A weary President Donald Trump slurred his way through a disjointed national TV address Wednesday night in which he repeated the same justifications for his war with Iran that he’s been posting on social media throughout the month-long conflict.
The primetime speech, which pre-empted scheduled television programming on all broadcast networks at the request of the White House, had been billed as a major address in which Trump would finally lay out the justifications for the military action he started against Iran — one that would finally provide details on how and when the conflict would end to an American populace that has grown weary of it.
Instead, the president spent nearly 20 minutes speaking from a lectern in the White House’s main foyer, in prepared marks that often repeated, word for word, his Truth Social posts, and offered contradictory statements about the war, Iran and the now bogged down Strait of Hormuz, while repeatedly having trouble pronouncing words like “enemies,” “Venezuela” and “battlefield.”
That’s how I feel too. Like it’s been super obvious for 25 years or more that America was going to devolve and collapse on itself and I’ve consumed so much media preparing for this but it’s still just staggering how fucking stupid it all is. There’s even a movie. The Lives of Others, about the Stasi in East Germany in the 80s before the wall comes down and the main guy at the end says to an ex-stasi guy something like “one day we’ll all look back on this and wonder how an idiot like you ever got in charge of anything” and even though I always think about that scene. Everything seems just so much more dumb than I could have possibly imagined.