Trump's Failed "Mission Accomplished"

The giant banners one either side of Trump's podium proclaiming that "America Leads the World in Testing" were there to bolster the White House message: "We have met the moment. We have prevailed."  In other words, "We're declaring victory even while the invisible enemy has infiltrated the White House and started taking our dudez." 

The banners themselves proclaim more or less the only good thing the administration has got going--the testing. But about that; there is higher per capita testing elsewhere and the levels of testing we have aren't up to what would be needed for a successful reopen. Since it's what Trump has got, it's what's going on the banner, even if Trump still wants to congratulate himself for closing travel from CHYYYYNA, the results of which have been overstated and revised upwards generously. 

They had the damn banners, though, so what was the takeaway from Trump's Rose Garden display? 

Well, Trump has a Plan B if declaring victory over COVID-19 doesn't work (and it won't, because cases are spreading in the heartland even while Trump urges "liberation" and because viruses, like facts, don't care about Trump's feelings) which is OBAMAGATE. Which is? Trump doesn't himself seem to know, but it's genuinely terrible and you can look it up, he says. He feels very genuinely aggrieved that the FBI et als looked into Russian assistance to his 2016 campaign and then completely sandbagged him by very cleverly not actually releasing any information about it before Election Day. 

Look, it's a tactic, not a strategy, so of course it doesn't make sense. Also, Trump doesn't do strategy, or he'd have come up with one for COVID-19 before declaring victory.

Also, the victory talk was dampened by Trump's problem answering simple questions from good reporters. 

"Don't ask me, ask China that question, okay?"

Trump abruptly ended today's press briefing after an exchange with Weija Jiang, a reporter for CBS News who was born in China, asked why he views testing as a "global competition" pic.twitter.com/X1bZXkELLZ

— Bloomberg QuickTake (@QuickTake) May 12, 2020

First--it's a global competition because the White House has to find a silver lining somewhere, and considering the cases and deaths, that's a tough one--but Trump can't admit to that. But as for "ask China that question, okay?" It's pretty clear he needs to escape responsibility at all--to him, China is at fault because the disease started there, even if there is no proof that it was either designed or released in a lab accident, or that the US didn't have significant intelligence to start making preparations to do something right away. Blaming China is his response to claims he could have done more. Taking out the utter weakness of that response on an Asian American reporter is....proof of the extremely bad optics of that choice.

He was supposed to be projecting competence, but it ended with conspiracy theories and racism and annoyance at female reporters. And I'm not at all surprised. He is, despite all the best efforts of all the worst people, what he is.

And it isn't much.