Squirrel! Trump’s Lack of Focus on Full Display at WH Small Business Event

At an event supposed to highlight his administration’s policy wins for small businesses on Monday, Donald Trump managed to stay on message for two minutes before “weaving” his way to the war in Iran.

“You’re the lifeblood of the American economy, and with your help, we’re truly making America great again,” the president told assembled business leaders. “We’re doing record business. We have a stock market that hit, even with this military operation, call it whatever you want. We can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

And off he went.

Trump assured his audience that the conflict, which has plunged the global economy into turmoil and likely put a strain on any small business that uses gasoline or diesel, is “going very well.”

Reality tells a different story.

At about the same time the president spoke, the United Arab Emirates accused Iran of having attacked its most important oil hub, which sent oil prices up sharply. At the end of the day, a barrel of Brent crude cost $114, an increase of 6 percent for the day.

That’s nothing, according to Trump, who suggested in his remarks that people had anticipated that the price of oil might soar to $300 in response to his war.

“Everybody was wrong,” he declared. “They thought that energy would be at $300. Right? $300 a barrel, and it’s like at 100. And I think going down.”

It is not going down.

More importantly, if the price of oil reached $300, it would be an economic extinction-level event that would lead to a global recession, so if anybody at the White House thought that was a possibility and still went ahead with the war, it would have been insane.

Speaking of… while Trump has taken some care in the past to avoid calling the conflict a “war,”  he liberally used the term on Monday, presumably because his lawyers had come up with a justification for why he does not require congressional approval for it.

While the president occasionally managed to get back on track, he also mused about staying in office beyond his current term, something the Constitution forbids, and bragged about passing a cognitive test meant to detect early dementia while lambasting the media for failing to give him credit for this accomplishment.

“[The tests] are hard,” he said and suggested that the “fake news media” would not be able to pass them. “The first question is very easy, and they always show the first question is you have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a, what’s another good… A squirrel. Okay? Which is the squirrel? So they show that question, and then the first four or five questions are, they get a little more difficult.”

The audience is laughing along at this point, although why is not clear. It’s not funny that a president keeps bragging about passing a test whose mere administration suggests that somebody feels he may not be fit for office.

Of course, one just has to listen to him to come to that conclusion.

On Monday, for example, he also riffed on the reflecting pool on the National Mall for a good five minutes.

To his allies, Trump’s inability to stay on message must be disconcerting, especially because there isn’t much of a message to begin with for the GOP right now. What is even more worrying for them is that the president keeps talking about things that are counterproductive, such as his ballroom or that everything is fine when Americans are feeling the pain of higher prices.

Most frustrating of all must be that there is nothing they can do about it. The time to try to rein in Trump has long passed, and the fate of the Republicans on the ballot in November hinges in large part on how Americans view a president who isn’t.

An added complication is that, in Trump’s mind, everything is going great, and any story or poll showing the contrary is “fake.”

There is a bright side for the GOP: Much of the media keeps largely sanewashing these events, so most Americans will never hear the rambling nonsense coming out of their president’s mouth on a daily basis. If they did, it stands to reason that Trump’s historically bad approval ratings would get even worse.