White House aides are following a new playbook when it comes to President Donald Trump’s frequently offensive and incendiary tweets: don’t comment and wait for the next big story to break.
According to a Thursday Politico report, it has become clear that attempts to control or guide Trump are futile since he considers himself the best spokesperson he could have.
With Trump’s most recent tirade when he falsely claimed the the death toll from Hurricane Maria was inflated by Democrats, aides are just waiting for the storm to pass, banking on real life storm Hurricane Florence to push Trump’s latest scandal out of the limelight.
But this is precisely the problem, isn’t it? He made these tweets to (try to) absolve his administration of responsibility for a terribly mismanaged pre- and post-storm operation for Maria, just a day before another hurricane makes landfall. His tweets can’t help but encourage the media (not to mention people in Florence’s path and voters in November) to make comparisons between Maria and how things go with Florence, examine similarities, differences, etc.
Trump is his own Category 5 weather-maker, his staff realize; getting out of his way, though, isn’t going to make things better. For them, for him, for any of us.
I’ve seen plenty of Congresspersons do this too. They haven’t seen the tweet, so they can’t comment, would be irresponsible blah blah. Like you can’t pull out your phone, find it in 10 seconds, and read it in another 4. And yet it’s hardly controversial. Even his strongest supporters wish he wouldn’t tweet like that, because everyone can see what a damaged, toxic person he is when he does it. It’s like a dinner party where the host is obviously drunk and everyone’s pretending that things are fine.
I believe this strategy is known as “ignorance is bliss”…
Well, I’ve never worked for Trump but I’ve been at dinners hosted by a person with a drinking problem. Never found them blissful.
If there were only mechanisms in our system of government by which he could be removed from office, tweet away to his heart’s content, and no one in the WH or Congress would even be asked to comment any longer because we could all ignore him while his mind wasted away without further danger to the world.