Donald Trump’s Loopy
Self-Pity Tour of Conservative Media Outlets
By John Cassidy
October 10, 2020
Whether or not the President’s treatment played
some role in his recent bizarre comments, he long ago mastered the art of rants
that are rife with falsehoods, incitements, and defamatory statements.
Over the decades, Presidents who are trailing in
the polls going into an election have resorted to many different tactics, such
as whistle-stop tours, fresh policy initiatives, and military adventurism.
Confined to the White House for the past few days as he has been recovering
from the coronavirus, Donald Trump has adopted a less taxing
campaign tactic. Beginning with a telephone call with
Maria Bartiromo, of the Fox Business Network, on Thursday morning, he’s
conducted a series of lengthy interviews with sympathetic media outlets,
including an on-camera interview about his illness with “Tucker Carlson
Tonight,” the top-rated Fox News Channel show, on Friday, in which he said he’d been retested for the virus but
was vague about the result. (“I’m either at the bottom of the scale, or free,”
he said.)
The other interviews
between the President and his conservative interlocutors have ranged across a
broad expanse of well-trodden Trump terrain, from the iniquities of the Russian
probe to the perfidy of the news media, the extremism of the Democratic policy
agenda, and the mental health of his opponent, Joe
Biden. At times, Trump has added some new variations to his familiar
laments. Rather than simply accusing the Obama Administration of spying on him
during the 2016 campaign, which he’s done many times before, he suggested to
Bartiromo that the Justice Department should indict the former President and
Vice-President. “This was the greatest political crime in the history of our
country, and that includes Obama and it includes Biden,” he said. During a two-hour
appearance on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show on Friday afternoon, he supplemented
his normal sabre-rattling toward Iran with an F-bomb. “They’ve been put on
notice,” he said. “If you fuck around with us, if you do something
bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”
It’s been widely
suggested that dexamethasone, the powerful steroid Trump has been taking, may
have contributed to his verbal tirades. (Tommy Vietor, a former Obama staffer
who co-hosts the “Pod Save America” podcast, commented on Twitter that Trump seemed
“High as a giraffe’s ass” during an interview with Sean Hannity.) For what it’s
worth, which might not be much, Trump told Limbaugh that he’s no longer taking
drugs for his illness. In his subsequent appearance on Carlson’s show, he said
the same thing to Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox News medical contributor, who
interviewed him. “I feel really, really strong,” Trump said. For the first
time, he indicated that the chest scans he received at Walter Reed National
Military Medical Center indicated “congestion” in his lungs, but he also said, “with each day it
got better.” Once again, he attributed his rapid rebound to the infusion he
received of Regeneron, an experimental cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies,
which, to the horror of the medical profession, he has described as a miracle
cure for covid-19.
Whether or not
dexamethasone played some role in Trump’s bizarre statements over the past few
days, he long ago mastered the art of engaging in marathon rants that are rife
with falsehoods, incitements, and defamatory statements. In fact, the most
surprising thing about his latest round of interviews has been their pathos
rather than their bluster. Far from pursuing a particular political strategy,
such as trying to refocus the campaign narrative on the economy, or unveiling a
new critique of Biden’s policy platform, he has seemed to be most intent on
evoking sympathy for his own political predicament, which, in his telling, is
absolutely no fault of his own.
Limbaugh, a veteran
superspreader of right-wing conspiracy theories, to whom Trump awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this year, told his audience of retirees
and right-wing “ditto-heads” that he wanted them to get to know the Trump he
knows privately—a loyal, unwavering person who cares deeply about everybody.
(No, I’m not making this up.) Trump immediately blamed the communication
problem on the media. “No matter what you do, they try and find fault,” he
complained. “Not only fault. Vicious. They are vicious people.” Limbaugh agreed
with his guest, and things went on in this vein for a bit. Then, Limbaugh asked
Trump why he decided, in 2015, to cast aside his opulent private life and run
for office. Rather than answering the question, Trump went into a long
digression about the “Russia hoax” and how the Democrats impeached him for a
“perfect phone call” with the President of Ukraine. Finally, he offered that he
would do it all again, but added, “I never knew it would be so unpleasant.”
Unpleasant? In his
interview with Bartiromo, Trump called Kamala Harris “a Communist.” On the
Hannity show, he criticized Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of
Michigan who was the object of an alleged kidnapping plot by right-wing
extremists, and he claimed that Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of
Virginia, endorses the execution of babies. In his interview with Limbaugh, he
described Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, as “a
nutjob,” and he strongly implied that Biden is suffering from dementia. (“He’s
in a daze. . . . There’s something wrong.”) In that interview,
and in a subsequent one on
Friday afternoon, with Mark Levin, another right-wing talk-radio host, he
suggested that Pelosi had a hidden motive for backing the creation of a
congressionally appointed commission that would determine whether a President
is capable of performing his duties. “I think they want to use it so that
Kamala can take over for Biden,” Trump said. “Because Biden’s not there,
everybody knows that. He’s batting at fifty per cent if he’s lucky.”
Trump is truly addled,
of course. In his mind, no matter what he says or does, he’s always the
victim—the person who is wronged, belittled, and underappreciated. He extends
this twisted world view well beyond the orbit of liberal journalists and
elected Democrats, whom he regards as part of the same rival team. Over the
past few days, indeed, he has seemed even more agitated about actual and
potential traitors on his own side: lily-livered Republicans; Fox News
journalists and executives that fail to follow a sufficiently slavish pro-Trump
line; even some members of his Cabinet.
In several of his
interviews, he accused Chris Wallace, the Fox News anchor, of repeatedly
rescuing Biden during last week’s Presidential debate. When talking to
Limbaugh, he also suggested that the presence of Paul Ryan, the former Speaker
of the House, on the board of Fox’s parent company, News Corporation, might be
influencing the network’s coverage of him. (Only Trump could complain that a
network which has just allowed him to speak to its audience practically
unfiltered and at length three times in two days wasn’t sufficiently supportive
of him.) But Trump reserved his greatest scorn for his current Republican
colleagues, and for his own Attorney General, William Barr. When Limbaugh asked
him about a report from Axios that Barr has informed senior Republicans that
the Justice Department’s review of the origins of the Russia probe won’t be
published before the election, Trump seemed stunned. “If Bill Barr made that
statement, I would be very disappointed in him,” he replied. The real problem
was that Republicans “don’t play the tough game,” he said. “If this were the other side, you would
have had twenty-five people in jail for the rest of their lives.”
The implication was
clear. If Trump had his way, the Justice Department would have had no
compunction about indicting James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Andrew
McCabe, Comey’s former deputy—or Biden and Obama, for that matter—regardless of
the evidence or the law. In Trump’s view, that’s how the “game” should be
played, especially in the late innings. But not even Barr, who has repeatedly
flouted Justice Department precedent on his behalf, understands this necessity.
To Trump, that makes Barr, whom many critics regard as the ultimate
Presidential lackey, another failure and disappointment.
On Saturday, the
embattled President is intending to address a group of supporters from the White House balcony—the
same balcony where, on Monday evening, he took off his mask and preened after
returning from Walter Reed. Since then, his antic behavior and all-pervading
self-pity have been redolent of other strongmen who felt history closing in on
them. As November 3rd gets closer, there is every reason to expect that he will
get even more unhinged. It’s going to be a crazy three and a half weeks.
John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The
New Yorker since 1995. He also writes a column
about politics, economics, and more for newyorker.com.
