Obviously, there are more pressing issues. For instance, the White House can ask the FBI to investigate Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh before next week's Senate hearing—as George H.W. Bush's did into those made by Anita Hill in 1991—but the president has repeatedly lied, suggesting the FBI "doesn't want to be involved." He could just ask them to get involved. Republicans are also refusing to include Mark Judge, the other man allegedly in the room for the incident, in the hearing. The president is again attacking the attorney general for failing to serve as his personal lawyer, and said supposed corruption in the FBI is "truly a cancer on our country" as the agency investigates him and his associates.

But even with all that this Wednesday morning, we have to ask: can't the president just occasionally stick to the script?



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"This is a tough hurricane, one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water." He added: "It certainly is not good."

The American president just explained that water is wet. This ought to go down with his Oval Office address from the lead-up to the storm, in which he suggested Hurricane Florence would be "tremendously big and tremendously wet."

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TRUMP sounds the alarm about Hurricane Florence during Oval Office press availability: "They haven't seen anything like what's coming at us in 25, 30 years, maybe ever. It's tremendously big and tremendously wet." pic.twitter.com/p5YljZK8oL — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 11, 2018

Again, we are reminded that the president has been assessed as speaking at a fourth-grade level. And again, we are forced to ask why he can't just accept a script from his staff and read it. Yes, the president found success during the campaign with his "freewheeling" style. Yes, normal politics can be boring. But sometimes it's the right thing for the president to be boring—or at least to be professional.

At points, Trump rightly praised first responders and warned residents about the still-looming dangers of rising floodwaters. Why can't the whole thing just go that way? The storm dumped more than 30 inches of water in some areas, turning interstates into rivers. 37 people are confirmed dead so far. An early estimate has found the storm caused $22 billion in damage, which would make it one of the 10 costliest hurricanes in history. It deserves seriousness and competence in all aspects of the response.



These direct-to-social-media videos shot in the White House gardens are a new pastime for Donald Trump, American president. There was, for instance, his unnervingly disjointed 9/11 message, featuring sentence fragments and long pauses as he trawled the caverns of his mind for what language to use:

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Why can't someone write this message for him? Why can't the president just read it? Could they at least do another take? Did someone think this was a good one? Why can't there just be, in one small corner of this hulking, godforsaken travesty of a presidency, a slice of normalcy and professionalism from the occupant of the highest office in the land?



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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