When he reads the words that someone else – someone who apparently thinks that we must “renew the bonds of loyalty” – has scripted, he seems like an ill-bred, unruly child, compelled by his parents to tell the neighbors that he’s sorry he broke their window, to tell his classmate that he regrets his bullying behavior, to repeat, with reluctance, the apology that his elders insist he offer. Few of us have one “real” self that emerges on every occasion the way we speak to our children is rarely the same as the way we speak to our friends.Įven so, we sense that Trump means the insults, the boasts, the attacks, the inflated claims about his popularity and achievements. On Wednesday, in Reno, Nevada, veterans who attended the National Convention of the American Legion heard a speaker who more closely resembled the Trump of Monday night – Teleprompter Trump – inform them that “we are here to draw inspiration from you as we seek to renew the bonds of loyalty that bind us together as one people and one nation”.īy midweek, news commentators were asking: which is the real Donald Trump, the one reading a script from the teleprompter or the one speaking off the cuff – and from the heart?įramed like that the answer seems obvious, and yet, in some sense, it’s a specious question. The former director of national intelligence James Clapper publicly stated that he’d found the emergence of “the real Trump” to be “scary and disturbing” and that the Phoenix speech cast doubt on the president’s competence.
His phrasing (punchy, aggressive, frequently inarticulate), his vocabulary (limited) and his tone (bombastic, unhinged) could scarcely have been less like what we heard Monday night. He defended his failure to condemn the violent white supremacists who demonstrated in Charlottesville, Virginia, attacked the press with fresh fury and threatened to shut down the government unless Congress agrees to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. The next day, addressing a rally of fervent supporters in Phoenix, Arizona, he delivered one of the most blistering rants of his career. He exhorted us to “make a simple promise to the men and women we ask to fight in our name, that when they return home from battle, they will find a country that has renewed the sacred bonds of love and loyalty that unite us together as one”.
He invoked a series of lofty abstractions (courage, patriotism, “mutual trust and selfless devotion”) and cited the need for national unity and brotherhood. Speaking in measured, sonorous cadences, reading from a teleprompter, Trump endeavored to sound “presidential”. All rights reserved.On Monday, Trump appeared before the nation to announce his plan to increase the American military presence in Afghanistan. ™ & © 2019 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. In 2012 he said of then-President Barack Obama, "Why does always have to rely on teleprompters?" And in 2016 he railed on his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton tweeting, "Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from the telepromter! She doesn't even look presidential!" On previous occasions, Trump has derided critics for relying on a teleprompter when delivering speeches. "And it was actually hard to look at anyway because of the rain." "I knew the speech very well so I was able to do it without a teleprompter," he said. Still, he said his memory of the speech otherwise served him well.
"I guess the rain knocked out the teleprompter." "That's not a good feeling when you're standing in front of millions and millions of people," he said. Without apologizing for the mistake, Trump said it wasn't pleasant to see the scrolling stop as he was delivering his highly anticipated speech.
He said the moment of technical failure came when he made the widely derided remark about eighteenth-century airports. "It kept going on and at the end it just went out," Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday. That the Continental Army "took over the airports" during the Revolutionary War. President Donald Trump blamed a faulty teleprompter for his claim during remarks he made at a July 4th event