Well … deeper madness.
On Thursday, MSNBC reporter Chris Hayes wondered what it would be like if Trump simply did not stop talking about Hurricane Dorian and Alabama, but just kept rambling on. And on. And … on. Then Trump did exactly that, bringing Hayes to the point where he said that the obsession felt “clinical” and pointed out how psychotic it would seem if anyone else behaved this way about what was, at its start, a simple mistake.
Trump behaved in exactly that way. He kept obsessing. Rather than let the story slip away, he kept talking about it, tweeting about it, even forcing a Homeland Security official to march out and give an utterly false statement about it. On Friday, he’s doing it again. Any minute now, we’re sure to hear from the White House physician to talk about how tall, slim, and bone-spurred Trump’s statement really was.
Trump still simply can’t stop. As of midday on Friday, he’s still propped up at the White House fuming about “the lamestream media” and turning this story into part of some grand media conspiracy, even though it started because Trump probably mixed up Alabama with Georgia. Or maybe the Bahamas.
No one cares that Trump said Alabama was threatened by Hurricane Dorian. He could have said North Dakota. Or Alaska. He could have said Eastern Europe wasn’t dominated by the Soviet Union (yes, you have to be old to get that one). He could have said anything—so long as he was simply willing to say, “Oops.”
The story is not about a storm, or a state, or even a Sharpie. It’s certainly not about the news media, because it was the National Weather Service that corrected Trump on his Twitter mistake, not the national news. The story didn’t become a story until it became a story about how Trump was derailed, again, over the most trivial of things. Right now, this story is about 10,000 times bigger than it deserves to be, and every bit of that is Trump’s fault.
Now … just imagine that the mistake Trump made was something to do with where to drop a bomb.