John Chuckman
COMMENT ON TRUMP’S PRESS CONFERENCE FIASCO WITH JIM ACOSTA
I think nothing we have seen – and we’ve seen plenty – so clearly demonstrates Trump’s unfitness for high office as his row at a press conference with White House reporter Jim Acosta.
You do not have to be a fan of Mr. Acosta’s network, CNN, to say so. Certainly, I never have been.
Acosta was being persistent in his questioning, but that is what such reporters are supposed to do, especially when the politician being questioned clearly does not want to answer.
Acosta’s behavior was never inappropriate (we have it all on video). However, Trump’s was rather shockingly so. He behaved like a really angry 12-year old in the school yard who isn’t getting his way, calling names and libeling the reporter and his employer.
It really was behavior most people would not expect or welcome at the level of a local school board meeting, but here it was, right in the White House.
When a young female aide approached Acosta and tried, with some rudeness and mild force, to remove the microphone from his hand, Acosta avoided her several lunges, but finally used his arm to block her continued effort.
This was then termed “placing his hands on a female aide trying to retrieve a microphone” by Trump’s near-lunatic Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who went farther with self-serving righteous indignation, “we never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job.”
The reporter’s White House credentials were revoked, endangering his job, basically just for doing his job, and to justify that action, the White House had what proved a heavily-doctored snippet of video of Acosta’s interaction with the aide shown on Trump-friendly media. Again, since we have the entire interaction on undoctored video, we do know just what happened.
Now, none of this is quite at the police-state stage, but it all is characterized by terrible, manic behavior, and all of that behavior was motivated by Trump’s unwillingness simply to answer a legitimate question. None of this is in the spirit of openness or trying to inform people. Indeed, quite the opposite and crudely handled.
Is a man who treats a question he does not like from a reporter in this manner, including all the darkly absurd follow-up from his press secretary, really fit to be engaging heads of other states, and particularly in such volatile and dangerous matters as his self-created crisis with Iran?
I think the answer is clear, at least to any clear-thinking observer.
