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Donald Trump
Interview
David Smith in Washington
She is a psychologist who used to deny being related to Donald – now she has written an explosive bestseller about him. She discusses his racism, incompetence, cruelty and why he never laughs More
Donald Trump has admitted that the coronavirus pandemic is likely to “get worse before it gets better” at his first press briefing devoted to the issue since April.Facing dire poll numbers, surging cases and sharp criticism for lack of leadership, the US president returned to the White House podium attempting to show more discipline in both style and substance.In several notable reversals, he urged people to wear face masks, promised his administration was working on a “strategy” and wrapped up in less than half an hour, avoiding his digressions in past briefings that culminated in a proposal to inject disinfectant in Covid-19 patients.The pandemic will “probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better”, Trump said, reading from scripted remarks. “Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is.”It was a marked shift from his claims last month the virus is “fading away” and “dying out”. And having once dismissed its remnants as “embers”, he now conceded that it is raging in states led by Republican governors.“We have embers and fires and we have big fires and unfortunately now, Florida is a little tough or in a big tough position,” he said. “You have a great governor there, great governor in Texas.”Trump has been widely condemned for failing to lead with a national strategy and instead shifting responsibility to state governors. Among the problems is a lack of infrastructure to process and trace test results, leaving people waiting seven days or longer.On Tuesday he claimed: “We are in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful. We have developed it as we go along.”After months of refusing to wear a mask in public, Trump finally did so on 11 July and has since claimed it is patriotic. “We’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask,” he said. “Get a mask, whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They’ll have an effect, and we need everything we can get.”Producing a mask from his suit pocket, he added: “I carry the mask … I have the mask right here. I carry it and I will use it gladly.”The belated appeal was insufficient to placate the president’s critics, however. Heather McGhee, the co-chair of the civil rights group Color of Change, told the MSNBC network: “This is three months too late and 30 or 40,000 lives lost too late.”Despite the more subdued and realistic tone, Trump also offered upbeat words about a reduction in deaths and progress on vaccines and treatments for Covid-19. “The vaccines are coming, and they’re coming a lot sooner than anybody thought possible,” he said.He also repeatedly used the racist term “China virus” and recycled his promise that one day “it will disappear”.More than 3.8 million cases have been reported in the US, including 141,000 deaths. The briefing was the latest of several attempts to relaunch Trump’s public response to the pandemic, after months of shifting from apparent denial to a “wartime” footing to a focus on the economy and other topics.Trump has previewed the briefings as having a good “slot” at 5pm that previously boasted strong “ratings”. But on Tuesday, he was not joined by Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, who had told an interviewer he was not invited, nor by the response coordinator, Deborah Birx, whom Trump claimed was “right outside” the briefing room.Critics have suggested that briefings have returned, albeit in a different form, in an attempt to dominate the media limelight at the expense of Trump’s election rival, Joe Biden. Asked whether he thinks Americans should judge him in November on his handling of the pandemic, Trump replied: “This, among other things. I think the American people will judge us on this. But they’ll judge us on the economy that I created.”Earlier on Tuesday, Biden reiterated his criticism of Trump’s response to the pandemic. “His own staff admits that Donald Trump fails the most important test of being the American president: the duty to care – for you, for all of us,” the former vice-president said in New Castle, Delaware. “He has quit on you and he has quit on this country.” More
Donald Trump is a very stable genius – and he has the test results to prove it. In an extraordinary interview on Sunday with Chris Wallace on Fox News, Trump bragged about acing a cognitive exam he had taken, and said he could “guarantee” Joe Biden would not have scored so highly. This wasn’t the first time Trump has cited this test as proof of his mental acumen: in a Fox News interview earlier this month he claimed he had blown doctors away with his results. “Rarely does anyone do what you just did,” they supposedly told him.While Trump hasn’t specified which test he is talking about, it is widely believed to be the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. This isn’t an IQ test – it’s used to detect mental impairment and dementia – with sample questions including drawing a clock and identifying pictures of animals. As Wallace noted, a lot of it is basic stuff: “They have a picture, and it says: ‘What’s that?’ and it’s an elephant.”I’m not a doctor and it is not my place to speculate on the cognitive health of the US president. But while liberals relentlessly mock Trump’s boorishness and overinflated ego, I’m not sure we focus enough on the fact that much of what he says doesn’t make any sense at all. As Lenore Taylor pointed out last year, because reporters impose structure and sense on Trump’s disjointed rambling, we sometimes forget how unintelligible he is: “The process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.”It’s not just the process of reporting that has helped to normalise Trump. It is the criminally low standards that far too many reporters hold him to. When Trump finally wore a face mask earlier this month, for example, a White House reporter for the Washington Post described him as looking “presidential”. In 2017, Trump honoured the widow of a Navy Seal; this two-second break from being awful was enough to prompt Van Jones on CNN to announce that Trump “became president of the United States in that moment”. In March, when Trump managed to say something moderately sensible about the pandemic, CNN’s political correspondent described him as “the kind of leader that people need”.And then, of course, there’s the fact that it’s impossible to properly scrutinise anything Trump says because there’s always another distraction. One minute he’s advocating injecting bleach to counter coronavirus, the next, his daughter-cum-adviser is advertising canned beans on Twitter. Normally, an ethics violation like that would be headline news, but it’s swiftly forgotten because (look!) Trump is on Fox News refusing to answer a question about whether he will accept the results of the November election. Which, again, would normally be a big story but, despite the fact it only happened on Sunday, has already been largely forgotten because, on Monday, the notoriously anti-mask president tweeted a bizarre photo of himself and declared mask-wearing patriotic. Now we’re all analysing that.As for tomorrow? God knows what fresh hell that will bring. It’s almost as if Trump has forced us to live by his own warped logic; it is like we’re all staring at a picture of an elephant and are collectively keeping up the pretence that it’s a president.• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More
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With Donald Trump’s approval rating plummeting as coronavirus cases in the US continue to rise, the president plans to resume daily briefings on the pandemic at the White House on Tuesday.Keenly aware of the need to change perceptions of how he is handling the virus if he hopes to win re-election, Trump also came out for the first time on Monday as a supporter of facial masks.Trump tweeted a picture of himself wearing a mask with the line: “Many people say that it is patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance.”It represented a whiplash reversal by Trump, who was facing a Republican mutiny. Governors in 28 states have now made mask-wearing in public mandatory as virus cases have exploded across the south and west, mostly in states governed by Republicans.The US recorded about 60,000 new cases of Covid-19 on Monday, up more than 30% in the last two weeks for a total of more than 3.8m. Deaths over the same period are up 64% and total confirmed deaths have passed 140,000.For months, Trump has punished and exiled public health experts such as Dr Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who have advanced basic recommendations such as mask-wearing and hand-washing.Trump’s mockery of his election rival Joe Biden for wearing a mask and his own refusal to wear one in the 19 weeks since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic helped to create a partisan divide on mask-wearing and provoke violent clashes in shops and streets.But aides have reportedly shown polling to Trump demonstrating that he is out of step with the public. Eight out of 10 Americans, and 66% of Republicans, say they wear a mask all or most of the time when they leave home, an ABC News-Washington Post poll last week found.The poll also found that only 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, down 13 points from March, and 60% disapprove, up 15.It is unknown whether Trump’s plan to reverse those numbers includes any new action to fight the coronavirus. As the reality of the pandemic has settled in, criticism of the federal government’s failure to establish routine testing, contact tracing and supported isolation has intensified.As negotiations continue over a new stimulus and relief package for the battered US economy, the White House is widely reported to want to cut new funding for testing and tracing and other efforts against the pandemic. While Senate Republicans aim to reduce special unemployment payments, Trump is pushing for a payroll tax cut, a move which would hit social security and Medicare in the middle of a public health crisis. More
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Two generations ago, Richard Nixon sweated his way to losing the first ever presidential debate on television to a young, fit and cool John F Kennedy.It was the kind of rookie mistake you could put down to the newness of TV.So how do you explain – 60 years later – the drenching sweat that trickled down the face of the reality TV star who is now living inside the White House?Of the very few things Donald Trump is supposed to know in any modicum of detail, TV sits right at the tippity-top. There are more historic crises challenging his presidency than there are cable news channels, but that doesn’t stop him tweeting about all the TV he’s watching all day.For a man who still measures his manhood by his own TV ratings, it was a curious choice to sit outside in the humid steamer of a Washington summer, caked in his glowing orange make-up, to field the pesky questions of the best interviewer on Fox News.“Hot enough for you here, Mr President?” asked Chris Wallace.“It’s hot,” said Trump. “It’s about, well, sort of almost record-breaking stuff.”“You know, we wanted to do it inside,” replied Wallace. “This is your choice.”Trump has made so many more consequential blunders than failing to prepare for his double-sided grilling by the weather and Wallace. But this chargrilled interview laid bare how the Wicked Wizard of the West Wing is melting before our eyes.This chargrilled interview laid bare how the Wicked Wizard of the West Wing is melting before our eyesFor four years we have been told that populist leaders – especially this one – are peerless showmen: experts not in government but in hijacking the public attention.His pithy nicknames and catchphrases supposedly destroyed his rivals in 2016. They came up with 12-point plans while he was going to make America great again. He threatened North Korea with his big nuclear button, then fell in love with the North Korean leader in a summit staged just for the cameras.But now his repeated attempts to smear Joe Biden have flopped and the great showman is reportedly asking aides if he should try to find another nickname.With every new poll showing him losing the election, both nationally and in all the battleground states, Trump’s despair dribbled through all his pores on Sunday’s interview.When asked if Biden was senile, Trump answered with the kind of half-baked half-thoughts of a mind cooking slowly in the heat of the presidency. “I’d say he’s not competent to be president,” he warmed up. “To be president, you have to be sharp and tough and so many other things.”What are these so many other things, pray tell?“He doesn’t even come out of his basement. They think, ‘Oh this is a great campaign.’ So he goes in.”It wasn’t clear who they were or what he was going into. But it seemed totally clear to our sharp and tough president, who is also so many other things.“I’ll then make a speech. It’ll be a great speech. And some young guy starts writing, ‘Vice President Biden said this, this, this.’ He didn’t say it. Joe doesn’t know he’s alive, OK? He doesn’t know he’s alive.”It may be tempting to blame all of this on the young guy whose writing clearly leaves a lot to be desired.But it’s the old guy in the Oval we should be worried about. He doesn’t know he’s dying out there.There have been some clues, of course. There was the disastrous riot of a photo op with a pretty bible and a ton of tear gas. There was the Tulsa rally for a million people who failed to show up. There was that weird Mount Rushmore speech about the fascists who say mean things about racists.Then again, as Chris Wallace pointed out, there are the polls that show this desperate act isn’t working. And there’s all the endless video of our sharp and tough president predicting the pandemic would just disappear, like a miracle, with a little disinfectant injected inside. Or perhaps some bright light.“I’ll be right eventually,” Trump insisted when confronted with his own cringe-inducing comments about the coronavirus. “I will be right eventually. You know I said, ‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again.”They say a stopped clock is right twice a day. But this broken timepiece will only be happy when all the clocks have stopped.At this point in Trump’s Twilight Zone, the audience has a good sense of the plot twists that lie ahead in the next four months. It consists of as much concocted chaos as humanly possible.There will be terrorist protesters in every major city, whisked off the streets by Trump’s paramilitaries in rented minivans. Thank goodness we have machine-gun-toting goons to protect us from all that graffiti.There will be caravans of coronavirus-filled immigrants scaling the freshly-painted border wall, which has done such a fantastic job of protecting us all from the pandemic.After Nixon sweated his way to defeat against Kennedy, he returned to win the presidency eight years later with a law and order campaign that promised to shut down civil rights protests and stop enforcing civil rights laws.Our Trumpified version of Tricky Dick is a little less subtle than the original.He claimed that people flying the confederate flag were “not talking about racism”. But when asked about removing the names of confederate generals from US military bases, Trump could only think about race. And some weird stuff about a couple of world wars.“We’re going to name it after the Rev Al Sharpton? What are you going to name it, Chris? Tell me what you’re going to name it,” Trump sputtered.“So there’s a whole thing here. We won two world wars, two world wars, beautiful world wars that were vicious and horrible. And we won them out of Fort Bragg. We won out of all of these forts that now they want to throw those names away.”Ah yes, those beautiful world wars. So vicious and horrible. All at the same time. Like the man says, there is indeed a whole thing here.“Let Biden sit through an interview like this,” Trump declared at another point. “He’ll be on the ground crying for mommy. He’ll say, ‘Mommy, mommy, please take me home.’”In his own man-childish way, Trump thought he was proving his point about senility and sharpness and toughness. And so many other things.But with every new interview, it sounds like he’s just asking his mommy to please take him home. More
