SPIN, 2 January 2019:
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| CREDIT: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images |
President Trump delivered
a harsh post-holiday awakening at his first cabinet meeting of 2019,
holding forth for a nearly two-hour freestyle press conference in the
presence of reporters.
In what amounted to
a barely coherent filibuster, Trump dragged his former secretary of defense, chalked recent
stock market turbulence up to a
“glitch,”gave a
shoutout to Kanye West, and mused that he might have made a good general himself. Most of the
time, he sounded like a guy at a bus station arguing with
pigeons. Behind him, ex-Fox News exec turned head of the White House press shop Bill
Shine shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
In spite of his best
efforts, Trump was nearly upstaged by a parody poster of
himself as a Game of Thrones character with the
text “Sanctions are coming.” The president initially shared the
parody image on his Twitter feed in November, apparently signaling
his intention to impose sanctions on Iran. On Wednesday afternoon, an
actual, physical, movie-theater-sized version of the poster was laid out on the
table in front of the president facing the press pool.
When the image first
appeared in November, HBO issued a statement that they would “prefer our
trademark not be misappropriated for political purposes.” An HBO rep told
Spin the network has no additional comment.
Trump didn’t address why
the poster was so prominently positioned, but he did extol the virtues of a
Southern border wall while posing with appropriated imagery from a dragon soap
opera that vehemently undermines that premise. “Walls work,” he told
reporters. Trump is currently holding out for wall funding amid an ongoing
government shutdown, leaving some 800,000 federal employees currently without pay.
TRUMP: "I had a meeting at the Pentagon with lots of generals. They were like from a movie. Better looking than Tom Cruise, & stronger. And I had more generals than I've ever seen, & we were at the bottom of this incredible room. I said, 'this is greatest room I've ever seen.'" pic.twitter.com/fTpgDXVso8— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 2, 2019
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