Yes, the president of the United States saying something daft is nothing new in the slightest but the past week has been so eventful in the White House it’s been difficult to keep up.
So we compiled this handy round up of some absolute gems from the mouth – and fingers – of Donald Trump.
The fake video
Trump loves to call out the “fake news” so it’s all the more ironic that on Friday he tweeted a doctored and completely faked CNN video to his 82 million followers.
The clip is edited to look like it appeared on a CNN broadcast, showing a black toddler running away from a white child, with a fake CNN breaking news caption reading: “Terrified todler (sic) runs from racist baby.”
It then claims to reveal “what actually happened”, showing the original version of events where the pair are playing – the way CNN had reported it – before accusing “fake news” of being the root cause of problems in America.
Twitter later removed the video.
The ‘different scene’
On Saturday night Trump – against the advice of his top health experts – will hold a huge indoor campaign rally where MAGA fans will not be required to wear facial coverings as they scream, cheer and possibly spread coronavirus.
Counter-demonstrations are expected and Trump preempted them on Friday by saying the “will not be treated like you have been” during protests earlier this month”.
He added: “It will be a much different scene!”
Given that earlier protests were violently suppressed by police and Trump implored governors to bring in the military, this sounds like quite a threat as many on social media pointed out.
John Bolton
Former US national security adviser John Bolton has a book coming out that has the White House very rattled.
It contains a series of claims about Trump’s time in office, accusing the commander in chief of ignorance of world affairs and putting his own personal interests ahead of those of the nation.
Trump has been on the offensive trying to downplay the claims and claiming Bolton is nothing but a “sick puppy’.
Obviously this is not how he described him when he hired him which is a great time to highlight just how he turns on people once they start revealing what he’s like to work with.
The book, titled The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, is set to be released on Tuesday by Simon & Schuster but we already know some of the juicier details, most notably that Trump asked China’s Xi Jinping during a 2019 summit meeting to help his re-election prospects by purchasing more US farm products.
Actually while we’re talking about the book…
The book
He may not have said it this week but as they were revealed this week, the revelations in the book make it into our roundup.
Here are some highlights:
- Bolton alleges that in a meeting with then-prime minister Theresa May in 2018, a British official referred to the UK as a “nuclear power”. Trump then asked: “Oh, are you a nuclear power?” Bolton insists that the comment “was not intended as a joke”.
- Trump once asked whether Finland – which is home to around 5.5 million people – was part of Russia.
- He encouraged China to build what have been described as concentration camps for Muslims “which he thought was exactly the right thing to do”.
- Trump was desperate to get a signed copy of Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’ to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un following a visit to the country.
The ‘total disaster’
Perfectly illustrating Trump’s shaky understanding of facts and figures is this tweet from Thursday in which he attempted to bash Democratic rival Joe Biden.
The president described Biden’s response to the the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak that killed 12,469 Americans as a “total disaster”.
The current coronavirus death toll in the US is 121,407 and counting.
The testing paradox
On one level, Trump’s logic in this statement on coronavirus testing is absolutely faultless. On another, it ranks as one of the daftest things said by a world leader in modern times.
Yup, the president of the United States saying that if they didn’t test for coronavirus then the country would have no confirmed cases.
The polling
On Wednesday Trump made a point of highlighting an astonishing approval rating of 96% within his Republican Party.
Things is, outside of the Republican Party and in the real world his polling is increasingly dire and he is trailing Biden by almost ten percentage points in the presidential race.
The late night chat… with himself
Being leader of the free world is a full-time job with little respite from all manner of incredibly important and life-changing decisions that have far-reaching consequences around the world.
It’s also a bit lonely at the top.
Which might explain why Trump took some time out one night this week to essentially chat to himself on Twitter.
Perusing his own feed, the president saw a comment he had made on Sunday and decided that the world needed to know he hadn’t changed his mind in the intervening two days and retweeted it with the words “So true!”.