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Trump gets widespread thumbs down on Oval Office speech and coronavirus role

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The big debate has started now about whether Donald Trump is a)one of the worst Presidents in American history or b)the worst President in American history. The reason: the number of his untrue statements (i.e. lies) that he’s pumping out on a regular basis has begun to catch up with him.

Only this time perhaps millions of lives are at stake.

All kinds of questions are now raised by reporters, analysts and on that 24/7 outrage machine known as Twitter. Questions like: Trump says he hasn’t been tested for the virus but is that true? Could he be carrying it? Why is he still shaking hands? Could Trump be pushing stimulus for hotels to benefit his resorts? Is it a coincidence that his 30 day ban on travel to and from most of Europe excluded countries where he has resorts? And one that is increasingly asked on Twitter and not necessarily by nutcases: is there a chance Trump could suspend the election on the grounds of the virus?

The catalyst for the new Katrina-like storm of criticism about Trump’s performance, veracity, empathy was his Oval Office address, which led to the U.S stock market suffering worst crash since 1987. Trump is a product of America’s talk radio/cable news entertainment political culture which is big on polemics and often thin on policy. Polemics, spin, and government officials (who work for Trump) praising him to the hilt haven’t worked here. Nor have Sean Hannity’s predictable comments (which are often at variance with both facts and reality).

Trump’s main problem is not just credibility but his decision to govern as President of the Base, for the Base and by the Base. He has never tried to truly unify the county. His bombastic, insulting, name-calling, norm-shattering style makes him appear less as President of the United States than of President of a new company: Boorshead Meats.

Here’s a sampling of the storm swirling around Trump as a pandemic begins to sweep the United States.

The Daily Beast:

“President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address Wednesday evening was supposed to calm concerns about the spread of the coronavirus. Instead, it sparked panic and confusion. Not just among the markets, U.S. travelers, and international leaders but within his own administration as well.

Two officials in the U.S. State Department told The Daily Beast that foreign service officers and diplomats were unprepared for the president’s announcement and spent the early hours of Thursday scrambling to figure out how their work and travel would be affected in the short term.

“It is just total chaos,” said one official currently abroad, adding that they did not know if they would have to return to the U.S. immediately or if they would need to quarantine for two weeks upon arriving. Diplomats and other U.S. staff overseas did not know if they’d be able to even visit their families back in the States, and they frantically searched for answers that weren’t immediately available from Foggy Bottom or the West Wing.

That lack of clarity extended to within the walls of the White House. Shortly after President Trump’s speech on Wednesday, White House aides and administration officials were already scrambling to walk back, clarify, or straight-up correct key portions of his high-stakes Oval Office address, furiously communicating with one another and inquisitive media outlets trying to figure out what had just happened.”

“Senior officials” told The Daily Beast: ““We are wasting time playing mop-up on something we absolutely should not have to do right now. And it goes without say[ing] that we aren’t allowed to admit that any of it is the fault of the president.”

Esquire’s Charles Pierce:

“This was not a speech. This was a cry for help, an SOS from a guy who knows, as Micheal Ray Richardson once put it, that the ship be sinking. You could almost imagine thousands of tiny feet running for lifeboats behind his eyes. You could see him reacting to storm sirens only he could hear. He is thrashing and floundering and he is surrounded by thrashers and flounderers who owe their entire careers to him now. This isn’t chaos. It is surrender to it.

Imagine if, in his address to the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy had announced a naval blockade of, say, Jamaica, and then had to walk it back minutes later to explain that he meant Cuba. That’s what we had Wednesday night when, minutes after the cameras in the Oval Office went dark, the White House had to rush out explanations that the president*, in discussing his own new policy proposals, didn’t know what in the hell he was talking about.”

The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser:

“Trump was detached from the unfolding reality of a global crisis that is unlike any in memory. I’ve watched Presidential speeches for a few decades now. I cannot recall one that was less equal to the moment.

Trump spoke from the Oval Office exactly five weeks to the day since the end of his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, which left him with essentially unchecked power after the Republican-led Senate voted against his removal. So much has happened since the trial, which already seems as if it happened in another era, but there is a through-line: Trump himself, constantly conflating the national interest with his personal interest. As the coronavirus spread and the President initially ignored, downplayed, and lied about it—even dismissing coverage of the risks as a media-inflamed “hoax”—the costs of the Senate’s impeachment decision have been cast in sharp relief. It will be a long time before we can reckon with the full damage done by an Administration whose incompetence, disinformation, and sheer bungling in the early stages of the crisis have been at once predictable and breathtaking.

The critics were quick to declare this to be Trump’s Katrina, Trump’s Chernobyl, even Trump’s “Pandumbic,” as “The Daily Show” named it. What is striking to me, however, is how much the last few weeks represented Trump merely being Trump. This wasn’t a situation in which the folly of the system or the depth of mismanagement was suddenly revealed to the man at the top, but a case in which the man at the top was the folly.”

Matthew Yglesias:

“On Wednesday night, Trump took the rare step of delivering a formal address to the public from the Oval Office. It turned out to be a catastrophe. If you’d asked me Wednesday morning, I would have said, “How bad could 10 minutes of reading a speech from a teleprompter possibly be?” The answer turns out to be worse than I’d thought.

The entire focus of the speech was wildly misguided, focused on ginning up xenophobia and restricting travel from abroad when the coronavirus is already spreading seemingly uncontrolled inside the United States.

But even within the narrow premise that delivering an Oval Office address about new restrictions on European travel was a good idea, Trump screwed it up beyond belief.”

The Guardian:

“Anger is mounting in the US over the Trump administration’s failure to test for coronavirus on a scale that could contain the outbreak and mitigate its most devastating impacts.

On Thursday the lack of testing capacity for Covid-19 was recognised in blunt terms by one of the top US officials dealing with the crisis. Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described the current state of affairs as “a failing” at a hearing of the House oversight committee.

From Congress to state capitals across the country, politicians of both main parties have shown rare bipartisan agreement that the pace of federal testing is woefully inadequate. Congress members who were given private briefings by Trump administration officials on Thursday expressed shock and outrage that so far only 11,000 tests have been conducted in a country of 327 million people.

…Answering press questions in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said: “Frankly, the testing has been going very smooth.” He added: “We have heavily tested.”

That is factually incorrect, and a growing number of public officials, including from his own party, are willing to say so.

Members of Congress who attended a bipartisan House briefing expressed anger about testing failures.”

Meanwhile, Trump immediately violated one of his points of his speech. The headline in Mediaite sums it up: “One Day After Calling for Politics to Be Put Aside, Trump Rages Against Joe Biden in Misleading Twitter Rant.”