from Trump’s lean
campaign to the staff of the federal bureaucracy.
The Trump
administration has also decided to vet for any criticism of the
president during the campaign. On Thursday, a political appointee at
the Department of Housing and Urban Development was fired after it
was noticed that he had written a critical opinion column about Trump
in October.
But operations have
also been hampered by competing interests and seething mutual
suspicion. Media reports describe paranoid staff using a secret chat
app that erases messages as soon as they are read. Trump’s inner
circle includes Conway; chief of staff Reince Priebus; senior
advisers Jared Kushner, 36, (Trump’s son-in-law) and Stephen
Miller, 31; and chief strategist Stephen Bannon, the former Goldman
Sachs executive who has likened himself to Thomas Cromwell in the
court of Henry VIII.
Senator John McCain,
the Republican nominee for president in 2008, told reporters this
week that “whole environment is one of dysfunction in the Trump
administration”.
“Who’s making
the decisions in the White House? Is it the 31-year-old? Is it Mr
Bannon? Is it the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff? I don’t
know.”
The default answer
could still be Priebus who, as chief of staff, would traditionally
act as gatekeeper to Trump. But his boss is anything but traditional,
and Priebus’s establishment influence is countered by two
ideologues, Bannon and Miller. Bannon, previously head of the
rightwing Breitbart News, has been described by Democrats as a white
nationalist and is seen by many as the true power behind the throne.
Last week Bannon and
Priebus gave a joint media interview to deny rumours of a rift. But
Tyler said: “There’s no clear chain of command. They can’t tell
who’s in charge.
Were the chief of
staff in control, Tyler said, Priebus would have fired Flynn. “If
Priebus and Bannon are doing PR to show how well they got on, that
shows Priebus is losing. He is the chief of staff, so he shouldn’t
need to say he’s meeting with Bannon, who ought to be a
subordinate.”
Bannon’s allies,
meanwhile, continue to rise in prominence. Sebastian Gorka, a deputy
assistant and former editor for Breitbart, has become a vocal
surrogate in a series of TV and radio interviews, telling the BBC
this weekthat Trump’s press conference performance was “fabulous”.
Miller, too, earned
Trump’s praise and widespread scorn for his zealous defense of the
president and for peddling a baseless claim about phantom illegal
voting. “He says things that would make movie villains blush,”
Tyler said. “You could not script this stuff.”
The problems have
been amplified by Senate Democrats doing their utmost to drag out the
confirmation process on many of Trump cabinet choices, leaving many
executive agencies with few senior staffers.
Trump is not the
first president to hit early turbulence, and Bill Galston, a former
adviser to Bill Clinton, recalled that “hardly anyone” of the new
president’s staff in 1993 had been in the White House before.
“That created all
sorts of problems. The simple fact of not knowing how the machinery
operates is already a huge problem.”
Before too long, he
said, Clinton recruited Hill veteran Leon Panetta and David Gergen,
who had worked with the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford
and Ronald Reagan.
“You need people
there who know how overwhelming it is to be in the White House with
‘incoming’ coming at you from all directions,” Galston said.
“You need to have a sense of all pieces of the government. It’s
not as harmonious as conducting an orchestra. It’s like juggling
knives and swords.”
But Galston, a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank, acknowledged
that the Trump administration is not normal. “I’ve consulted many
people in town about analogies and comparisons and nobody can come up
with any. Our seismographs are broken.
“We appear to have
a president who cannot distinguish chaos from order,” he continued.
“There are amateurs doing a job that only professionals can do, and
even then often not successfully.”
In contrast, Trump’s
allies contend that, for a non-politician learning on the job, he is
doing well and playing the media like a fiddle.
“It’s like the
beginning of any administration,” said Christopher Nixon Cox, who
is well acquainted with Bannon and other members of Trump’s inner
circle. He compared Trump’s first month to Clinton’s, observing
that critics also called those weeks “a disaster”.
“Every
administration has its palace intrigues,” Nixon Cox said. “It’s
hard to say he has any more or less. Given that we have social media
and he’s a social media president, it could be we’re just more
aware of what used to be kept behind closed doors. There will be good
days and bad days but it’s way too early to say it’s going to go
off the rails.”
Cox, a financial
adviser and grandson of Richard Nixon, added: “Fundamentally he’s
going to be judged on the economy and whether he keeps peace around
the world. I think it’s going to be a big success. We have to give
him time.”
Tom Stewart, a
member of Trump’s national security advisory council during the
campaign, said that the president was “cunningly” manipulating
the media, so that “his strong cabinet will have a chance to make
some meaningful reforms.”
Grover Norquist,
president of Americans for Tax Reform, said Republicans are making
good progress on their conservative agenda. “The press and a lot of
observers in Washington DC like to stop and look at a car accident
and they miss that the traffic is continuing to drive past at 50mph,”
he said. “Things are moving forward, largely on track.”
Nevertheless, as
Trump enters his second month, there will be many praying for a
steadier hand and fewer tweets ending with exclamation marks.
“This can’t just
stand,” said Rich Galen, former press secretary to the 44th
vice-president, Dan Quayle. “It was kind of fun in the beginning
watching the kids run around and bump into each other. Now they’ve
got the keys to the car and it’s dangerous. Someone has to go in
and get their arms around this.”
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