Trump: I’d Rather “Get Things Done” Than Worry About “Being Presidential”

In an ABC News town hall event on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said that while voters may critique his brash style, his willingness to fire administration officials at the drop of a hat, and his blunt way of attacking his opponents, he wouldn’t change a thing. Insisting that he is constantly besieged by political enemies in Washington, Trump said that he was more concerned with pushing through his agenda than worrying about any toes he might step on along the way.

“I’m fighting a lot of forces,” Trump said. “Sometimes you don’t have time to be totally, as you would say, ‘presidential.’ You have to get things done. I’m fighting a battle. It’s a big battlefield, and I have a lot of forces against me. I have the media, which I call the fake news because a lot of it is fake.”

Trump said that his accomplishments over the first four years of his presidency – done against the backdrop of both the Russia investigation hoax and the Ukraine impeachment spectacle – were more than enough to recommend him for a second term. He pointed to the tax cuts bill of 2017, his role in improving healthcare for veterans, his work in rebuilding the military, and his success in nominating federal judges as examples of his first-term triumphs.

“Honestly, we move very fast, and I have to get rid of people fast because they’re not doing their job,” Trump said. “The fact is, being presidential is easier than what I have to do, but I get things done.”

The ABC News special also involved a question from an uncommitted voter named Pastor Carl Day, whom we can only assume was time traveling from 2016 to ask Trump about his “Make America Great Again” slogan.

“When has America been great for African Americans in the ghetto of America?” asked Day. “Are you aware of how tone-deaf that comes off the African American community?”

Because every African-American lives in the ghetto?

“We have tremendous African American support,” Trump insisted, saying that before the pandemic brought an economic downturn, he’d created an economy that was “the best single moment in the history of the African-American people in this country.”

Well, Trump is never going to convince people who want to see America’s past, present, and future through a racialized lens. The Democrats can have those people, because they are only interested in what the federal government can give them as reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, redlining practices, years of Aunt Jemima syrup sales, and “white man” crosswalk symbols. And those people are never going to vote for Trump or any other Republican, for that matter, regardless of what the slogan is.

And hey, Trump didn’t roll his eyes and tell the guy to sit down, so we’d say that’s some fairly extraordinary – even “presidential” – restraint.