With every passing day you get the sense that our ever-unraveling and re-raveling President might be hitting a new low point even for him — but how many times have we all said this in three years? It's like we're all in a support group for children of narcissistic parents.
Today we find Trump rising early in the morning to do his toilet tweeting, and around 6:45 a.m. D.C. time he was threatening vandals with with 10 years in federal prison. He was reacting to the attempted toppling of a statue Monday night of a 168-year-old bronze statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, next to the White House.
As ABC News reports, the activists were unsuccessful in pulling down the statue of Jackson — who despite being the face of $20 bills is seen by many modern historians as a troubling figure who both owned slaves and encouraged western expansion at the expense of countless indigenous lives, and throughout his argumentative presidency felt persecuted by critics, much like Trump. But they did manage to spray-paint the base of the statue with the word "killer."
Trump called the statue "magnificent" in yet another dog-whistle to racists.
Then on Tuesday morning Trump decided to throw in a tweet referencing Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, which has been the location of two shootings in recent days, prompting the mayor and Seattle police to step in and tell protesters to "go home."
Trump said that any such zone in D.C. would never happen because, you know, he is king and protesters would be "met with serious force." That unveiled threat was viewed as a violation of policy by Twitter, which has put the tweet behind a click-through warning about "abusive behavior."
Trump spent the rest of today crowing about the great success that the U.S. has had in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, again trying to lie his way through a global crisis that is, in fact, not going well at all here in the states.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was the voice of rationality in this today before a House committee, and Trump may have been reacting to that when he tweeted, "Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!" He also shouted that mortality rates are going down, but that is of course a direct result of wider testing — because: simple math. If we did fewer tests, the U.S. mortality rate would rise, as come on Twitter pointed out to him, but certainly he's too busy watching Hannity to pay attention.
The president is in a coronavirus hot spot today, Arizona, where he just took the stage at a Students for Trump rally at the Dream City megachurch. The 3,000-person event is meant to erase the memory of his disaster in Tulsa on Saturday. As AZ Central reports, he addressed the crowd of young supporters saying, "You’re on the front lines of a tremendous intellectual struggle for the future of our country."
Meanwhile, a protest is reportedly set to march from a nearby Home Depot to the church.