The channel-changer in chief
The newly elected chancellor of Germany had patiently waited on Thursday as President Trump took questions from reporters about a range of topics, including an explosive war of words with Elon Musk that was just erupting online. Finally, the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, saw a chance to get back to his own top priority: Ukraine.
“We are on the side of Ukraine,” Merz said flatly, adding, “We are trying to get them stronger and stronger just to make Putin stop this war.” And he exalted Trump as “the key person in the world” to help end the conflict.
Merz had Trump — briefly. For a few seconds, Trump murmured in agreement. He described having seen gruesome battlefield footage and acknowledged that the war was “a terrible, terrible thing.”
But then, like a sports fan who had accidentally found himself watching PBS, he changed the channel.
“Did I hear the word autopen?” Trump said, returning to a topic he had already expounded upon: former President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen to sign legislation. “I think it’s the biggest scandal maybe in the last 100 years in this country,” he said.
The moment crystallized Trump’s approach in recent weeks to some of the more challenging issues facing the administration and the world. As wars and conflicts overseas become only more intractable, Trump has frequently sought to pivot to the red-meat domestic topics that he knows will fire up his base.
It is a far cry from Trump’s hyperbolic bravado during the presidential campaign, when he promised to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and to bring “hell” to Hamas if it didn’t release all the hostages it held in Gaza. Having kept a breakneck, action-packed pace during his first four months, Trump is running up against problems that defy quick solutions. His administration is struggling to broker long-term cease-fires in Ukraine and Gaza.
So Trump keeps reaching for the remote.
Last Saturday, the day that Hamas rejected an Israeli-backed cease-fire proposed by Trump, the president made no public remarks about the negotiations. He did, however, share a ludicrous conspiracy theory on social media saying that Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone.
Of course, every president has the ability to redirect the national conversation by making news, and Trump has proved himself a virtuoso at doing so. On Wednesday, the White House was dodging questions about Musk’s denunciation of Trump’s signature legislative package, Ukraine’s audacious weekend drone attack on Russia and whether Trump was considering imposing sanctions on President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
That night, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders, imposing a sweeping travel ban on mostly African and Middle Eastern nations, cutting off Harvard from educating international students and ordering his administration to investigate Biden’s use of the autopen.
But substantive announcements aren’t always at hand.
During Thursday’s meeting with Merz, the German chancellor, Trump acknowledged that no one had uncovered any evidence yet that Biden’s team had acted illegally in using the autopen. (Trump, too, has acknowledged that his own team has occasionally used the device.)
Merz sat patiently by, waiting for Trump to finish. Then Trump pivoted again. Not back to Ukraine, however, but to the granddaddy of debunked Biden conspiracy theories.
“He didn’t get elected, either,” Trump said of Biden, the winner of the 2020 election.
