A tale of two tweets: Trump publicly contradicts his own post in just over an hour
Donald Trump has often demonstrated that he believes that he is his own best spokesperson.
This is after all the man who in his pre-presidential career liked to return calls from reporters pretending to be his own fictional public relations representative.
Yet, even in the area in which he is reputed to excel — the smoke and mirrors of publicity — Trump is undermining himself by a lack of consistency in his messaging as he makes statements and then undercuts himself just moments later.
Take the president’s tweets this morning.
Trump was acting momentarily presidential with a tweet that read like a positive teacher’s progress report on the in-classroom conduct of a notoriously disruptive student.
Working very well with States and our Nation’s Governors. #TEAMWORK
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2020
While one would think that the ability to work well with others would be an essential requirement for anyone with the ambition to preside over the federal government, unfortunately, it was a quality that was ignored by the minority of the American electorate who voted for Trump and by the members of the electoral college who could have prevented this travesty of a presidency, had they been able to foresee the current situation in which the nation finds itself.
After patting himself on the back for working so well with the governors across the country, Trump almost immediately disproved his own claims with a tweet sent just a little over an hour later that attacked one state’s governor by name and left the world to guess who the other “very small group of certain other Governors” might be.
.@JBPritzker, Governor of Illinois, and a very small group of certain other Governors, together with Fake News @CNN & Concast (MSDNC), shouldn’t be blaming the Federal Government for their own shortcomings. We are there to back you up should you fail, and always will be!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2020
President “I don’t take responsibility at all” Trump doesn’t want to be seen as having anything to do with the federal government’s failures to prepare for a crisis of which they were warned repeatedly that they needed to prepare for and respond to quickly.
Blaming state governors and the media who accurately point their fingers his way when defining expectations and apportioning credit and responsibility, Trump defies credibility when then subsequently claiming he’s got everyone’s backs.
The only ass that he’s watching out for and covering is his own, and as the biggest ass in the country — at least in terms of his behavior — that’s more than a full-time job for someone with his culpability and his lack of capability.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Trump. The president bristles at constant media criticism and then continues to do things so egregiously contradictory and unhinged that failure to point them out would be a dereliction of journalistic duty.
Trump should learn to keep his mouth shut or should simply resign. Preferably both.
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