Trump should be feeling heat for rambling rhetoric

A great day of triumph for Donald Trump! The president went to an American Legion convention Wednesday and read a speech off a teleprompter. Nothing weird happened. Total victory.

We now divide the president’s public addresses into two categories. There are the unremarkable and predictable ones written by someone else and the ones in which he ignores the script and just says what’s on his mind, terrifying and confusing all Americans who are not in his base.

Any other president who went to a convention of veterans and called for Americans to “work together” would have gotten no notice whatsoever. But Trump was coming off his spontaneous appearance in Phoenix, where he frightened the whole country with rants about the media and wild riffs of self-congratulations.

It would be calming to the national psyche if the president refrained from ever again speaking to the American people about his true thoughts and feelings. It wouldn’t do anything to improve his performance in office, but at least we might feel less nervous, moment to moment.

Right now, every day Americans have to wonder whether the president will be sane or spontaneous. He staged an impromptu press conference on Charlottesville and defended the neo-Nazis. His ramblings in Phoenix unnerved former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who pointed out that this is the guy with the nuclear football, and called Trump’s performance “downright scary and disturbing.”

The unfair part, of course, is that when Trump just reads words he’s been given, people are so relieved that he gets way too much credit. Look at the speech on Afghanistan. The plan Trump unveiled is clearly never going to improve anything. And he delivered it in a strange way, staring at teleprompters to the left and right but almost never looking directly at the TV audience. But still, it had complete sentences! He did not once mention his own personal wealth or make up facts about his election victory. The White House basked in glory.

Then came the rally in Phoenix, an excellent example of how the president wanders off the written plan and just sort of runs amok.

He blathered for 77 minutes, dissing the two local Republican senators, one of whom is suffering from brain cancer. He threatened to shut down the government if he didn’t get money for his wall. He revealed that “Washington is full of people who are only looking out for themselves” and then raced into another paean to youknow-who.

This is a man who can’t refrain from congratulating himself even when he’s talking about the weather.

“I was over at the Yuma sector,” he told the folks in Phoenix, describing his trip to meet members of the Border Patrol. “It was hot. It was like 115 degrees. I’m out signing autographs for an hour. I was there. That was a hot day. You learn if you’re in shape if you can do that, believe me.”

Now, the auditorium was full of people from Arizona. They spend their lives in ridiculous heat. It did not seem like a group you wanted to entertain with a story about how much you suffered signing autographs when it was “like 115 degrees.”

It was actually 107. But that’s the least of our problems.