It’s Saturday and time once again for the regularly scheduled Trump Tweetstorm. On this episode, our reality TV game show president posted fifty (50!) self-serving, lie-riddled, insult-laden tweets, all before mid-afternoon.
It’s bad enough that the American president finds it necessary to constantly lash out with such childish egocentrism on a frivolous social media site. But during a pandemic that is causing hundreds of thousands of illnesses in the country, and thousands of deaths, it is mind-boggling that he even has the time. Trump has never been a particularly efficient manager, having spent more time playing golf than any other president. And that’s when he isn’t watching Fox News or staging cult rallies. But you would think that his days would now be consumed with finding ways to mitigate the hardship – physical, emotional, and financial – that our fellow citizens are enduring.
Instead, Trump is tweeting interminably. With 50 tweets in seven hours (that’s about a tweet every eight minutes), Trump really needs to explain how that benefits a nation in distress. And you also need to factor in the time it took him to read the content that he’s retweeting prior to posting it.
Among this morning’s retweets were eight by John Solomon, a disgraced, ultra right-wing conspiracy crackpot. But even more egregious, there were 16 tweets that featured Trump’s daughter Ivanka. They covered a variety of subjects, but were mostly attempts to pay tribute to her and whatever project she’s pretending to be involved with. That’s a lot of tribute to someone who is only in the White House because of her family name.
The tweeting appears to have stopped just as Trump took to the podium at today’s Coronavirus Task Force briefing. Unfortunately, these briefings have not served their purpose from the start. Trump has hijacked them to boost his 2020 reelection campaign. So he commandeers the microphone to exalt himself, malign his critics, and shout manically at the press.
In fact, Trump opened today’s briefing by haranguing the media in some vague sense without ever explaining what he’s talking about. He later spent several minutes defending his firing of the intelligence community Inspector General, which led into several more minutes lying about the conversation wherein he extorted the president of Ukraine to get dirt on Joe Biden. Again, this obsession with himself does nothing to advance the fight against the coronavirus.
The bottom line is that we have a president who is flagrantly negligent. A competent leader wouldn’t have time to cast himself as the star of a daily press conference. He wouldn’t have time to bicker with reporters for whom he harbors a bitter hatred. And he surely wouldn’t have time to tweet dozens of times, predominantly about his own daughter, while the American people are suffering.
We need a president who will assemble the best and brightest experts to attack this pandemic, and then let them do that while he attends to a bigger picture agenda and the multitude of other presidential responsibilities. Trump has dropped the ball on virtually everything. And with respect to COVID-19 that has been a deadly dereliction of duty.
How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.
