Donald Trump doesn’t have press conferences by his people…
A man who ran a small real-estate staff in NYC STILL and never will get comfortable with running the American government…
So the White House press corps got a ‘availability ‘ yesterday as Trump left the White House to board Marine One for a trip…
The session lasted for over a half hour, was wide ranging, and sometimes baffling…..
It was another bravura performance of “Chopper Talk.”
The latest iteration of President Donald Trump’s signature news conferences in front of a thwapping Marine One on Wednesday was a whirligig of boastfulness, slingshot attacks and public self-therapy — in other words, vintage Trump.
As reporters shouted dozens of questions above the din of the helicopter’s churning blades, Trump picked the ones he wanted — on Greenland, Russia, the Fed and background checks for gun sales — and brushed past those he didn’t.
Wednesday’s careening, impromptu 35-minute news conference may have looked bizarre to veteran observers of the White House, not to mention maddening to television pros accustomed to high-quality audio and video production values. But there’s a method to the seeming madness.
The “Chopper Talk” sessions, as comedian Stephen Colbert has dubbed them, serve multiple goals for Trump, reporters and White House insiders say. They allow him to speak more often in front of the cameras than his predecessors, yet firmly on his own terms. He scans the pack of reporters, seizing on questions he wants, while ignoring others. He makes headline-ready pronouncements and airs grievances for anywhere from a few minutes to a half-hour — and then walks away when he’s had enough….
…
Donald Trump started off precisely on-message.
Strolling to the end of a White House driveway on Wednesday ahead of his departure for a veterans event in Kentucky, the president began speaking while still walking toward a crowd of waiting reporters. “So the economy is doing very, very well,” he said.
With fears of a recession stirring and public confidence in the health of the economy dropping for the first time in Trump’s presidency, it was a sound message to project to a skittish nation. But that was as good as it got.
What followed might have swept away all previous Trumpian benchmarks for incoherence, self-aggrandizement, prevarication and rancor in a presidency that has seemed before to veer loosely along the rails of reason but may never have come quite so close to spectacularly jumping the tracks.
Over an ensuing half-hour rant, Trump trucked in antisemitic tropes, insulted the Danish prime minister, insisted he wasn’t racist, bragged about the performance of his former Apprentice reality show, denied starting a trade war with China, praised Vladimir Putin and told reporters that he, Trump, was the “Chosen One” – all within hours of referring to himself as the “King of Israel” and tweeting in all caps: “WHERE IS THE FEDERAL RESERVE?”…
image….Mark Wilson/Getty
One would have thought that any thinking person would want to avoid association with Trumps harebrained scheme to buy Green land from Denmark.
One would be wrong.
Sen. Tom Cotton, (InThe Cult-Ark.) is bragging that the idea was originally his!
The hilarity just never ends!