260,000 Words, Full of Self-Praise, From Trump on the Virus
Source: New York Times
260,000 Words, Full of Self-Praise, From Trump on the Virus
Three journalists from The New York Times reviewed more than 260,000 words spoken by President Trump during the pandemic. Heres what we learned.
By Jeremy W. Peters, Elaina Plott and Maggie Haberman April 26, 2020
At his White House news briefing on the coronavirus on March 19, President Trump offered high praise for the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn. Hes worked, like, probably as hard or harder than anybody, Mr. Trump said. Then he corrected himself: Other than maybe Mike Pence or me.
On March 27, Mr. Trump boasted about marshaling federal resources to fight the virus, ignoring his early failures and smearing previous administrations. Nobody has done anything like weve been able to do, he claimed. And everything I took over was a mess. It was a broken country in so many ways. In so many ways.
And on April 13, Mr. Trump insisted that governors were so satisfied with his performance they hadnt asked for anything on a recent conference call. There wasnt even a statement of like, We think you should do this or that, he said. I heard it was, like, just a perfect phone call.
The self-regard, the credit-taking, the audacious rewriting of recent history to cast himself as the hero of the pandemic rather than the president who was slow to respond: Such have been the defining features of Mr. Trumps use of the bully pulpit during the coronavirus outbreak.
The New York Times analyzed every word Mr. Trump spoke at his White House briefings and other presidential remarks on the virus more than 260,000 words from March 9, when the outbreak began leading to widespread disruptions in daily life, through mid-April. The transcripts show striking patterns and repetitions in the messages he has conveyed, revealing a display of presidential hubris and self-pity unlike anything historians say they have seen before.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/26/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-briefings-analyzed.html