Trump’s ‘Bah! Humbug!’ address suggests he is feeling the chill of opinion polls | Donald Trump
This will go down in history as “Bah! Humbug! ” address.
Surrounded by Christmas trees and garlands in front of a fireplace, Donald Trump on Wednesday gave a convincing interpretation of Ebenezer Scrooge, the old miser who despises Christmas and blames everyone except himself.
The US president looked like a desperate man, pointing an accusing finger at Joe Biden and spreading the opposite of charity and encouragement on issues such as immigration. Here’s to the season of celebration.
Like Biden, Trump has abandoned the traditional end-of-year presidential press conference. He preferred to deliver a highly publicized 20-minute speech. If he had been sitting in the Oval Office, he might have been sleepy; instead, he stood in the diplomatic room and declaimed with monotonous anger.
Dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, Trump unleashed a garish stream of consciousness with barely a pause or punctuation mark. Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, recently observed that he had an “alcoholic personality,” but apparently it was a sugar high: Just before the remarks began, according to a White House report, an usher brought in three Diet Cokes and ice.
“Eleven months ago, I inherited a disaster and I’m fixing it,” Trump said, beginning as he intended to continue by lying: he claimed that inflation was the worst in 48 years when he took office, when in reality it was down to 3%.
He then placed blame on Biden, previous trade deals, immigrants and what he described as a corrupt system. As in his campaign rallies, Trump painted a grim picture of Biden forcing “transgender for everyone” and opening the border to criminals from insane asylums. He claimed to have “broken the hold of sinister woke radicals in our schools.”
The president has repeatedly called “affordability” a Democratic hoax. On Wednesday, he acknowledged that prices remained high while saying the country was “ready” for an economic boom. “I’m bringing these high prices down and bringing them down very quickly,” he said. As an example, he claimed a sharp drop in gasoline prices, even though a White House graph displayed by Fox News as he spoke showed only a slight drop in the national average.
Trump also announced he would send a “warrior dividend” of $1,776 to 1.45 million U.S. military personnel in the coming week. He said this was made possible by revenue from customs duties, without mentioning that those same tariffs drove up prices.
Trump delivered his usual boasts about settling eight wars and bringing peace to the Middle East “for the first time in 3,000 years.” He repeated vile remarks demonizing Somali Americans and echoed far-right European extremists in declaring: “We are now seeing reverse migration as migrants return home, leaving more housing and more jobs for Americans.” »
But it was not the speech of a confident man handing out Christmas presents to the nation. This smacks of desperation from someone who can feel the wind chill from December opinion polls – a Reuters/Ipsos poll on Tuesday showed just 33% of American adults approve of Trump’s handling of the economy – dissent in his own Republican ranks and the Jeffrey Epstein files looming on Friday.
The speech also revealed that Trump needed a reliable foil. Over the years, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been useful enemies to a man and a movement defined less by what they are for than by what they are against.
That point was illustrated earlier Wednesday when Trump’s presidential fame walker at the White House unveiled plaques that called “Barack Hussein Obama…one of the most controversial political figures in American history” and said, “Drowsy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst president in American history.”
Good luck with that. The truth is, Biden has been gone for 11 months and people don’t think much of him anymore. Trump needs a new punching bag, but Democrats don’t have an obvious leader to target.
After the remarks were finished and the president was given the green light, according to a pool report, he turned to the press and said, “You think this is easy?” then I took a sip of Diet Coke. He suggested that Wiles had asked him to give the speech and asked: How did I do it? Wiles assured him, “I told you 20 minutes and you were at 20 minutes sharp.”
But there was little news of comfort or joy. We’re still in the story arc where Scrooge, the Grinch, and Mr. Potter are at their unrepentant worst, determined to crush the Christmas spirit. Friday, however, casts a long shadow: Beware of Epstein, the ghost of Christmas past.
