We all know at this point that Donald Trump is a thoroughly public image obsessed president, to the point that he’s willing to abandon reality for the sake of “making a stand” on behalf of that image.
Earlier this week, he brought his public image obsessed, reality disconnected self to Congress, delivering his first State of the Union address since taking office. On the occasion of his State of the Union address, he certainly did not put a pause on his peculiarities, going so far as to clap into the microphone over and over and over again during his speech.
In the aftermath of that speech, Trump has now put his public image obsession on display yet again, whining to Republican Congresspeople about the fact that Democrats stayed silent during much of his speech.
Trump made these remarks while appearing at the GOP retreat in West Virginia, where he’s spoken in the past and whose occasion this year was marked by a tragedy. The train carrying GOP members and their families hit a garbage truck, leaving one of the passengers of that truck dead and the other with serious injuries.
Trump mentioned this incident in his remarks at the retreat on Thursday, putting forward the classic GOP offering of “thoughts and prayers.”
Going on from there, he turned his attention to the State of the Union address, again touting some out of context facts that he’d incorporated into his speech and whining in the process about the fact that Democrats didn’t clap for him when he mentioned these facts.
Mentioning the facts that “African American and Hispanic unemployment have both reached the lowest levels ever recorded,” the president commented to GOP lawmakers on Thursday:
‘That’s something very, very special. And when I made that statement the other night, there was zero movement from the Democrats. They sat there stone cold, no smile, no applause. You would have thought that on that one, they would have sort of, at least clapped a little bit, which tells you, perhaps, they would rather see us not do well than see our country do great, and that’s not good. That’s not good. We have to change that.’
First of all, as has been pointed out time and time again in the past, the various currently positive economic indicators didn’t get that way overnight.
Overall, unemployment has been going down since the Obama era.
Similarly, Trump has often claimed total credit for the rising stock market values, although values have been going up since the Obama era and Trump’s barely been in office for a year at this point.
In addition to these facts, the conclusions drawn here by the president are patently ridiculous.
Democrats didn’t clap for him, so they don’t want to see the country do well? Really? Clapping for Trump is not the surefire indicator of whether or not any given person wants to see the country do well, no matter how many bigotry shills assert otherwise.
America hasn’t become some kind of North Korean wasteland where we all must clap for the leader or else, no matter how desperately Trump wants it to be that way.
If he wants Democrats to clap for him, maybe he should reach out to them and actually listen to their concerns instead of just dismissing them and those of the people they represent.
Watch Trump’s remarks to Congressional Republicans at their West Virginia retreat below.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
