In March 2020, then-President Donald Trump announced new restrictions on people coming into the United States as a way to battle the COVID-19 pandemic -- but it wound up massively backfiring when it sent the stock market crashing.
Michael Bender's new book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, revealed that the speech Trump delivered crashed and burned in large part because his staff didn't know how to use the teleprompter.
Trump was going to address the nation about the new lockdown of people coming into the U.S. Jared Kushner, Jason Lyons and Stephen Miller took over speechwriting. The problem, however, is that the men knew nothing about COVID-19 and they wrote a speech without consulting any of the science advisers. Even Vice President Mike Pence, who was on hand, didn't have any real ability to check facts.
So, while Trump was speaking, the science advisers were sending their updates and corrections in real time.
The Trump advisers, in turn, tried to jam these updates into the president's teleprompter, but it wound up being a chaotic mess.
"The errors were fed into the teleprompter and read aloud by Trump, who inserted his own costly mistakes as well," said Bender's book. "In a prepared line that described how the restrictions would not apply to trade and cargo—the same as Trump's first two Covid travel bans—Trump inserted an extra word, 'only,' that completely changed the meaning of the sentence."
So Trump's statement was: "These prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo." The word made the statement completely inaccurate and led to disaster.
"Trump hadn't prepared for the speech or for the moment," Bender recalled. "He appeared uncomfortable as he spoke in a hushed monotone, and he offered no words of sympathy to Americans who were suffering from the disease or had lost loved ones. He stumbled over words and twiddled his thumbs."
The speech sent "futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average [falling] with almost every word he uttered," the book continued. "The speech did seem to help change the way Americans viewed the disease, but not in the way Trump's family had hoped. Ivanka and Jared had wanted the moment to reset how Americans viewed the president's handling of the contagion; instead, it only underscored how ill-prepared he was for the job."
Bender's book went on sale this week.
