About 12 hours after he arrived back at the White House from last night’s college football championship in Florida, Trump made a rare appearance in the James Brady Briefing Room for what he thought would be a victory lap marking a year back in the Oval Office.
The aim was clearly celebratory; the performance was not.
The 79-year-old president, who will enter his eighth decade in April and is the oldest person ever to be sworn in for a full term as chief executive of the United States, spent nearly two hours mumbling and slurring through a textbook-sized binder of accomplishments — apparently the same press release distributed to reporters but in much larger print owing to his refusal to wear reading glasses in public.
The marathon appearance, which came just hours before he is set to travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, did not include any actual news. For example, there was no effort to walk back the topic of the day, his threats to impose tariffs on allies that have rallied to Greenland’s defense. And he refused once again to rule out using force to annex the autonomous Arctic island, telling a reporter, “You’ll find out” when asked how far he’d go to make Greenland an American property.
Instead, to the extent Trump did acknowledge any problems with how he and his team have handled the issues at the forefront of the public discourse in his first year since retaking the nation’s highest office, he did so by throwing his own people under the bus.
Asked to opine on why as few as only 34 percent of Americans approve of how he’s handling the economy and 30 percent approve of his handling of inflation (according to a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll), Trump first tried to blame the press — then blamed his own people.
“A lot of people are listening to the fake news a little bit,” he said. “And I’m not blaming anybody. I think I blame ourselves.
“I think we’ve done a much better job than we’re able to promote. We’re not promoting. We’re doing a great job, and we’re sort of letting the promotion take care of itself,” he said.
He did the same while interspersing grievances and attacks on immigrant communities and Democratic elected officials, at one point punctuating a rant about his Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minnesota by flipping through a stack of mugshots depicting black and brown people who’ve been arrested by his Department of Homeland Security force.
Despite the gratuitous display of seeming racism that has characterized his administration’s rhetoric on immigration-related matters, he did acknowledge that ICE officers may cross lines in dealing with citizens and noncitizens alike, telling reporters that the officers are “going to make mistakes sometimes” such as being “too rough.”
He also described the shooting of a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, by an ICE officer earlier this month as “a tragedy” and “a horrible thing” — a view perhaps informed by his understanding that Good’s father had been a supporter of his was “all for Trump” in the 2024 election.
Throughout the extended briefing, Trump’s delivery was muddled slurred enough that at one point he appeared to say that ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria terrorist group based in the Middle East — was “largely Hispanic” while he was attempting to tout the demographic makeup of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, slurring the possessive ‘s’ into one word.
He also appeared to confuse Greenland — the Danish territory he has been obsessing about annexing or purchasing to the dismay of America’s traditional European allies — with Iceland, at another point as he attempted to claim his dubious use of emergency powers to impose import taxes has made the U.S. “the richest we ever were” and “the most secure.”
“As an example, Iceland, without tariffs, they wouldn’t even be talking to us about it. So we’ll see what happens,” he said.
The whole thing concluded roughly two hours after it began when Trump exited the briefing room after telling reporters he had to make it to a scheduled call with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan — one of the authoritarian leaders with him he has always had a strong relationship.
But if Trump or his aides came away with the impression that he was successful in his efforts to tout his first year as the raging success that was described in the lengthy press release he read out, they might want to watch the entire appearance again for themselves.
If they can’t see how the president’s attempts at bluster and bravado — staples of his campaign rhetoric that worked because his two opponents in his last election weren’t able to project strength the way he did — aren’t working as a governing tactic, his and his party’s prospects in this year’s midterms may grow bleaker than they currently are.
