With his usual disrespect for the journalists who cover his press conferences at the White House, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, has ended his appearance on Monday without further notice after an Asian-American journalist asked him a question to which he replied: “You should ask China.” Weijia Jiang, CBS correspondent to the White House, has asked the president why he was treating the tests for the coronavirus as if it were a world competition when there were 80,000 deaths in the country. The president has snapped directly at Jiang, born in China and living in the United States since he was two years old: “Don’t ask me. Ask China that question, ok? ”
From that moment on, everything President has done has been nonsense. Trump has moved to give the floor to CNN correspondent for the White House Kaitlan Collins, who had been interrupted by the CBS journalist, visibly upset. “Why is he asking me that question specifically?” Jiang asked him. “I’m just saying it,” the president has defended himself. “I am not telling anyone in particular. I say this to anyone who asks an unpleasant question, ”Trump continued, using a term with which he very often qualifies questions from journalists and even themselves.
“This is not an unpleasant question,” said Jiang. By then, the president was already giving the floor to another reporter, but the CNN journalist, who had been previously called, has asked for his time and told him that he had two questions.
“No,” Trump has declared. “But you have pointed me out, I have two questions, Mr. President, you have pointed me out,” Collins reminded him. Trump has used his presidential finger in a completely arbitrary way to say that, in fact, he had pointed it out to ask the following question but, since he had not asked it, it was someone else’s turn. It did no good for Collins to try to explain that he had let his colleague speak in a right of reply that he deemed appropriate following the president’s response to China.
No one else has been able to make any interpellation to the president of the United States. Without more, Trump has said “ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much,” has turned around and left the garden of the White House where he had gathered the accredited press.
Comments on Trump’s behavior were immediate. Twitter burned. Others accused him of being a racist. Others sexist. Vermont senator and former Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders has called the exchange “pathetic” and wrote on Twitter that Trump is “a coward who destroys others in order to feel powerful.”
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