On Monday, President Donald Trump delivered an address that was so “unusual” and off the rails that it suggests the White House has “lost control of the president.” This is according to Mark Stone, U.S. political correspondent at the British outlet Sky News, who asserts that Trump’s midterm eve appearance — during which he stood before the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and delivered an unfocused, low-energy rant about disproven vandalism and various culture war grievances — “will go down as one of the most unusual that we have seen maybe in presidential history.
Throughout the speech, expected to be his final public address before Election Day, Trump began by saying he’s “giving serious thought to changing the name to the Trump Reflecting Pool," before claiming it was a joke. He went on to assert that the pool “went through a lot with vandalism” during its disastrous renovation earlier this year, even though such allegations famously blew up in his face during a humiliating attempt to prosecute Olympian David Hearn. While both internal government investigations and the contractor who did the renovation in the first place admitted that the pool’s liner came loose due to faulty installation, Trump continued to persist in asserting vandalism, even making it his last-minute appeal to voters who polling shows are unimpressed by his vanity projects.
“This was a truly extraordinary speech that seems to me does not reflect the issues that voters across the country are worried about,” explains Stone. “It felt to me to be entirely tone deaf.” In Stone’s estimation, no campaign team would ever suggest such a move. “No one would suggest that it would be a good idea to do what he has just done over the course of the past half an hour,” asserts Stone, “which suggests that his communications team have entirely lost control of the president and what he is doing… If he's making decisions about what he says to voters on the eve of the midterms, goodness knows what decisions he might make after the midterms if, as the polls suggest, he does very badly.”
“Loser is a word that Trump likes to band around about other people,” notes Stone. “It’s kind of, in the Trump vocabulary, the big insult. If someone's a loser, you're in a bad way in Donald Trump's book, so I don't imagine that he would like to be a loser. But as I say, the polls suggest that in the two houses of Congress that are up for grabs in these all-important midterm elections – the House of Representatives and the Senate, it looks, if the data is right — that the Republicans will lose certainly the House and possibly the Senate as well."
