For One Night, Biden was the Media Master While Trump was Fumbling
Ah, such embarrassment.
Presidential campaigns will always surprise you, but I didn’t expect Donald Trump, a tireless master of media, to be tripped up by his own social media platform.
Trump had announced before President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address began that he would supply his own special commentary in real time on “Truth Social,” the social media platform in which Trump has a financial stake.
But, when showtime arrived, the webcast was disrupted by a series of power outages. There were more than 3,000 reported outages on the site in its first half-hour, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks user reports of web disruptions.
Even the master media manipulator hits static, among other perils, sometimes.
After the Trumpcast finally got underway, the former president unleashed a predictable burst of derogatory posts about the current president’s speech and fitness for office. Similar barbs were voiced by Trump’s fellow Republicans and other conservatives who criticized the speech as too “angry” or “political” or “divisive.” But few, if any, described him as “showing cognitive decline,” for which Biden can declare “mission accomplished.”
This was a speech in which what he said was possibly less important than how well he said it.
After all, as just about everybody knows, age is our 81-year-old president’s most serious vulnerability as he seeks a second term that would make him the oldest president in the nation’s history. At 77, Trump is no spring rooster, as my grandpa used to say, but — master of fast-talking showmanship and salesmanship that he is, regardless of whether he really knows what he’s talking about — Trump has gotten really good at looking and sounding less aged than Biden. In the real world, that gives a distinct advantage to Trump.
Let’s give Biden credit, though. He performed well enough to reap the full benefit of our low expectations.
In another Truth Social post, even Trump grudgingly acknowledged that Biden held his own. “The story is that he got through it, he’s still breathing, and they didn’t have to carry him out in a straitjacket.”
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