The president has evidently watched a lot of the old Get Smart TV series.
Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, when trapped in an ugly predicament, would try to make everything okay by bluffing the arch-villain. He'd usually say something like, "Right now, this building is surrounded by an army of CONTROL agents in Sherman tanks." The villain would respond with, "I find that very hard to believe." Smart would then respond with, "Errrr, would you believe a meter maid and two mean beagles?" And on it would go.
Today the president tweeted something about journalists needing to return their "Noble" Prizes. He also said he'd be contacting the "Noble" committee to complain. A few hours later, after people poked fun at him for conflating Pulitzer Prizes with Nobel Prizes and the misspelling of Noble/Nobel, the president deleted the tweets. He then claimed, for the second time in four days, that his presumed errors were just sarcasm.To which the villains in the media will say, once again, "I still find that hard to believe."
So I am left with trying to frame the key observations regarding today's tweets. Here they are.
1) The president does not use editors, even when he doesn't necessarily know anything about that which he's tweeting or discussing. Nobody checks to make sure he didn't put an enormous boner on paper. This smacks of such spoiled hubris, I don't really know what to make of it. It does suggest that the origin of his beefs with the press lies in the president never fact checking himself and understanding that the press fact checks everything.
2) When confronted with something of which he is unsure, he doesn't even bother to google the topic.
3) Taken together, these impulsive habits reveal someone either (a) too emotional to take the time to fact check or get a correct spelling or (b) someone who thinks/knows the readers won't care if he gets everything wrong.
Circle back to the "bleach and bright light" press briefing last week. Superficially, the core problem seems to be, as Dr. Birx said to cover the president's ass, that he processes new information out loud to audiences. If you look deeper, however, this isn't the crux of the issue.
The real problems are twofold. First, according to multi-sourced reports, President Trump rarely attends the daily task force meetings in the situation room. For whatever reason, he sits in on the meetings about once a week. The task force reportedly doesn't mind this, as they get more accomplished without him there, but it leaves the president woefully underinformed considering that he is the primary briefing speaker most days. Second, his absence from those meetings necessitates a short pre-briefing verbal cram session where they inform President Trump of the topics of the day. The president thus gets new information verbally before stepping to the podium.
Basically, the president doesn't really read, has neither the patience or concentration to attend every task force situation room session, and gets a pre-briefing immediately before the start of the actual briefing. He then goes out on stage and attempts to wing it.
This is a slovenly, lazy way to communicate crucial information to the American public. Expecting to inform and impress a national audience while blindly winging it is both incredibly arrogant and unbelievably stupid. Then, when he spews the inevitable blunder, similar to Smart's "army of CONTROL agents in Sherman tanks," the president's fallback is, "Would you believe it was sarcasm?"
Dr. Birx, playing the role of Barbara Feldon's Agent 99, is trying her best to thwart KAYOS while also maintaining the president's competency cover. Tough jobs. Meanwhile, all of America's fate lies in the hands of a man who, day by day, makes Maxwell Smart look increasingly, well, smart.
April 26, 2020
Bob Dietz
