It was a tale of three speeches for Donald Trump this week. But don’t take my word for it. In what looked suspiciously like an audition to write this column, the president reviewed his own live gigs with a series of tweets on Thursday:

“Well, there was Afghanistan (somber),” he recalled, lamenting media criticism of his wildly see-sawing speaking styles, “the big Rally … (enthusiastic, dynamic and fun) and the American Legion – V.A. (respectful and strong). Too bad the Dems have no one who can change tones!”

It’s probably not the tones the Dems want to change.

Last weekend

The fallout from the president’s initial refusal to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, continued last weekend, with the news that he and his wife would be skipping a prestigious arts awards ceremony and White House reception “to allow the honorees to celebrate without any political distraction”. At least two of the five stars due to receive the awards had already indicated they would boycott the reception, joining Republicans, business leaders, charities and sports stars in denouncing Trump after he suggested that neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, were morally equivalent to the anti-fascist activists opposing them.

Trump seemed eager to wade into a new controversy when he described anti-racist demonstrators who converged on Boston as “anti-police agitators”, but he later rowed back, praising the right to demonstrate and applauding “the many protesters in Boston who are speaking out against bigotry and hate”.

As conservationists nervously awaited a decision from the White House on which of 27 national monuments might be reviewed – possibly opening up these stunning landscapes to the oil, mining and timber industries – campaigners criticised the administration’s decision to reverse a ban on the sale of plastic water bottles in national parks.

Monday

After risking blindness and public mockery by staring directly at the total solar eclipse that crossed the US on Monday, Trump headed to Fort Myer in Virginia to make a major speech on Afghanistan, indicating he was going to increase the US military presence there but not spelling out exactly how many more troops he would send, claiming not to want to telegraph his policies to America’s enemies.

Speaking slowly and deliberately, Trump admitted that his “original instinct was to pull out”, but noted: “All my life I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk at the Oval Office.” And he included a harshly worded warning to Pakistan that it had “much to lose by continuing to harbor criminals and terrorists”.

While some praised “a new President Trump” for “acknowledging a flip-flop and talking about gravity of office, history & substance”, others noted very little substantive difference from Barack Obama’s strategy, while some warned that the president could leave the US “without a clearly defined mission, and stuck in the middle of a worsening conflict”. Among the critics was the website run by Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon: Breitbart, which accused the president of becoming little more than a puppet of generals in the White House and characterised his move as a U-turn that contradicted a campaign pledge to limit US intervention abroad.

Tuesday



It was a very different Trump who turned up at the Phoenix convention center in Arizona on Tuesday night, delivering a rambling, belligerent 75-minute speech in which he read out at length his previous statements on Charlottesville – crucially omitting the key phrase “on many sides” that had ignited the firestorm in the first place – and returned to his criticism of anti-fascist activists, at one point yelping: “Antifa!”

He criticised the state’s senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, and told the crowd the media was attacking them, disliked America, and was “trying to take away our history and our heritage” – a familiar phrase from his argument that Confederate monuments should stay in place. And he dropped a clear hint that he intended to pardon Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, after his conviction for intentionally defying a judge’s order to stop his traffic patrols that targeted immigrants.

Wednesday



Trump’s Arizona speech certainly worried one listener, with the former US intelligence chief James Clapper saying he found it “disturbing” and calling the president’s access to the nuclear codes “pretty damn scary”. Clapper was joining a growing chorus of alarm over Trump’s erratic behaviour. The Republican chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, Bob Corker, said last week that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful”, and Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman who has introduced a bill that would prohibit the president from launching a nuclear first strike without a declaration of war by Congress, tweeted after Trump’s speech: “Freaked out yet?”

At his third speaking event in three days, the president swung back to the calmer tone of his Afghanistan remarks, delivering a message of unity to an annual veterans’ convention in Reno, Nevada. “It is time to heal the wounds that have divided us, and to seek a new unity based on the common values that unite us,” he said.

Thursday



Trump himself was driving those divisions, according to more than 62% of voters surveyed in a Quinnipiac poll, which also found that the president’s job approval was 35%, with 59% disapproving, and that 60% disapproved of his response to the events in Charlottesville. But Trump’s Republican support was solid as a rock, with 77% giving him their approval. Voters also said they trusted the media more than Trump by 54%-36% “to tell you the truth about important issues”.

Looking ahead to the problems facing Congress when it returns on 5 September, Trump lashed out at the GOP leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan for failing to take his advice over increasing the country’s borrowing limit. “Could have been so easy – now a mess!” he lamented.

Some considered another post – a retweet of an allegedly antisemitic supporter’s set of images entitled “The best eclipse ever!” which showed Trump’s face gradually obscuring that of Barack Obama – slightly unpresidential.

Elsewhere, the interior secretary Ryan Zinke announced he was considering rolling back conservation safeguards on a “handful” of national monuments, with sources claiming the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments in Utah and the Cascade-Siskiyou monument in Oregon were among them.

Friday

On Friday, Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser, became the most senior administration official to criticize the president over Charlottesville. “This administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these [neo-Nazi] groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities,” Cohn told the Financial Times.

The former president of Goldman Sachs and bête noire of Bannon supporters who call him “Globalist Gary”, Cohn said he had considered resigning over Trump’s remarks but “as a Jewish American, I will not allow neo-Nazis ranting ‘Jews will not replace us’ to cause this Jew to leave his job”.

As Hurricane Harvey bore down on Texas, Trump prepared to deal with the first major natural disaster on his watch, tweeting a photo of himself being briefed by Brock Long, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) chief. On Thursday, he also put out a video clip of his meeting with Fema officials in early August, with the caption: “Remember, the USA is the most resilient nation on earth, because we plan ahead.”

Critics pointed out that Long had only been confirmed on 20 June, three weeks into the Atlantic hurricane season, and the president has not yet nominated a permanent head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which plays a key role in weather forecasting.

“I think we have to be hopeful that they’ll handle it properly,” said Kristy Dahl of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

While the focus shifted to the hurricane, the White House announced a number of controversial decisions, pardoning former sheriff Joe Arpaio, the hardline Arizona lawman who was convicted of contempt of court in July for defying a judge’s order to stop racially profiling Latinos, firing nationalist adviser Sebastian Gorka, and signing a directive banning trans people from joining the military. It was hard to see the three decisions as anything other than an attempt to bury bad news while all eyes were on Texas.

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