The slow roll of Trumpian disinforming contradictions now appears in the WH daily briefing dominated by a Trump jonesing for a campaign rally.
His unhingery is now on full display with the structure of usual falsehoods and lies. Those used to his puffery in his campaign rallies are now seeing it bleed more profusely into the briefings where facts actually matter more than rhetoric.
Today he fixated on “miracle cures” in a way reminiscent of the bark of a snake oil grifter.
If anything his true failure is still not understanding how to be a president after four years. He fails to understand America’s use of fiscal policy or even federal assistance and national planning. Without indulging content analysis, when he talks about the economy taking off like a rocket, it has never out-performed the prior administration even as he has now erased all market gains during his tenure.
On Wednesday, Trump met with nurses, telling them the government had ordered 500 million N95 respirator masks -- a key piece of personal protective equipment, or PPE, that is in shortage in the U.S.
He declined to mention that the order was placed 14 days ago, and will take 18 months to fill. Meanwhile, health professionals are in such desperate need for the masks that some have posted on social media asking neighbors to donate them.
A hospital ship that can’t yet sail, a drug that’s not approved for coronavirus, a windfall of masks that’s not due until next year. Donald Trump has repeatedly overstated his government’s accomplishments as he tries to calm Americans and fight the spread of coronavirus.
In news conferences intended to explain the government’s actions to a public that’s practically stopped engaging in social interactions or large swathes of the economy out of fear of the virus, the president has sold incremental steps as major breakthroughs, tentative moves as final and long-term measures as immediate relief.
The coronavirus outbreak has rapidly become the biggest crisis of Trump’s presidency, straining both the nation’s health care system and its economy just months before the president must stand for re-election. As of this week, Trump has declared himself a “wartime president,” shifting abruptly from minimizing the threat of the virus and endorsing massive government spending to combat its fallout.
But with his new, more activist approach has come misstatements.
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