Teleprompter Trump raises hopes and Tuesday Trump dashes them
It is getting easier to agree with Donald Trump. You just have to be patient. Our president is like the weather in Oklahoma. If you don’t like it, wait a minute and it will change. I decided to use that Will Rogers quote after spending an hour and a half covering a softball game under sunny skies and driving home in a thunderstorm that blew a neighbor’s trampoline over their fence and relocated it a few yards over.
It was also right after President Trump gave his second speech of the week. His sunny skies, teleprompter controlled Afghanistan policy speech was followed by a thunderstorm of a political rally in Arizona where he rewrote history and implored his faithful followers to believe him despite his more than 1,000 lies or misleading statements since taking office and not the evil media who is always making him look bad by running video clips of what he says. During his speech, Trump railed for several minutes about horrible lying media while rereading a heavily edited version of his Charlottesville comments. Many of his supporters will gladly forget he bookended more legitimate comments with the “both sides” rhetoric that he conveniently left out Tuesday night. That would be like my neighbors trying to explain to their friends that the trampoline didn’t actually fly across the fence. My neighbors would never consider doing that because they are honest people. Trump read a redacted statement to those in attendance at his rally and all of their heads bobbed along blissfully believing the lies.
The biggest problem isn’t that Trump supporters are being lied to. It is they can’t tell or don’t care that it is Trump doing the lying.
It is hard to believe Trump has kept any followers with his flip-flopping and inability to get anything done. Trump the candidate would have a field day tweeting about Trump the President.
He has failed to do anything about Obamacare. That was kind of a big deal on the campaign trail. I can’t imagine what Trump would be tweeting if another Republican had failed in that primary priority. Can you imagine what he would have said about a President who promised to get American troops out of a “stupid” engagement in Afghanistan and six months into his presidency announced that he was expanding and lengthening the war?
I don’t even disagree with what he ultimately decided to do. I don’t think our work in Afghanistan is done and a power vacuum can exacerbate existing problems. Trump is like the local guy that says during his campaign that the school board does a bad job and he is running to fix the way they do things. Then they get elected, figure out there was a good reason things are done that way and end up voting along with the majority.
I guess it is encouraging that he can admit he was wrong for years and do what most in the intelligence community believe is the right thing.
It is sad that Americans elected a guy who is clueless about foreign policy, but if the box on the ballot had simply said, “Not Hillary” instead of Donald Trump, he would have received the same number of votes. But failing to end the war isn’t the only way Trump has pulled the wool over the eyes of those who hated Hillary Clinton just enough to vote for him. On Tuesday night, after spending 30 minutes praising his sheep-like friends on the FOX Network and attacking members of the media who don’t constantly prop him up regardless of what he says or does, Trump announced a major u-turn in his immigration policy.
Many actual conservatives had a big problem with President Trump’s plan to build a wall across the southern border to keep illegal immigrants out of the country. The cost and likely inefficiency of a wall as a security method made it a bad investment. Trump had a plan to fix that. Remember all of his campaign rallies before Tuesday in Arizona? Trump would screed into the microphone, “Who is going to pay for the wall?” And all of his frothy followers would shout “Mexico!”
It would be funny if it didn’t get him elected. Tuesday night, Trump had found a new funding method. He threatened to shut down the American government if Congress didn’t approve funding for the wall. So government services and social security checks could be delayed if he doesn’t get his way.
Hopefully, Congress has the same resolve the Mexican government did when they told him to forget it. From one day to the next, it is impossible to predict what Trump will do or say. It has been a long seven months to start his tenure. It seems like every move in the White House — his wife moving in, a new chief of staff, several other new members of the White House staff — is going to be the one that helps control his impulsive and self-defeating communication style.
Instead, he still has shouting matches with the Senate Majority Leader and intentionally damages re-election hopes of incumbents from his own party in Arizona. It is becoming apparent that he can’t be controlled and that isn’t good for the country or the office he holds. I recognize that some of his missteps are calculated to distract from more pressing concerns.
However, when the rubber meets the road like it did in Charlottesville and the nation needs a leader, impulsive comments that veer off script don’t help. They never have and never will.
Monday night’s speech left people thinking Trump may be learning and growing into the office. Tuesday night showed the sunny days can still end in damaging thunderstorms. Kent Bush is publisher of Shawnee (Oklahoma) NewsStar and can be reached at kent.bush@news-star.com