WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump left little room for doubt. “We’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO,” he said, referring to the World Health Organization. “We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it.”
Story continuesBut the advent of these daily briefings over the past month — sessions that stretch for an hour, 90 minutes or even two hours — have put the conflicts on display in a particularly stark way. The longer a briefing goes, it seems, the more likely the president is to waver from one message to the next. And then at the next briefing, the message may be different all over again, but always captured on camera and therefore difficult to deny or explain away.
The crossed signals over cutting finances for the WHO, however, showed that his contradictions can take place over the course of days or even within the same briefing. Only five days before vowing to review the health organization’s response to the pandemic, he blasted Congress for setting up a panel to review his own administration’s response to it, saying such an investigation “during a pandemic is really a big waste of vital resources, time, attention.
The president has also swung radically in his views of governors and reporters, one day praising them, the next day castigating them. “I really think the media has been very fair,” he said at a briefing last month. By Monday, he no longer thought so. “I wish we had a fair media in this country, and we really don’t,” he said as he denounced one journalist as a “third-rate reporter” and called another one’s question “horrid.
A couple of weeks later, he spoke with President Xi Jinping of China and afterward praised him as “strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus.”
realDonaldTrump He'll go by way of McCarthy, Oreilly BillOReilly , and let's not forget Nixon...
None of these people are wearing masks.