Donald Trump is indeed a wartime president, waging battles on multiple fronts, many of them having nothing to do with the pandemic.
When he abruptly ended a news conference Monday because he didn’t like a question, it was a moment that captured not just his hostilities with the press but the broad range of his pugilistic approach to politics.
At the Rose Garden session, he essentially accused a former president of the United States of treason, and that wasn’t even close to being the day’s top story.
TRUMP WEIGHS VIRUS RISKS AS MEDIA FOCUS ON WHITE HOUSE OUTBREAK
Just yesterday, Trump was arguing for a plan to reopen America that Anthony Fauci says could cause “needless suffering and death,” and fighting to keep his tax returns secret in a case heard by the Supreme Court. Oh, and he found time to say of a cable news critic and former congressman, Joe Scarborough, “Did he get away with murder?”
All this drives his critics up the wall, and after 80,000 deaths he lags far behind most governors in the polls during this virus era. But Trump supporters love his street-brawling style, the fact that he’s always punching back no matter what the issue.
The overriding issue, of course, is Covid-19, and yesterday it was Fauci, telling a Senate panel remotely (because he’s self-quarantining) that the rush to reopen is risky, because in some areas “little spikes” might “turn into outbreaks.” In an email the previous night to a New York Times reporter, Fauci warned of “the danger of trying to open the country prematurely”–an almost total contradiction of the Trump message that America had “prevailed” against the invisible enemy.
At Monday’s presser, Washington Post reporter Phil Rucker asked about a series of tweets in which Trump has said “Obamagate is worse than Watergate.” In the wake of newly released documents and the attorney general dropping the Mike Flynn case, Trump and his allies have accused Obama administration officials of pushing the Russia investigation for partisan reasons.
“What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing? And do you believe the Justice Department should prosecute him?” Rucker asked.
Trump’s response: “Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected. And it’s a disgrace that it happened.”
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Rucker asked the question again. “You know what the crime is,” Trump said. “The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”
What was very obvious to everybody is that Trump didn’t want to make the charge on camera. And Senate Republicans aren’t joining his call to personally investigate Barack Obama, Politico says.
The president also claimed that the United States and Germany have the world’s lowest rate of virus deaths per capita, which was quickly contradicted by media fact-checkers.
As the press conference was winding down, CBS’s Weija Jiang, who is Chinese-American, noted Trump’s declaration that the U.S. is faring better on testing than other countries: “Why does that matter? Why is this a global competition to you if, every day, Americans are still losing their lives and we’re still seeing more cases every day?”
Trump replied that “maybe that’s a question you should ask China. Don’t ask me; ask China that question, okay? When you ask them that question, you may get a very unusual answer.”
He tried to move on, but Jiang interjected: “Sir, why are you saying that to me, specifically? That I should ask China?” The president said he was “saying it to anybody that would ask a nasty question like that.”
Trump had pointed to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, but when she hesitated so Jiang could follow up, he refused to recognize her, and when she persisted, he said “ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much” and walked off.
Early yesterday morning, the president continued his tear against the media in a torrid tweetstorm.
He retweeted posts involving actress Rose McGowan accusing Bill Maher of sexual harassment (“show sucks!”), and my “Media Buzz” interview with Emily Miller, who says NBC executives sexually harassed her when she worked at the network in the 1990s.
And with “Morning Joe” in its first hour, Trump tweeted: “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so. Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”
This was his latest promotion of a conspiracy theory involving the 2001 death of a 28-year-old aide intern in Scarborough’s Florida congressional office. Her death was ruled an accident by the medical examiner–she died from hitting her head after losing consciousness from an abnormal heart rhythm–and no foul play was suspected.
Scarborough responded on air: “Turn off the television, and why don’t you start working, okay?…You do your job, we’ll do ours. America will be much better off for that. Just go. Turn off the TV, Donald.”
Not very likely.
