The Atlantic does a piece that goes back and looks a man having issues rehearsing a speech after people tore up the offices were Congress does it business trying to help him stay in power….
If, as Carl von Clausewitz once observed, the mark of a historic moment is that no one knows what the fuck is going on, then what we have here is a historic moment. (Pretty sure it was von Clausewitz who said that.) What we have here is President Donald Trump, the day after his people sacked the Capitol, trying to strike a tone. Which tone? He doesn’t know. And it’s making him very uncomfortable.
He doesn’t want to scold them, to be censorious, because that’s not his style; his style is to get everybody pumped. But that was yesterday. Today, apparently, he has to be boring. He has to be pouty and presidential. People died, after all. Things got broken. They wanted to string up Mike Pence! As fun as it was—and it was a lot of fun—pointing an armed mob at Congress might not have been the greatest idea he ever had.
So now what? He stands at the lectern, in his lambency, in his mysterious Trumpy softness, between two sternly drooping flags: Donald Trump, great communicator-confuser, great charismatic muddle of signals and twisty wires, groping for a mood. He’s pettish. He’s trying hard. Someone’s written this speech for him, this pompous speech, and he’s reading it in his special slushy, droning-intoning rhetorical-blah-blah-blah voice, the voice that means he doesn’t mean it. “I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack yesterday …” Heinous: fine American word. You can use it to describe a mass shooting (“this heinous act”) or a bad slice of pizza (“this crust is heinous.”)….
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But this is not a fairy tale. A couple more takes and he’ll nail it. No curse will adhere to him. He will defy the seat of destiny, and come bouncing, bouncing back….
image…President Donald Trump speaks at a rally Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. …AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin