Is it mental fatigue? Is it the pressure? Maybe he needs a bit of counselling himself? Whatever the reason, it seems that even the pressures of work are getting to the US President Donald Trump himself. The President made headlines this week when he responded to an interview question posed by a reporter about possible collusion in the presidency voting. Despite his own intelligence services going on record to say that there was evidence to suggest so, Donald Trump ducked out of that question to say that he saw no reason to suggest why Russia would interfere.
You can imagine the media storm that followed. “President does not trust his own intelligence services!” a headline might as well have read. It is somewhat ironic then that the service responsible for security gets undermined by the very individual it ultimately tries to protect.
Unfortunately for Donald Trump, he tried to reverse his remarks in the light of this statement, saying that what he had meant to say, was “I see no reason why Russia wouldn’t” instead of “would”. But to attribute the blame to a mispronunciation hinging on a negative, when the rest of his non-verbal actions suggested otherwise, does not cut the mustard.
If you were looking to put things in a positive spin, the only thing that you might say is that perhaps it was an honest mistake. Everyone gets tired and the burden of mental fatigue can trigger us to make errors. And when we are mentally fatigued, we don’t really care about how we present ourselves, and our body language can bring the wrong impression. So when Donald Trump made what could perhaps be seen as a mistake, he was fatigued – which then perhaps suggests someone else should be in the job.
The problem with politics is no one is perfect, and the personal faults of one are transferred over to other areas. Unlike in music, where the naturalised composer Antonin Dvorak sought to create a new American style from traditional roots, and the tie-ins work because of past associations, doing so in politics means people remember you for who they saw previously – in other words, Donald Trump the apprentice, the womaniser, and the hotelier. And they don’t have this sort of positive opinion. (In the case of the former, you could find out more about Dvorak’s attempt from the Piano Teacher Crouch End blog.)
If you ever find yourself making this sort of error, perhaps you should re-assess yourself and the way things are going. But that’s the lesson to take away only if you accept that Trump was really suffering from the pressures of the presidency. If you believe he was trying to weasel his way out of the backlash – well, there’s a post for another day.