Our pinball president

Our president Donald Trump is not like someone playing pinball. He instead is more like a pinball in a machine – just bouncing around off of bumpers and flippers.  Donald ignored and downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, as described in an article by Tamara Keith at NPR on April 21, 2020 titled Timeline: what Trump has said and done about the coronavirus. He also gives overly optimistic forecasts about when the pandemic will end: Easter, May 1 st, etc.    

Trump began holding daily briefings which should have aimed at informing the public. He should just have been the ringmaster of that circus. Instead he and the vice president became the clowns.  An editorial on April 9 in the Wall Street Journal titled Trump’s Wasted Briefings contained the following quote (which I have taken from an April 10 article by Chris Cillizza at CNN Politics The Point titled What the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board gets exactly right about Trump’s problematic coronavirus briefings):

“But sometime in the past three weeks Mr. Trump seems to have concluded that the briefings could be a showcase for him. Perhaps they substitute in his mind for the campaign rallies he can no longer hold because of the risks. Perhaps he resented the media adulation that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been receiving for his daily show. Whatever the reason, the briefings are all now about the President.”

This week the president said something breathtakingly stupid in a briefing. On April 24, 2020 at Snopes Dan Evon had a brief article with a title asking Did Trump suggest injecting disinfectants as COVID-19 treatment? He did! AT CNN a longer article described How a media-distracted Trump ended up derailing his own briefing. Later he claimed he’d been sarcastic, and eventually he tweeted:

“What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately? They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!”

He reminds me of a recent GEICO commercial about making Poor Decisions in a horror movie.