Jonathan Karl, an ABC reporter who has covered Donald Trump for decades and written a book about the experience, was saying the other day that Trump lives by his numbers and shoots from his instincts, even in a crisis.
It was not insight. All of America knows that by now.
The utter transparency extends to those who decry the style, those who love it and those who support this president in spite of it and who were beginning to say even in 2016 that we should pay no attention to what the man says but only to what he does.
We behold by now a clear cycle. Trump says publicly a thing that is so stark or odd that the media feel obliged to report it and comment on it alarmingly. Such regurgitation is a staple of American political coverage grounded in the tenet that whatever a president says matters. Then, in time, often no time at all, Trump takes an action opposite to, and more conventionally responsible than, those stark, odd words. Usually he accuses the media of fake news in the breathless reporting of the previous comment in the first place. Then we rinse and repeat.
"And you fall for it every time," a social media respondent said to me last week.
I'm not sure of the ploy for which I am falling. I'm clearer that there's presidential instability that requires chronicling. But I am slowly catching on.
I cite the column last week saying I'd give Trump the benefit of the doubt on that nonsense about full-bore restarting of the American economy by Easter Sunday. Recall that I wrote that maybe he, while outrageous as usual, was simply trying to give Americans encouragement.
Here is what Trump actually said last week about filling up churches on Easter to re-launch the economy, which would have fertilized the virus exponentially, risked making all of us sick and thus extended the unsustainable economic shutdown.
"I'd love to have it open by Easter," Trump said only days ago at a town hall on his personal network, Fox. "I would love to have that. It's such an important day for other reasons, but I'll make it an important day for this too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter."
In another interview with Fox News later that afternoon, Trump said he came up with the goal because "Easter is a very special day for me."
"Wouldn't it be great to have all the churches full?" Trump added. "You'll have packed churches all over our country. I think it'll be a beautiful time."
That was Trump's version of our having nothing to fear but fear itself.
Did he actually say he was going to do it? Or did he say he'd like to do it? Or did he provide his usual jumble? And, for that matter, did it make a darn what he said? Could he have reopened the economy by Easter even if he had wanted, or even presumed to direct? Wouldn't governors and mayors have retained the ability to keep activity shut down locally?
In other words: Was this a case of the president publicly uttering an idle fantasy, revealing per usual his self-interest and irresponsibility, but having no real effect and being far less newsworthy than would have been the case if a normal president in normal times had said such a thing?
Would the better journalism have been to say that the president appeared to express a personal hope borne of frustration but unlikely to amount to action, considering that people around him were saying his comment was "aspirational" and that of course any date for restarting the economy would be "flexible."
Is accurate reporting now dependent on some sort of emoji--an eye roll perhaps--when the president is quoted?
I've been told the cycle occurs daily in the Oval Office. Trump makes some frustrated or angry or injudicious declaration. Some who hear it become alarmed and leak to the press and leave the president's employ. Some learn to pay no attention and await the snit's evaporation within hours. A few come to understand that they need only to say to him, "Mr. President, you can't do that. But maybe here's what we could do."
It sounds a lot like parenting.
As for Trump being obsessed with his numbers even during a crisis, which is of course true, The New York Times reports that he abandoned the Easter fantasy when he was presented with two sets of numbers.
One represented the exponentially frightful number of coronavirus cases likely to occur should we go back to work prematurely. The other revealed the overwhelming majority of Americans who said in polls that they opposed seeking to re-normalize too hastily.
It's not in our national or media nature to tune out the president. But we're making some progress on that, I sense.
There might even come a day when I won't write a column like this one. Maybe a column about one man's pursuit of toilet paper on the international market would have been more relevant and a more valuable read.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
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