Your bag is empty.
Reality and energy are in short supply at the White House.
On Tuesday morning Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the latest soon-to-be-erstwhile keeper of the Trump administration’s propaganda, called a press briefing for noon.
About 15 minutes past noon, a young press assistant blurted over the West Wing speaker system the briefing would begin at 12:30 p.m. Shortly after the appointed time, the same assistant dutifully announced a “two-minute warning” to let us know the briefing would soon begin. Nothing happened. Then just before 1 p.m. the disembodied voice reassured us with a “real two-minute warning.”
I sighed. Thus it is with this White House. Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about—but it’s not John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It’s the White House in the dog days of August 2020, and Donald Trump—when he’s capable of a cogent thought that doesn’t involve a Happy Meal—is scared to death he’s going to lose the November general election.
McEnany seemed muted, delivering her propaganda with little gusto. The atmosphere was in line with the feeling of dread that permeates the White House and everything Trump and his staff do, and that mood filters down to the press corps covering the chaos. As I waited for McEnany’s briefing to begin, I felt out of sorts. A strong sense of ennui and déjà vu came over me.
Shortly after covering the first Gulf War, I found myself feeling the same way. Walking through Knightsbridge in London, I kept my Army-issue gas mask strapped to my side—the 41st Combat Support Hospital’s Colonel Bob Abodeely had given it to me as protection from the chemical weapons Saddam Hussein was suspected of using. Even as I shopped for a gift for my wife in Harrods, it was with me.
He makes dog-whistle calls to racists, science deniers, conspiracy theorists, the uninformed and those filled with arrogant hatred so often it is damn near impossible to keep up.
Few who saw me understood why, and I got quite a few odd looks as I occasionally patted the gas mask at my hip as if it were Linus’s security blanket. Security guards working at the store asked me about the mask. One had me unpack it. Another, who had just returned from Saudi Arabia, knew what it was and smiled. We shared the experience of seeing the skies overhead turn dark as midnight at high noon from the hundreds of oil fires blazing across Kuwait. We shared disconcerting memories of seeing blackened, scorched human flesh juxtaposed against bleached-white bones in burned-out Iraqi troop carriers, of dismembered body parts strewn across roads in and around Kuwait City.
“You can’t understand if you haven’t been there,” the combat veteran told me.
I understand.
Last Friday afternoon the president ushered the press pool into the Cabinet Room and offered an unsolicited and unprompted assessment of NBC News. “NBC, fake news,” he said. Turning to the situation in Portland, he said the courthouse there “is in very good shape.” He praised the DHS officers who, in response to the protests, were sent to the city to protect federal property. Trump said they have been strictly “defensive.”
“They’re not allowed to be offensive, unfortunately,” Trump said. He appeared listless.
You can get dizzy shaking your head at Trump’s lunacy. But a lack of energy seems to consume him, even as he continues to call the coronavirus “the China virus.” He makes dog-whistle calls to racists, science deniers, conspiracy theorists, the uninformed and those filled with arrogant hatred so often it is damn near impossible to keep up. Protesters, Trump claims, are the worst.
“The ones that were the problem were absolute anarchists, in many cases professionals,” Trump said about Portland’s protesters.
Of course Trump spent the weekend golfing. Saturday was his 264th day of golfing during his administration, according to pool reports. When he wasn’t golfing in the heat, he was tweeting self-praise for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic that has left nearly 160,000 Americans dead.
He started his workweek on Monday bragging about an imaginary crowd cheering him in Florida and claimed he has a 96 percent approval rating among Republicans.
That same day, New York prosecutors announced they are seeking Trump’s tax returns, citing reports of “protracted criminal conduct” at the Trump Organization, according to the Associated Press. This probably caused more presidential dyspepsia than his favorite McDonald’s Happy Meal.
Trump is circling the drain, and that giant flushing sound comes from members of his own party pulling the chain. George Conway, one of the leaders of the Lincoln Project, penned a recent opinion piece for The Washington Post in which he said of Trump: “For the sake of our constitutional republic, he must lose, and lose badly. Yet that should be just a start: We should only honor former presidents who uphold and sustain our nation’s enduring democratic values. There should be no schools, bridges or statues devoted to Trump. His name should live in infamy, and he should be remembered, if at all, for precisely what he was—not a president, but a blundering cheat.”
As if to prove Conway’s point, in an Axios interview with Jonathan Swan Trump dismissed late representative John Lewis because Lewis didn’t attend Trump’s inauguration.
In short, there are fools, there are damn fools, and there is Donald J. Trump.
His lunacy is compounded by the idiots he’s hired who take advantage of a befuddled conman in order to advance their own interests. They are now running the show. Trump appears tired, set on cruise control and wanting to be anywhere but in the White House.
Winston Churchill once said, “This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
Trump knows neither honor nor good sense, but still he never gives in. It’s hard for a dog with a bone to let go of the bone.
How do you cover a president who defies rational thought, honor, good sense, science and appeals to racism and class warfare—especially when he can cover all that ground in just one comment about fair housing? “We ended a rule that was a very horrible rule for people in suburbia, in the suburbs. And that rule has been a very unfair rule for a long time and it was going to be made a lot worse by Biden and Cory Booker,” Trump said last Friday about replacing an Obama-era policy intended to combat discrimination with one granting far fewer protections. “It’s a rule that, basically, you build low-income housing and you build other forms of housing also having to do with zoning and destroy people that have lived in communities in suburbia. For years they’ve lived there, and they want to destroy their lives, and destroy what they have, and it’s been going on for a long time. I ended the rule so people living in the suburbs will no longer have that problem.”
Swan, in his Axios interview with the president, pushed back on every point he could, questioning Trump on many of his ridiculous claims, lies and dog whistles.
Covering wars and covering Donald Trump are a lot alike.
As Democratic operative Adam Parkhomenko put it Tuesday in his newsletter, Today’s Big Stuff: “You’ve just been pantsed in front of the whole world by an Aussie reporter who two years ago was publicly kissing Jeff Sessions’s ass until his lips bled. Swan is the first reporter aside from Chris Wallace to not just take Trump’s idiotic dishonest non-answers with a nod and instead ask real, challenging follow-ups. It’s so embarrassing for Trump, or it would be if he had any human feelings. But it’s especially embarrassing for the other journalists who have interviewed Trump.”
I guess I know now why the president has never agreed to sit down with me. His press people keep telling me I’m “on the list,” but it must be the “people who will never have a private interview with the president” list.
Trump, meanwhile, keeps on steadily declining. Originally scheduled for 5:30 p.m., his Tuesday briefing was pushed to 5:50 p.m. But it was after six p.m. when he finally walked out to face the depleted press corps, once again befouling the Brady Briefing Room with a seemingly unending string of lies laced with the lethargy of an aging septuagenarian who’d rather be golfing.
As he spoke, I got that feeling once again.
I cannot explain it. You cannot understand if you haven’t been there.
It is an uneasy feeling that keeps you looking over your shoulder. It’s the realization that soon you will have to report on fresh carnage and destruction, the likes of which you never thought you’d see from the White House. It’s the realization that things have gone so far south, they may never return to normal.
As for me, I still have my gas mask. I found myself strapping it up the other day. It gave me a sense of safety I hadn’t felt since I last wore it nearly 30 years ago.
Covering wars and covering Donald Trump are a lot alike.
But as you look at Donald Trump these days, you can’t help but realize he’s out of gas. His war is soon to be over.