SNOWFLAKE-IN-CHIEF:

It starts with a reporter, usually a female reporter, asking President Donald Trump hard, tenacious questions at a news conference. Trump's jaw seizes up, rattled and dumbfounded by the questions that he can't or won't answer, he abruptly ends the presser by saying, "Thank you, very much" and stalking out of the room.

Trump threw such a fit on Saturday when CBS News reporter Paula Reid launched a volley of questions about why he once again took credit for passing a veterans program that the Obama administration pushed through in 2014. In late July, the same fight-or-flight response turned to flight again when CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins chased Trump with pointed, persistent questions about his retweets of a fringe doctor's theories that masks were useless and hydroxychloroquine cured Covid-19. "OK, thank you very much everybody," Trump said as he backed off, truncating the news conference. [...]

Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the recipient of Trump abuse--"You're a third-rate reporter," he told Karl in an April briefing--tells me that the trigger for Trump's walk-offs appears to questions in which a reporter fact-checks him. That's abundantly true in the Reid, Collins and Jiang instances. For somebody who has told at least 20,000 lies in the course of his presidency, Trump seems to flinch hardest when confronted with his own mendacity. There may be something about being contradicted in a group setting like the briefing that sets him off. As we saw in his recent one-on-one interviews with Chris Wallace and Jonathan Swan, he's able to contest their exacting fact-checks without completely losing it. Group settings must make him more vulnerable to humiliation, hence his expectation that the world receive his words as the uncontested law, no matter how batty those words are.

Trumpies might think that avoiding direct and extended conflicts with detail-minded reporters during the pandemic lends his administration an edge. They might even think shutting down the pressers on no notice make him look like a bad-ass with his base. But I doubt these tongue-tied tantrums have such an effect. And so does Karl. "The walk-off is a surprising display of weakness--he allows the reporter to have the last word, ending the press conference by asking a question the president appears unable to handle," he says.

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