Pages

Friday, February 17, 2017

President Trump's first solo press conference



Yesterday, Donald Trump's first solo press conference as president was just crazy piled on top of crazy. As others have said, it was unhinged. It was nonstop whining. And it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

If this didn't scare you about the future of our country, nothing will. And we're not even a month into his presidency yet!

I can't even begin to recount all of the lunacy he displayed here. TPM has posted the 8 Craziest Moments and 5 Overlooked Asides, but even those barely scratch the surface. It was just nuts! SNL will have to devote an entire show to this press conference if they hope to come even close to the insanity of the real thing.

This is one of the best reactions, for its brief length, from Jake Tapper at CNN:



"It was Festivus." Heh, heh. Now, that was funny. But his point was very serious.

"At one point he said that the leaks were real but the news was fake, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever." Tapper is right. If it's fake, it's not a leak.

You can't claim that the intelligence community is leaking classified data while also claiming that news organizations are lying when they report it. Yet that's exactly what Trump has been claiming.

Tapper mentions Peter Alexander at NBC, and the clip below shows that brief segment of the news conference.

Remember, after the election, Donald Trump bragged and bragged about winning one of the biggest electoral college margins in history, while also claiming that he won the popular vote. Neither of those claims was true - not even close!

Recently, he's dialed back the first of those claims, maybe because it was so ludicrously false. But he replaced it with a claim that was just as demonstrably false, that he had the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.



That "304 or 306" stuff is because Trump didn't even get that part right. He's repeatedly claimed that he got 306 electoral votes, when he actually got 304. But that's hardly the main thing here. I mean, at this point, no one is going to expect Donald Trump to get numbers right.

But he claimed, as he has been claiming, that he won the biggest electoral college victory since Reagan. Alexander started to correct him, mentioning one of Barack Obama's wins (both were bigger than Trump's), when Trump interrupted to change that claim to just Republican wins. But even that isn't true, which Alexander noted when he finished his sentence.

"So why should Americans trust you, when you accuse the information they receive as being fake, when you're providing information that's not accurate?" Good question, isn't it?

But like everything else where Donald Trump has been demonstrably wrong, he shrugs it off as just something 'he was given.'  "Actually, I've seen that information around." But the point is that it's not true.

We've seen this over and over again, throughout the campaign and right into the presidency. We saw it when he falsely claimed to have seen thousands of American Muslims cheering on 9/11. We saw it when he claimed that he actually won the popular vote, because 3-5 million people voted illegally.

Over and over again, Donald Trump either lies or is just too stupid to separate fantasy from reality. I don't know which it is, but it's scary as hell, either way, given that he's now President of the United States.

PS. Please note that Trump is holding a 2020 campaign rally in Florida tomorrow! Yes, this is an actual campaign rally, paid for by his 2020 presidential campaign, less than one month into his term of office. How crazy is that?

No comments:

Post a Comment