The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.
When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he had written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years. (Why did he pick 1977 as a benchmark? Who knows. But he’s wrong.) He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he glowered and hurled one lie after another into the camera.
We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in pure panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting that he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you simps—America is strong and respected.
In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.
I consider myself a connoisseur of Trump’s speeches. I’ve watched them and live-tweeted them for years because I think Americans need to see what kind of man sits in the Oval Office. But even by Trump’s standards, this was an unnerving display of fear. I could only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president who has lost his bearings berating his own people and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse.
His rant contained no news, other than another example of his contempt for the U.S. military, which he apparently believes he can buy with a onetime $1,776 bonus check. This is projection: Trump has shown his willingness to be bought off with gold bars and trinkets, and he may think the men and women of the armed forces are people of low character who can be bought as easily as he can.
This was not a holiday address from the leader of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate, enraged tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. The president has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight, like Trump himself, was unworthy of America and its people.
The post This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like appeared first on The Atlantic.
