First Draft: Ranting, Screaming Trump Walks Out of NBC Interview
As the Iran war burst back to life, the president's 'Meet the Press' sit-down was an indictment of his unfitness and the media's inability to hold him to account. CBS, meanwhile, keeps imploding.
On this day in 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ was published. The British writer’s last book sold millions, changed the English language, and continues to be cited whenever authoritarian governments, including that of Donald Trump, seek to deny reality.
Good morning… Martin here, delighted to be bringing you your ‘First Draft’ goodness for a Monday morning, which in DC dawns disgustingly hot and muggy, a sign of the utter delight awaiting those who, for some reason, live here, over the next three infernally sticky months. Hurrah for that, I say, attempting to type with sarcasm.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we watch Donald Trump’s ludicrous interview with NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ preposterous hissy fit and all, so you don’t have to, and ask a hallowed question: “What if Obama or Biden behaved like that?” NBC was onto a loser anyway, in that they taped Friday, and by Sunday, all hell had broken loose over Iran. But then, Trump’s sheer absurdity essentially speaks to any moment. Elsewhere, we consider the latest Bari Weiss noise at CBS, with fired anchor Scott Pelley alleging editorial interference and CBS not really denying it. Such, such are the joys. Read on…
‘Thank You, Darling’
Eleven years into the Trumpocene era, it’s basically a truism to ask, after watching the president’s latest outrageous demonstration of his sheer unfitness for office, “Imagine if Barack Obama did this? How would Republicans react? How would the media react?” Or if the footage shows Trump nodding off, “Imagine if ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden did this?”
Trump did not fall asleep during the interview with NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ he recorded in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, on Friday, for broadcast Sunday morning. But it was full of “Imagine if” moments that would surely have set the political world on fire if any other president even came close to matching them. There, Trump squatted, absurd orange makeup slapped on if rather haphazardly up by his ears, ski-jump combover wispily in some sort of place. And on he rambled, for 40 dreadful minutes, circular, fantastical, contradictory, vague, aggressive, outright rude, mostly about his war in Iran and its multiplying malign effects.
Trump repeatedly said a deal to end it was close. By the time the piece went out, on the 100th day of the war, Israel had hit Beirut despite Trump claiming to have a promise it would not, and Iran was about to strike back. So Trump went to Axios, as he always does, to dictate the line that he would tell Benjamin Netanyahu not to respond. Officials confirmed that he did. Guess what: Israel responded, hitting Iran overnight.
In Wisconsin for a “farmers’ roundtable,” taking time out for NBC, Trump made his usual complete lack of sense. The regime in Tehran has been “largely decapitated,” he said. You can be decapitated, or not. Ask Marie Antoinette. And then there were the classic rambles: “We’re going to either have a deal, a strong deal, a meaningful deal, not like the Obama thing, Obama was a path to a nuclear weapon. Mine is the exact opposite. Mine is a wall, it’s a wall, just like I built 1,000 miles of wall on our southern border, and by the way, I took the worst border in history, and I made it the best border in history in a matter of weeks, and…”