It is like the White House has been completely disinfected, isn’t it?

We don’t have press conferences in which the president is out in front of the country talking about himself, the great job they were doing, “no one’s even close,” “everyone said we couldn’t do it,” and long ramblings that didn’t make sense. There are no bizarre attack tweets, always ending with an exclamation mark! We have a president who knows about the policies they deal with, can prioritize, can point to Armenia on a map, and be courteous and understated. In other words, we have someone who is “presidential,” someone big enough for the office.

We have almost forgotten how it looked and sounded under Trump. We suspect that part of it is due to the post 1-6 period, when most “decent people” fully understood the horror, including – critically, corporate America. The January 6th siege sort of acts as a PTSD line, making everything before it a haze.

Well, there are times to look back, in order to never go to that place again and today is one. Today is the one-year anniversary of the humiliating press conference at a critical junction in the epidemic. Instead of solid information, real guidelines, and real leadership, we got “injecting bleach” or putting “UV light” into the body,” as “maybe something we should look into.”

Thing is, it wasn’t just some stupid riff that oozed out of Trump’s toxic skull. He had staff that actually saw it coming beforehand and tried to stop it. That is stunning. According to Politico:

Some ex-Trump aides say they don’t even think about that day as the wildest they experienced — with the conceit that there were simply too many others. But for those there, it was instantly shocking, even by Trump standards.

So the aides certainly understood the enormity of what they just heard, immediately, despite the fact that there were so many others. But again, some knew it was coming:

The Covid task force had met earlier that day — as usual, without Trump — to discuss the most recent findings, including the effects of light and humidity on how the virus spreads. Trump was briefed by a small group of aides. But it was clear to some aides that he hadn’t processed all the details before he left to speak to the press.

“A few of us actually tried to stop it in the West Wing hallway,” said one former senior Trump White House official. “I actually argued that President Trump wouldn’t have the time to absorb it and understand it. But I lost, and it went how it did.”

One suspects that under President Obama, Bush, Clinton… if any of those presidents had aides that worried that he hadn’t had time to absorb something and was about to meet with the press, the president would be furious that the aides didn’t stop him and tell him – “you haven’t had time to fully get this,” because all of us – even presidents – may not know that there’s more to the story than what we heard. (We would not need to be told that ingesting bleach or the same UV light that causes skin cancer would be a great idea.) No one specializes in everything and that’s why a president has aides, to begin with! Nearly all of us crave advice even if we choose to turn it down.
But Trump held the press conference and thus the U.S.’s historic failures in the early COVID months has a stark marker as symbolic of nearly everything.

We repeat this a lot but it bears repeating. Every other decent-sized nation on Earth watches our presidential press briefings because there is so much useable intelligence to be tapped. The most sophisticated intelligence services will study every sentence, mannerisms, health, all of it. And the aides knew the impact it would have:

“People joked about it inside the White House like, ‘Are you drinking bleach and injecting sunlight?’ People were mocking it and saying, ‘Oh let me go stand out in the sun, and I’ll be safe from Covid,” said one former administration official. “It honestly hurt. It was a credibility issue. … It was hurting us even from an international standpoint, the credibility at the White House.”

No shit? Try looking at it from the outside, knowing that there was not a damn thing anyone sane could do anything about it? Now, one-half million deaths later, we look back because we should. It truly was this awful. According to Robert Gibbs, one of Obama’s former Press Secretaries:

 “But this was the moment where we knew without any doubt that the government was in way over its head, and its ability to both respond effectively and educate Americans about what to do was not going to be anywhere close to meeting the moment.”

We never were, until January 20th and a president worked that day on COVID and distributing the vaccines. On that day, we regained a functioning government.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak