President Trump returned to the White House on Monday after spending the weekend at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center battling COVID-19. Upon his return, the president, who is still sick with the virus, walked silently up the steps of the White House. He then turned around for the cameras, took off his mask, gave a thumbs-up, and saluted Marine One, which had just brought him back at around 7 p.m.
Theatrical? Yes. Overly dramatic? Maybe. Tone-deaf? Well, there is certainly an argument there, especially considering the national coronavirus death toll stands at more than 210,000.
Is it just like something a fascist dictator would do — something that will “absolutely get people killed?”
Come on.
But you try telling that to members of the press and the “resistance” (often the same thing), many of whom are positively apoplectic.
“The president felt well enough to leave the hospital and walk up those stairs and stage that photo-op that looked a lot more like something you would see in North Korea with Kim Jong Un than in the United States of America with an elected president of the United States,” complained CNN’s Dana Bash on Tuesday morning.
Elsewhere on the same network, CNN’s John Berman barked at his producers Tuesday to cut away from footage of Trump’s return, shouting, “Take it off! Please, don’t even put it on the screen! Please take it off! Because that’s going to kill people!”
Earlier, the reaction in the press and elsewhere to the president’s White House reentry was similarly overwrought.
“This is a Mussolini moment,” said MSNBC’s Joy Reid.
Said CNN regular and former Trump flunky Anthony Scaramucci, “And you’ve got, I don’t know, the American Mussolini, standing on the balcony … we’ve never had a president stand on that balcony and do what he just did.”
CNN’s Chris Cuomo was similarly displeased, saying sarcastically of the president’s return, “There he is, hair blown majestically. Reshooting the scene for his own ad.”
The cable anchor said, “What a bunch of bullshit.”
“You want a metaphor?” he added. “You’ve got a president who is a drunk driver who is pushing others to drive drunk. That’s what he is. … Do I want to see a drunk driver get hurt? Hell no. But I worry more about the people he hits.”
CNN’s Erin Burnett said, “What we are seeing here really looks like something out of North Korea.”
“I have no words,” said NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell, who did, in fact, have words.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said of the president’s mask-removal stunt: “That video will absolutely get people killed.”
Then, there is the press’s favorite presidential historian, Michael Beschloss, who claimed, falsely, that “in America, our presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes — that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems.”
This is not even close to being true. A 10-second perusal of the Associated Press’s photo archives disproves this assertion immediately. Do any of these resistance types think first to double-check what they say before they say it?
Maybe it is time we have a national conversation about basic research.
