Donald Trump described it as perhaps “the most important speech” he’s ever delivered. By any fair measure, “important” was not the first adjective that came to mind.
The outgoing president, still pretending he won an election he lost, released a 46-minute tirade recorded in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room. Elements of the lengthy tantrum were familiar — the Republican stood behind the presidential seal, repeated a series of lies, and lashed out at state and local election officials for failing to be corrupt — but as the Associated Press noted, what Americans saw was a leader unraveling.
Increasingly detached from reality, President Donald Trump stood before a White House lectern and delivered a 46-minute diatribe against the election results that produced a win for Democrat Joe Biden, unspooling one misstatement after another to back his baseless claim that he really won…. It was largely a recycling of the same litany of misinformation and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud that he has been making for the past month.
The timing of the harangue could’ve been better: Trump peddled obvious nonsense about imagined voter fraud the day after his own attorney general, Bill Barr, conceded that the Justice Department couldn’t find evidence of systemic voter fraud.
And that, in turn, made obvious one of the principal problems with Trump’s 46-minute rant: he lied repeatedly throughout the video. Despite impassioned pleas from members of his own party to stop deceiving the public about the integrity of his own country’s democracy, the outgoing president clearly does not care. Indeed, releasing lies via social media appears to have become a security blanket of sorts for the pitiful and defeated man to cling to in the wake of public rejection.
But that’s not the only thing that made the mind-numbing video notable. It was also deeply unpatriotic. As the Washington Post noted, “Standing behind the presidential lectern in the Diplomatic Reception Room, flanked by the flags of his office and the country whose Constitution he swore to uphold, Trump tried to leverage the power of the presidency to overturn the election results.”
American patriots honor democracy, respect election results, and celebrate the integrity of the U.S. system. Trump celebrates Trump, and remains overtly hostile toward any process or institution, no matter how legitimate, that interferes with his quest for adulation.
But let’s also not overlook the broader context: the United States actually needs a real president right now. We’re in the midst of a deadly pandemic crisis that’s intensifying. We’re approaching 9/11-level death tolls on a daily basis, and hospitalizations have reached record levels. The economy is struggling, and proposed aid packages may not survive a tenuous legislative process. There’s a possibility of a government shutdown next week. There’s a challenging administrative transition process underway.
Leadership matters. Trump has an actual job he should be doing, but the post-policy president, indifferent toward governing, has abandoned it, choosing instead to invest his efforts into ridiculous 46-minute Facebook videos.
