The press conference from 'The Twilight Zone' - By Jennifer Rubin
By Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
September 27 at 9:00 AM
You had to watch it to believe it.
President Trump, in an 80-minute news conference, provided the full spectrum of Trumpian syndromes — the insistence on reducing all international relations to “he’s my friend” or “he likes me”; his reflexive lying (the U.N. General Assembly attendees, he falsely insisted, were laughing with him, not at him); the self-contradictions (e.g., claiming women accusing Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct were part of a con job, but allowing that he might decide they were truthful after listening to one of the accusers); his moral vacuity (no FBI investigation, because it would not change Democrats’ minds, as though Republicans might not be enlightened and the search for truth meaningless); his indecisiveness (once ready to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, Trump now says he may stick around); and the nonstop self-congratulations about matters small and large. No matter how many times a non-fact is easily debunked — he “won the women’s vote” (no, just white women) — he’ll never stop repeating it.
Throw in his meandering speaking style (in which one sentence hovers in suspension and then collides with the next unrelated thought), and you have someone whom Rosenstein, the interviewees in Bob Woodward’s book and the unnamed New York Times op-ed writer could well have concluded was not mentally or temperamentally stable.
Most damning to him and his Supreme Court nominee was the president’s emphatic agreement that sexual-misconduct accusations against him (which he falsely said numbered only 4, and then falsely said the accusers received money) “absolutely” influenced his thinking. In other words, as an accused sexual predator, he has sympathy for another accused sexual predator. This is NOT being a helpful character witness (I suppose that’s what it is) and, moreover, it forces Republicans into a position where they seem to be vindicating both Trump and Kavanaugh.
It also didn’t help Kavanaugh that Trump essentially said he would withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination if his accuser did better than he on television. The nominee, therefore, risks going out and being pulled, essentially for being bad on TV, with the public left to think Trump believed his accuser to be truthful.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/09/27/the-press-conference-from-the-twilight-zone/?utm_term=.52d1d3a40e17
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