Wednesday night, Donald Trump gave a speech from the Oval Office about the coronavirus. People within the administration were begging him to make some kind of in-depth statement about the federal government’s preparedness for a pandemic, and to put citizens at ease that the federal government could at least be counted on to function at a bare bones level. What happened was that Trump sniffed and wheezed through eight minutes of lies, propaganda and jingoism and he announced one ill-advised travel ban, which skirts his own Trump-owned foreign properties. The result was catastrophic. The European markets crashed, followed hours later by the worst American stock market crash since 1987 – the market crash was even worse than the darkest days of the 2008 crash. Reportedly, even Trump knew he made a bigly mistake:

In the most scripted of presidential settings, a prime-time televised address to the nation, President Trump decided to ad-lib — and his errors triggered a market meltdown, panicked travelers overseas and crystallized for his critics just how dangerously he has fumbled his management of the coronavirus.

Even Trump — a man practically allergic to admitting mistakes — knew he’d screwed up by declaring Wednesday night that his ban on travel from Europe would include cargo and trade, and acknowledged as much to aides in the Oval Office as soon as he’d finished speaking, according to one senior administration official and a second person, both with knowledge of the episode.

Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser who has seized control over some aspects of the government’s coronavirus response, reassured Trump that aides would correct his misstatement, four administration officials said, and they scrambled to do just that. The president also told staffers to make sure other countries did not believe trade would be affected, and even sent a cleanup tweet of his own: “The restriction stops people not goods,” he wrote.

Other administration officials rushed to alert the public that U.S. citizens would be exempt from the travel ban, after scores of Americans, upon digesting Trump’s speech, phoned government offices and raced to airports in Europe out of concern that they would not be able to fly home.

Trump’s 10-minute Oval Office address Wednesday night reflected not only his handling of the coronavirus crisis but, in some ways, much of his presidency. It was riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the supremacy of the nation he leads.

[From WaPo]

“Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser who has seized control over some aspects of the government’s coronavirus response…” Lord almighty. So Mike Pence is the Coronavirus Czar, but Jared Kushner is the Coronavirus King. It was said (pre-speech) that Trump didn’t even want to make the speech until Jared told him what to say and Jared came up with this stupid travel ban scheme. Anyway, yeah… the administration’s response to the pandemic has been perfectly on-brand for this ignorant band of white supremacists, morons and hateful idiots. The Daily Beast also did a story about the “total chaos” within the Trump administration – mainly the State Department – about his speech.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid and Avalon Red.