Guardian's take on yesterday's circus - "This press conference is proof Donald Trump will never be
Presidential"
Trump spent his first solo press conference as president berating the press and dodging any serious questions – and none of it is ever going to be normal
by Ben Jacobs
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/16/donald-trump-press-conference-administration-defense-media
It was an exhausting 77-minute extravaganza, and any five-minute segment would have been enough to make front-page headlines around the world.
For the president of the United States, the simple act of sneezing can be newsworthy. When the president goes on a freeform monologue, occasionally interrupted by questions, that is almost the length of a motion picture, as Donald Trump did on Thursday, the news can be overwhelming. The entirety represents a deluge that is difficult to process.
Trump said he wasn’t “ranting and raving” during his press conference, and that was correct. The president was confidently unhinged as he spent more than an hour berating the press and boasting without any real basis that “there has never been a presidency that’s done so much in such a short period of time”.
The press conference, nominally called to announce the nomination of Alexander Acosta to be secretary of labor, represented the first opportunity for reporters to ask the president about a series of stories about his administration’s ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin. Trump responded by focusing on the real enemy – the media. In fact, at times, it felt that the press conference focused more on the CNN correspondent Jim Acosta than on Alexander Acosta (Trump even made sure to check with the CNN correspondent that the two weren’t related) as the president prosecuted his case against CNN. Often, Trump seemed to be in a time capsule, railing against Hillary Clinton and reusing entire paragraphs of rhetoric that he had once directed against her while campaigning for the White House.
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The result was a spectacle that was sheer entertainment if not terribly presidential.
He assailed all reports on his aides’ ties to Russia as “a ruse” and “fake” while conceding that the cascade of leaks on the subject was real.
But there can only be one takeaway from the press conference – Trump may have become president, but he will never be presidential. It has only been 27 days since the president took office. There are still at least three years and 11 months left to go, and it is never going to be normal.
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