The entire extended, violent fantasy involving women bound with duct tape did not appear to be preprogrammed into the teleprompter at all. At one point, he was veering from his prepared remarks so often that I thought I might get whiplash as I turned to watch him speak and then abruptly turned toward the prompter and then back to his face and back to the prompter and what is he even saying? Something about duct tape? I noticed other members of the press turning to look back, too. I found myself getting distracted, watching as the scrolling of the prompter slowed and stopped to accommodate his ad libbing. This is something he always does, but it was difficult to ignore with the teleprompter so close by. “When I say Make America Great Again, it could never be done without you! Great people.”Īs he delivered his remarks, Trump seemed to go off script more and more. He claimed “in many cases” federal workers had encouraged him to continue the shutdown. Hopefully it will be unnecessary.” He thanked federal workers “and their amazing families” for their devotion, acknowledging their suffering and applauding them for not complaining. “I am very proud to announce today that we have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government,” he said, “ ‘cause everyone knows I have a very powerful alternative but I didn’t want to use it at this time. They stood off to the side, as far away as possible from the reporters and cameras, applauding like we were at some kind of hometown game. Members of his administration - Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, John Bolton, Elaine Chao, and others - looked on. Between the two sections, there was a pathway leading directly from the president to a large teleprompter, positioned among the cameras, that contained his speech, each word typed so large that it could hardly fit a dozen at a time. The press was assembled before him, with the cameras positioned farthest back and the correspondents arranged in two sections in front. Seven minutes after the two-minute warning, Trump eventually walked out of the Oval Office and to the lectern. Yet he had to speak, and at times, as he did, it felt like the exercise was a form of catharsis, as if the way in which he spoke - not the specific words he said, but the machine gun stream of consciousness, the off script riffing - was a way for him to work through his frustrations about this entire self-made crisis. It’s not as though Trump could be expected to deliver a sober statement assessing where he’d gone wrong and apologizing to everyone his decisions had harmed. Accepting the very kind of deal he said he’d never accept - one to temporarily end the shutdown with no funding for a Southern border wall - would do nothing to satisfy those already mad at him and everything to upset his base of far-right supporters whose top priority had consistently been ensuring that he wouldn’t “cave.” The shutdown was unpopular from the beginning, and over time, as negotiations fell apart and members of his administration said one callous and idiotic thing after another, Trump only received more of the blame. The White House scheduled the event at the very last minute, as news began to break that the president had reached an agreement with congressional leaders.īut standing on the freezing dirt waiting for it to begin, what was less clear was The Art of the Keel, or how Trump would attempt to spin his defeat. We knew that “the program” would address the temporary end of the longest government shutdown in history, during which 800,000 federal workers were either furloughed or asked to work without pay for two consecutive pay periods over 35 days. Donald Trump admits a temporary retreat, if not outright defeat, in the shutdown fight.ĭonald Trump was already 40 minutes late when the deep Wrestlemania voice came over the speaker in the Rose Garden with an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, the program will begin in two minutes.”
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