This should have been a terrific week for Donald Trump. The Senate, even with its slim and quarrelsome majority, appears ready to pass the major tax overhaul the president has been pushing for. An attempt by a rogue federal agency to forestall the president’s appointment of a new director was roundly rebuffed in court. The Commerce Department reported 3.3 percent growth in the third quarter—an impressive gain for a period in which the United States suffered two major hurricanes—and the stock market continued its upward trajectory.
Yet Trump’s itchy Twitter finger turned the week into another disaster.
On Wednesday, he retweeted links to three videos posted by a fiercely anti-Muslim British activist, provoking no less than British prime minister Theresa May to issue a rebuke. The videos themselves are nothing more than spurious Internet garbage, and they won’t provoke the wave of anti-Muslim backlash that is always being predicted. But that the president of the United States promoted them to his 43 million followers is a disgrace.
Trump followed that up by suggesting that NBC, which had just fired Matt Lauer for sexual misconduct, should also fire the network’s “top executives” for “putting out so much Fake News. Check out Andy Lack’s past!” Lack is the chairman of NBC News. It’s unclear what part of Lack’s career the president’s tweet was referring to. Two hours later, in a fit of pique directed at MSNBC, Trump alluded knowingly to an old conspiracy theory involving the 2001 death of an aide to Joe Scarborough (who was a Republican member of the House of Representatives at the time). The death, rather than being suspicious, was the result of a fall in connection with a heart arrhythmia.
One would think this president would keep quiet on the subject of prominent public figures stepping down as a result of sexual harassment allegations, but Trump can’t keep quiet about anything. According to a November 28 story in the New York Times, he tells allies and associates that the Access Hollywood tape—the recorded conversation in which Trump spoke in graphic terms of his inability to control himself in the presence of attractive women—may not be genuine. This despite his apology for the remarks when they became public in 2016. The same article noted that Trump continues to question the validity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate and make fanciful statements about his 2016 victory.
One might equally think that Trump would back away from the Alabama Senate race after the credible claims of Roy Moore’s inability to control himself in the presence of teenaged girls. And yet on November 29, we learned the president is considering using his PAC, America First Action, to bombard Alabama with robo-calls, emails, and text messages promoting Moore. Trump is, further, planning a visit to western Florida in the days before the election to rail about Democrats and, perhaps, Moore’s opponent Doug Jones. The location is no accident; Pensacola is less than an hour’s drive from Mobile, Alabama, and shares the same television market.
The president thus managed to turn a good week for his presidency into a series of pointless and preposterous Internet outrages. But of course a “good week” for any other president—indeed a good week in the estimation of any ordinary human being—is not a good week in Trump’s opinion. A good week for him is one in which the global news media ignore a vast array of consequential matters and fix their attention almost exclusively on the subject of Donald J. Trump.