“I just spoke to our great General [James] Mattis, just now,” Donald Trump said near the end of his first State of the Union address back in 2017, “who reconfirmed that—and I quote—‘Ryan was a part of a highly successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future against our enemies.’” Trump was at that point deep into a familiar State of the Union ritual—a speedrun of local heroes and Forever War martyrs whose inspiring stories give everyone in the chamber a light applause-based workout shortly before the speech winds up to its conclusion.

Trump, who has always seemed happiest when serving as Master of Ceremonies in Chief, delights in doing this sort of thing not just in major addresses but in his daily Covid-19 press conferences. On Monday, Trump invited the mustachioed conservative demi-celebrity Mike Lindell—he is the creator of a product called MyPillow, which is a pillow—to say a few words. Through pipe-organ sinuses, in a voice that sounded like a chopped-and-screwed imitation of former WWE heel and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, Lindell veered boldly off script. “God gave us grace on November 8, 2016, to change the course we were on,” Lindell honked. Lindell said that Trump had been sent by God and encouraged Americans to “get back in the Word.”



On Tuesday, Lindell went on the former Family Research Council chief Tony Perkins’s radio show and said that MyPillow’s website kept breaking down. “I just think it’s the devil,” Lindell told Perkins. “I mean, it’s evil attacking MyPillow because it knows we’re winning.” That same day, Trump won raves from a host of political commentators for a somber and serious press conference performance in which he claimed that “we will altogether have done a good job” if anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 Americans die as the result of a pandemic he spent months ignoring, spinning, minimizing, and furiously misapprehending. “Trump sounding different today,” The New York Times’ Eric Lipton noted early in what wound up being the longest public address of Trump’s term. “Scale of death appears to have changed his tone, at least.” Politico’s Jake Sherman tweeted later, hailing “an absolutely new message and new tone.”



Even given that reporters like Lipton and Sherman function less as journalists than TV recappers—running down new plot developments, sketching the performances, offering on-the-fly prognostications of what it all might mean for the next episode—they should have known that Trump’s tone was not really “new.” It’s one he has tried on before, when the moment calls for it and when he feels like it, but seldom for long.

There are extenuating circumstances here, of course. Vanity Fair reported that a New York real estate peer of Trump’s is in a coma as a result of Covid-19, which, given Trump’s lifelong struggles with object permanence, is the sort of thing that would shake him more than the deaths of a quarter-million strangers; a former West Wing official also confided that “the polling sucked … they don’t expect to win states that are getting blown to pieces with coronavirus.” Trump likes to believe that he’s capable of turning this sort of thing on and off—“to trigger praise from a typically adversarial press simply by acting ‘nice,’” as The Daily Beast had it—but it is always a better bet, when encountering a somber Trump, to presume that he’s pouting over a real or perceived offense against himself than that he is troubled by the crushing responsibilities of his job. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about Donald Trump—and they are all truly the slightest things—knows that, for him, there is always only one type of suffering, and one person’s suffering, that he is capable of caring about.

