Donald Trump’s “Presidential Instant”
The Pundits are pushing the narrative of Trump as suddenly “Presidential”. But we’ve all been played like this before.
There was this time, following the Conventions, when Donald Trump was in some pretty deep political trouble. We now know he had a legion of secret Trumpsters hiding behind socially acceptable answers to pollsters who were going to vote for him no matter what, but we didn’t know that then. It was widely believed that Trump had gone off the rails- even he thought his campaign was doomed. It was right after he spent a week making fun of a deceased Veteran’s family who criticized him at the Democratic National Convention.
This was in August of 2016. And then he hired a pollster, Kellyanne Conway to manage his PR. And he suddenly started using a teleprompter and talking “on message.” His tweeting slowed to a crawl, and surprisingly he wasn’t making incendiary statements at 3 o’clock in the morning. Remember this? Because I sure do. It was the long-awaited “pivot,” to where he was starting to act less like a spoiled schoolyard bully and more like a serious candidate for President. At this time, Mother Jones even wrote a short cautionary note telling people to not forget who the real Donald Trump is. It was almost like they had seen that play before and were not convinced that his “pivot” was real.
In fact, we had all seen that show before- after Trump won the New York Primary in April, he promised to be “more disciplined” and “so presidential, you will be bored”. But, as you know, he never was- that “pivot” lasted like three days and consisted almost entirely of him magnanimously deciding to call a sitting US Senator “Senator Cruz” instead of his usual “Lying Ted.” What a guy!
The author of this piece, Kevin Drum said something that is worth quoting here
“ But a lot of voters have very short memories. It’s always been true that if Trump can manage to act relatively sane for a mere few weeks, that would be plenty of time for a chunk of credulous voters, pundits, and hacks to decide that he’s turned over a new leaf and wouldn’t be a crazy man after all.”
Noted conservative SE Cupp went further when she suggested that we shouldn’t give any sort of credence to the notion of the “Pivot.” She wrote for CNN.com
“ But while the focus now seems to be the durability or otherwise of this latest “pivot,” few are asking the much more important question: When did we construct this new version of the political pivot, whereby a year’s worth of garbage is erased or forgiven, and why do we apply it only to Donald Trump?”
It’s almost like Trump is so horrible for so long, and then he makes a speech which sounds reasonably literate and is not completely bonkers, and it’s so different that people are convinced he has turned a new page and has become “Presidential.” Because they have forgotten (willfully or otherwise) the last time he ran the same exact script, and got the same exact results from millions of people.
They want… so badly… for him to be Presidential… SO so badly…
Fast forward to Trump’s first Speech to a joint session of Congress. It’s not quite a State of the Union speech- he just got into office and therefore has not had time to actually evaluate the state of the Union. That will come next year. But this is a SotU in all but name. Anyhow.
Trump gets up there, and delivers a speech which, except for a few things, sounded like any Speech before a Joint Session of Congress would sound if delivered by a 70 year old Republican. As a matter of fact- listening to it on the radio and watching it on TV was a surreally different experience. Just hearing his voice on the radio, it was kind of hard to tell it was him.
He didn’t deliver a tirade about the “fake news media” which is a staple in virtually all his speeches. He didn’t brag about how massive his inauguration crowd was, or how everyone should just let the “Russian questions” go because he won and wants to enjoy his time in the White House. No, he didn’t say anything like that. Instead, he basically laid out a bunch of very vague policy suggestions to the Republicans in Congress, got tons of applause from the sycophant Majority who hung on his every word, and, in his one moment of bombast (the only time he was off script, by the way), claimed that a Navy SEAL that he got killed in Yemen was “looking down” from Heaven (because, as all Republicans know, Heaven is actually a physical place that is above us somewhere, hence giving someone a place to look down from) and smiling, because his grieving, crying, and praying widow received the “longest” standing ovation ever at a Joint Speech to Congress. * We don’t really know whether that’s true, but who cares?
There was, to my understanding, a lot of coded language designed for Trump’s main audience of the night, the Republicans in Congress and his cult followers at home, talking about how radical Islamic terrorists were going to be exterminated, and how he was going to create a special bureau in the Department of Homeland Security specifically to highlight the stories of nativists in the US who were apparently screwed out of a job or attacked by these ravaging gangs of illegal immigrants that are apparently roving our cities and taking all of our food or something, (while not offering another bureau for the much more frequently occurring instance of immigrants who are exploited by American business people or who are harassed and threatened by American police or shot at by nativist vigilante groups), and so forth. He even physically delivered almost the entire speech to the Republican side of the room!
But- and here we go again. Trump didn’t refer to “crooked Hillary.” Trump did not come out with “bad hombres” or “Mexican rapists.” He did not call someone out for wearing a hijab. He simply didn’t say anything really that bad.
Cue Trump Pivot 3.0 in 3…2…1…
(I’ll let Seth Meyers do the honors.)
Yesterday, he was giving Congressional Republicans palpitations. Today, he has completely reassured them, and has reunited the GOP. Now, Trump is “Presidential.” He did not actually do anything a President would do- he set out no policies with any sort of details whatsoever. He didn’t reach out to the opposition save the supposed Infrastructure bill, (which is actually just a tax giveaway to construction and energy companies, and which Dems are going to get suckered into because voters have no patience for stupid details) and a nod to paid family leave (which doesn’t do anything for someone who doesn’t have a job which would even allow them to pay the damned rent.)
But yeah, we have to agree, more importantly, he didn’t really do anything that a President SHOULDN’T do, such as fall off the podium, or refer to the press as the “opposition Party”, or tell Sonia Sotomayor that she can’t possibly be neutral because she is a Mexican (She’s Puerto Rican). Yeah, he read real nice off the teleprompter and got all the words out, and paused when he was supposed to, and got through it…
And yet- that one tear jerker moment, where Trump pointed out the widow of the Navy SEAL whose death is on the hands of the Commander in Chief, even got the anchors at CNN, who Trump has been full blasting for more than a month now to jump full on the Trump sycophant train. Even Van “Whitelash” Jones choked up a bit- Jones immediately crowned Trump “President” because of this bit of exploitation in Trump’s speech. (For the record, he tried to walk his comment back today after getting slammed from the Left for his words.) It’s like- Trump says something nice about someone, and we have to “reset how we deal with this guy…”
It’s almost like Van Jones, and the Gen Xers Pundits on TV didn’t bother reading Mother Jones or SE Cupp, or watching Seth Meyers… It’s almost like they so desperately want Trump to actually be a real President instead of a alt-right flamer that they’ll give him a pass everytime he reads from a teleprompter. They so want him to be normal, that they go out of their way to set the bar so low, and then when he doesn’t trip while slithering over it, they declare it a resounding success! See! He’s changed. Look- he’s such a disruptor. He is so deft at what he does. He’s outmaneuvered the “resistance,” YET AGAIN… Look at how well he tricked us all.
Because they want… so badly… for him to be Presidential… SO so badly…
PS- This most recent pivot lasted all of 3 full days. Early in the morning on Saturday March 4, The President tweeted four tweets in quick fashion which accused former President Obama of tapping his “wires” at Trump Tower. No evidence was presented, but it appears to be a forward, of sorts of some kind of conspiracy nonsense in Breitbart, which I won’t bother to link here, because I don’t care to pollute my story with that trash.
And then, just to show how Presidential this pivot TRULY is, he used his fifth tweet of the day to take a swipe at Arnold Schwarzenegger, the current host of Trump’s television program The Apprentice. Schwarzenegger said last night that he wouldn’t be returning as a host for next season, because as soon as it became clear that Trump was still involved, “half the fans” boycotted and sponsored began abandoning the show. Trump, in true powerfreak fashion responded, saying “No, you can’t quit because you were fired…”
What a true pivot, for a sitting President to libel a former President. But I suppose in Trump’s America, whatever the President says is true… How “presidential” indeed…
