Where oh where is Trump无毛视频檚 teleprompter?
It was one of the most disturbing days in the eight-year presidency of Barack Hussain Obama.
On Aug. 28, 2014, during a live news conference, he brazenly wore a tan suit.
Oh, the humanity!
Republicans everywhere were appalled by such an outrageous display by a U.S. president supposedly dressed in such un-fine finery.
Obama had broken some unwritten rule about presidential suit color. And Republicans wanted Obama, and everybody else, to know it.
“There’s no way, I don’t think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday,” said New York congressman, Peter King. “I mean the world is watching.”
It didn’t matter to those irate Republicans that presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton had each worn tan suits. Obama wore one, and that, somehow, breached some invisible presidential protocol.
Barack Obama’s tan suit became such an issue that “Barack Obama tan suit controversy” has its own Wikipedia page.
But this isn’t really about tan suits.
It’s about misplaced and overblown Republican rage.
If you think that the Republican conniptions over Obama’s tan suit were misplaced and overblown – let’s look at how they convulsed into fits of outrage over his use of teleprompters.
When Obama speaks, people listen.
His eloquence is unrivaled among America’s 21st Century politicians. Republicans have known that since Obama first appeared as a young state senator from Illinois.
But when Obama’s presidential campaign started getting the attention of the American public, so, too, did his teleprompter.
“He speaks well. He reads the teleprompter well,” said his future presidential opponent, Mitt Romney in November 2008.
At the 2010 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) – the governor of Minnesota at the time, Tim Pawlenty, was busily sharpening his debate skills, in case he happened to win the Republican nomination for president in 2012.
During Gov. Pawlenty’s CPAC speech, he leaped to grasp the lowest hanging fruit: An attack on Obama and his teleprompters. “The next era of hope and change,” Pawlenty said, had led to an era of “hope and change and teleprompters.”
Somebody should have alerted Pawlenty that what made Obama’s elocution soar, wasn’t his use of those blasted teleprompters. It was the result of his natural communication skills.
A year after he cracked that teleprompter joke about Obama, Pawlenty gave a speech
announcing his campaign for president – while – altogether now – reading from a
teleprompter.
That was clear proof teleprompters don’t give you something you didn’t already have.
Pawlenty’s name recognition, even after using teleprompters, didn’t improve. According to
the New York Times in January 2011, “Few Americans even know his name.”
Well, one fellow who denigrated Obama’s use of teleprompters was future presidential
candidate, then president, now presidential candidate again – Donald Trump.
During a 2016 campaign rally in Georgia, he made it an applause line to brag, “I’ve always said, if you run for president, you shouldn’t be allowed to use teleprompters.”
He later explained what many Republicans had avoided saying about people (namely Obama) who made use of teleprompters for speeches.
“Because you don’t even know if the guy’s smart,” said Trump in 2016.
At one point, Trump went so far as calling Obama “teleprompter guy.”
You’d think that Trump had such an aversion to teleprompters – he would never get caught using one.
But he has. In fact, during his recent rally in Nevada, he complained vigorously about his teleprompter not working.
“You know I pay all this money to teleprompter people, and I’d say 20% of the time they don’t work,” he told his crowd, which appeared to not be the least bit interested in whether he was reading from his predigested script or mumbling as if he was suffering from fits of ad libbed incoherence.
It didn’t matter.
Mr. Trump was on stage.
He had his audience.
He was prepared to tell it that Joe Biden is the addled, but fiendish source of everything that’s been bad for the world for four years.
Who needs teleprompters? Especially when the money-grubbing people who supply them want to be paid in full.
Al Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter, and anchor for Entertainment Tonight, and 50-year TV news and newspaper veteran. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.