'Delay, whine, lie, blather, wince, repeat': Latest Trump question time stuns onlookers
President Donald Trump spoke to reporters from the Oval Office on Monday about his trade tariffs and his talk with Canadian and Mexican leadership — and signed an executive order establishing a sovereign wealth fund for the nation.
But his news conference was littered with comments that left onlookers wondering if he knew what was happening.
It started when he asked a staffer which executive order he was signing. Then he was bombarded with questions including what he thought of markets tanking after he announced tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China over the weekend, and about Elon Musk's closing of the office housing the U.S. Agency of International Development. He was also questioned over Musk's accessing the personal data of government employees.
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Those who watched couldn't help but ridicule as the president struggled to answer — and they fact-checked his statements.
Journalist Aaron Rupar called out a Trump claim that 300,000 Americans die annually from fentanyl overdoses — even though Trump's own executive order on tariffs to China cites 75,000 deaths from the drug. "This is a lie," he wrote.
Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding linked the sovereign wealth fund order to authoritarian regimes. "Kings and dictators have sovereign wealth funds," he wrote.
"Trump is again doing that weird thing where he signs executive orders that need to be explained to him just before he signs them," pointed out Rupar.
On tariffs, policy director Ned Resnikoff pointed out on BlueSky, "Neither the mainstream press nor our political system seem to have digested the fact that the U.S. president is trying to illegally annex a NATO ally using economic coercion."
And on Musk's activities, legal analyst Bradley Moss said it's clear: "He has no idea what Elon is doing. He let loose Elon to go wild."
Ex-conservative columnist Jen Rubin replied, "Musk is running the government. Trump is a feeble figurehead."
Radio show host Nicole Sandler summed up order signing event with, "Delay, whine, lie. Blather, wince, repeat."
"Donald Trump just criticized the existing trade deal, and asked, "Who the hell came up with some of these trade deals?" I'll just leave this here," wrote author and activist Majid M. Padellan, better known as BrooklynDad on X. The screen capture he posted showed Trump was the one who signed the "new NAFTA" trade deal during his first term.