Trump’s slurred, confused Oval Office announcement really should concern Republicans

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.

Rumors swirled on Monday morning when the White House announced that President Trump would make a mystery announcement at 2 pm. Coming just after his private dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei — and a few days spent with Chinese leader Xi Jinping — would this have something to do with AI and trade, regulation and globalization? Or perhaps, considering the ongoing war with Iran, an announcement of a turning point?

I’ll save your bated breath. By lunchtime, it was clear: Trump was just going to talk about a steel plant.

So why the bells and whistles, the secrecy and the big gathering in the Oval Office? Well, because what Trump talks about when he talks about steel plants is the midterms. And what everybody else talks about when they talk about the midterms is gas prices and grocery prices and all those other things that everyday Americans actually care about and are daily confronted with.

So what’s a president who ran on affordability — well not the word, per se, that’s a “Democrat hoax” — and an end to wars, then made everything unaffordable with an ill-thought-out war to do? Gaslight the nation, of course! And, because he’s remarkably frail these days, it wasn’t a very convincing gaslighting.

The problem with Trump is that so much of his secret sauce is the energy behind his bombast — when he rapid-fires out nicknames and insults, it’s shocking, it’s weird and creative and it’s often funny; when he gets himself worked up about the Democrats or the issues facing the country, his rage is infectious. But the Trump of the past few months has become slower and slurrier, and has started reading verbatim off a large, laminated binder with extra-large type font on it.

Today, he surrounded himself with administration sycophants, a couple of senators and some business leaders, and mumbled about how Minnesota has “one of the worst governors in history. A real stupid guy.” It wasn’t exactly an astute observation or a particularly cutting insult.

He trailed off, then picked up at the usual stuff about “the best economy we’ve ever had” and repeated his odd promise to effectively pay people to vote Republican in the midterms by adding that he’ll give “$5,000 to every adult, and we can do it and the Democrats can’t because the Democrats don’t have any income”. That wasn’t the most corruption-proof way to phrase it, to put it lightly, and he was fully slurring at this point.

Trump then turned the page on his binder and read out: “So two years ago our country was dead and now we have the hottest country of anywhere in the world and it’s not even close.” He’s said this exact, semi-coherent phrase at least four or five times in recent appearances, which I presumed was his best approximation of a boast off the top of his head. What’s surprising is that he clearly chooses to keep such a facile sentence typed out in front of him, lest he forget such eye-opening words of wisdom.

And so it continued: tired-sounding insults aimed at “communist lunatic socialists” that just didn’t even sound like he cared. At the border, there are “no people coming in, zero, which is hard to believe,” he added, and as he said it, he sounded a little confused. “We have the best murder — well, that’s not a nice thing to say,” he corrected himself, before clarifying that murder rates are down across the country. And “Iran, very soon that’ll be over and the gas prices will come tumbling down. Nobody else could do that, nobody else.”

The president seemed to have forgotten that his own administration is now saying the war with Iran isn’t actually a war, and rambled off with an aside about how “what I did was I went to war to stop the — it could’ve been one of the worst things that would happen to the world, to us but to the world. Israel would’ve been wiped out.” JD Vance must be crying into his coffee.

If the Democrats get in, Trump added, “millions of people will come pouring in like before,” which was “the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.” Again, he sounded confused. Had he seen it? Were there millions? There wasn’t a lot of conviction behind his words.

Why are Republicans polling so badly in Iowa right now, he was asked, when they opened for questions. Well, murmured Trump, “there are some things that the Democrats have done — that are very bad for our country… They’re the ones who caused the affordability problems.” He talked around the idea that Democrats and not the people in charge have somehow caused a cost-of-living price crisis before he ended up at: “First of all, the polls are fake.” Except that wasn’t his first reaction, and he’d already told on himself with his initial answer: affordability is the reason, and he knows it’s too late to do anything meaningful about it.

There was a long aside about how Canada haven’t been sufficiently respectful or obsequious to Trump, to which one reporter asked how the trade war with our neighbor at the northern border ends. Trump’s answer sounded weak and naive: “We’re gonna win everything,” he said, unconvincingly. “We even have Lake Ontario — is now Lake America… They’re gonna come in and they’re gonna say: Sir, we are sorry.” Just vibes why you believe that, then? OK, great!

He then started muttering about how Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon in a way that didn’t seem especially connected to a question. It ended up, slightly alarmingly, at “Let them hit us with a nuclear weapon.”

The rounding out of the press conference was painful to watch: a very low-energy rant about how “the press is not — nobody hears that we have more people working than ever in our country! Nobody hears that we have the best poverty numbers!” He moved into “one of my people who’s very good said, ‘Sir, people don't care about the border anymore,’ but I got elected on the border.” It was very ‘grandpa reminiscing about the good old days,’ except the good old days are happening right now and they’re not good but he’s certainly old.

By the time he got to, “When you see what will happen, as soon as that war ends, inflation’s gonna be eradicated completely!” it felt more like a production of Death of a Salesman than a full-throated political announcement.

Nobody talks about the good things, he repeated a few times, circling around Iran and gasoline and Biden a few times, his sentences coming apart at the seams. (“Nobody talks about the fact that Biden — you were paying far more much for gasoline!”)

And then, bizarrely, he ended the presser with, “Have a good time, everybody,” as though he’d been speaking at an opening night or a party in New York and was about to add that everyone should tip the waiters.

Reporters filed out and the administration officials behind him relaxed. But this is the Trump who’s supposed to be doing a stump stop a day throughout the whole of October for midterms campaigning. Today, he was seated the entire time and reading from a binder, and he struggled.

If I was Susie Wiles, I’d be absolutely terrified.