In November 2019, the president made a sudden and largely unexplained visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center near Washington, D.C. In November 2017, he seemed to struggle with drinking from a water bottle at the White House. Reporters puzzled over Trump’s handling of stairs in early 2017. This is not the first time questions have come up. Yet there remains little actual information about Trump’s health on which to base any conclusions. Beyond that, Trump’s repeated claims that Joe Biden is too old and doddering for the presidency mean that his own struggles will get additional scrutiny. And the president’s post just made the story fair game to cover. The ramp was not especially steep, and it’s unclear why it would have been slippery-a general next to Trump didn’t stumble. Final ten feet I ran down to level ground. The last thing I was going to do is “fall” for the Fake News to have fun with. The ramp that I descended after my West Point Commencement speech was very long & steep, had no handrail and, most importantly, was very slippery.
(Consider the case of Ronald Reagan, whom many reporters understood to be declining in his second term, but whose symptoms went largely uncovered he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, five years after he left office.) But Trump fell victim to the Streisand effect, the principle that trying to debunk a negative story just brings more attention to it. Often that means reporters just look away. The mainstream press typically shies away from these stories, unsure of how to cover odd moments like this in the absence of a clear pattern or a medical diagnosis. Trump himself is to blame for some of the spread of the clips.
Read: Donald Trump embraces the Streisand effect Trump has offered ample evidence to judge his dubious fitness for office over the past three years, regardless of how he sips water. The search for some sort of disqualifying physical ailment is a distraction. Whether or not Trump can walk smoothly down a ramp says nothing about his ability to serve as president. But these questions, and the largely baseless theories to explain his behavior, seem to miss the point. The president seemed to struggle to drink out of a glass of water, then faltered while walking down a ramp from the dais.Ĭlips of the two moments circulated over the weekend-especially after Trump himself tweeted about his walk down the ramp, insisting that he was fine-raising questions about his fitness for office. The speech was supposed to be a triumphant moment for Trump-he’d insisted on calling cadets back to the United States Military Academy, after they were sent home amid the coronavirus pandemic-but instead it raised questions about his physical fitness. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.Įveryone’s feeling a little frayed these days, but even by those standards, President Donald Trump seemed a little off on Saturday, as he delivered the commencement speech at West Point.
0 kommentar(er)
