These were the words of a man who, in keeping with the axiom that perception is reality, was used to being able to get the media and the wider world to honor an image of himself that he created through his ebullience, carping and sheer insistence.īut the virus couldn’t be spun or dazzled. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” and a couple of weeks later, “Just stay calm. The next day, he said, “It’s going to disappear.
The worst example, which has been understandably hung around his neck ever since, was when he said in late February of the early confirmed cases in the U.S., “the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” His lapse is failing to say consistently from the very beginning, “This could be bad, and we should prepare for the worst.”Įven when he did say it, he’d soon revert back to statements positing a magical disappearance of the virus. His concern about not creating a panic is also reasonable and common enough. Trump’s repeated statements at the outset of the pandemic that “we have it under control” are fairly typical of any leader confronting a situation he or she might not be able to control. If anyone appreciates, indeed overestimates, the power of words, it’s Trump himself, who thought he could bend the virus to his will by diminishing it and predicting its imminent rout.Īny government tends to default to assurances, whether they are warranted or not.
The president’s most fervent defenders might dismiss this as “just words,” but what leaders say matters a great deal, or we wouldn’t remember how Lincoln, FDR and Churchill rallied their peoples at times of testing. Trump obviously wanted to accent the positive on the virus from the beginning, and, besides a brief period of greater sobriety, has done it ever since.Īs a result, he’s fallen down on a key aspect of presidential leadership in a crisis, which requires serious and credible communication. If a Kinsley gaffe is when a politician tells the truth, the Woodward book is a Kinsley revelation, confirming what everyone already knew to be true. By talking to Woodward at such length, Trump has, in effect, authored his own tell-all book to compete with those of his niece and his former fixer.
How to handle Woodward is a challenge for any White House, but putting Trump on the phone with him for hours was bound, ultimately, to be an exercise in masochism. The revelations obviously can’t be chalked up to dubious anonymous sources, because Trump said these things himself, in on-the-record, taped interviews-18 of them.
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