Pinballing through the presidency

In the gilded, overwhelmingly ornate main room of his Mar-a-Lago resort and estate, former President Donald Trump stood in front of four huge American flags Thursday and pinballed through a news conference unlike anything ever seen in presidential campaigning.

Trump performed much like those steel pinballs that bounced and banged off spring-cushioned blobs beneath the glass tops of those flashing, clanging bar game machines that were all the rage in the last century. Trump bounced and banged from one false claim to nasty name-calling to fake statistics to feel-good promises and then back to the next false claim.

If you thought each seemed astonishingly unrelated to whatever came before and/or was about to follow, well the problem wasn’t you. America’s 45th president seemed determined to become a one-man public works jobs provider for media fact-checkers.

Actually, there was one organizing theme to Trump’s pressorama: size matters. He returned to the theme he fixated upon on Day One of his presidency, when he ordered his press secretary to tell you Trump’s Inauguration crowd was the largest ever. On Thursday, Trump kept returning to brag about his crowd sizes.

When a questioner asked about Vice President Kamala Harris’s large and enthusiastic crowds, Trump responded by pinballing wildly. All that follows here was in one answer (which I have condensed as a favor to your sanity):

“Oh, give me a break. …I'm so glad you asked, what did she have yesterday? 2,000 people. If I ever had 2,000 people, you'd say my campaign is finished. It's so dishonest the press.…

“I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size…. If I were president, you wouldn't have Russia and Ukraine, would've never happened. Zero chance. You wouldn't have had October 7th of Israel. You wouldn't have the horrible withdrawal… from Afghanistan…. We wouldn't have had these soldiers killed, and we wouldn't have had 45 soldiers obliterated, no legs, no arms, the face, none of that would have happened, and you wouldn't have had inflation….

“You wouldn't have had any inflation, because inflation was caused by their bad energy problems…. But the day after the election, if they won, you're going to have fuel prices go through the roof. Everybody's going to be forced to buy an electric car…. People want gasoline propelled cars….

“So, but on crowd size in history for any country, nobody's had crowds like I have…

“I have hundreds of thousands of people in South Carolina and 88,000 people…”

Whoa. Well, let’s at least fact-check something. How about Trump’s South Carolina crowd of 88,000? Turns out it wasn’t a Trump crowd, after all. He just went to the state’s biggest football game – the Palmetto Bowl, Clemson vs. South Carolina. The announced crowd was 80,172. At halftime, South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Henry McMaster and Trump walked to the center of the field, Trump waved and walked off the field. That’s all.

Later in his news conference, Trump compared his Jan. 6, 2021, rally crowd size at the Washington Monument with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s crowd size at the iconic 1963 civil rights “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech – his great speech – and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people. If not, we had more.”

Today, as we look with our mind’s eye at the visuals of Trump pinballing through a Mar-a-Lago news conference, we can envision the scene of Number 45, if he becomes Number 47, pinballing through America’s presidency. We envision. We decide.

EPILOGUE: We also remember another revealing thing about Trump’s Jan. 6 rally where he urged the crowd to go to the Capitol and fight to prevent Congress from certifying his 2020 Electoral College defeat. We especially remember the important testimony – that has just become more poignant than ever – where his aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified that Trump told his Secret Service to remove the magnetometers because his rallygoers who had guns weren’t entering the site.

“I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons,” she quoted Trump as telling his agents. “They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”

We remember. We decide.

Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Readers may send him email at martin.schram@gmail.com.