Robert Armstrong’s place is history is at a crossroads: Will he be the journalist who had his 15 minutes of fame by slapping a funny nickname on President Donald Trump that made the world laugh for a few days? Or will he be the guy who threw a rock at a dragon, pissed him off and the watched as the fire-breathing menace burned down every village in the countryside? Armstrong, a reporter for the Financial Times, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that he fears he’ll be known as the smart aleck who humiliated Trump and prodded the thin-skinned narcissist into blowing up the economy — because he was angry and because he could.
“Look, the reason the TACO joke, which is kind of a dumb joke, stuck is because it has this huge element of truth in it,“ Armstrong said Thursday on Deadline: White House. ”And yes, a lot of times in the last 12 or 18 hours since that conversation in the White House, people have either written me or mentioned me on social media, saying, ‘This guy’s dumb joke is going to cause a recession.’ And I don’t like that at all. I meant to make a joke, not cause a recession.
“But there’s a serious question about a world in which you’re not allowed to make fun of the president. He’s the president. I am an inky-fingered hack making a dumb joke.
I’m the one who’s supposed to behave carefully around the president of the United States? How did we get here? Bizarre doesn’t even begin to cover it as far as I’m concerned.” Conservative talk-show host Charlie Sykes, appearing with Armstrong, said it’s important to embarrass Trump as often as possible — and he applauded the “Trump Always Chickens Out” one-liner.
“I wish we could humiliate him on a daily basis,” Sykes said. “I wish we could mock him. …
This is the bizarro world that we’re living in, where everybody is walking around on eggshells, afraid to anger the senile uncle who has incredibly thin skin. “Donald Trump is, of course, a complete narcissist, but he has a very, very thin skin, and he’s dangerous because he has the power and he has no restraint. That’s just the reality that we have to deal with.
“There are some people who say that … resistance is futile, we can’t do anything about it. But to the extent that we can point out the absurdity of Donald Trump, the fact that the emperor does have no clothes … there’s always a value to pointing out that the emperor is, in fact, buck naked when it is Donald Trump. I think we ought to take that risk,” Sykes added.
Wallace assured Armstrong that if the U.S. sinks into a recession, “it will have nothing to do with you. It will be Donald Trump’s policies.” She then compared the country to a dysfunctional family. “Look at the study around dysfunctional families, it’s the same story all the time,” she said.
“An otherwise normal body bends and collapses around the mentally ill or addicted or most sick member of the family. This country is the same. We had the Republican Party collapse onto itself around the dysfunctional leader.
And then you had all of the partisan actors collapse. And now you’re seeing Trump collapse the economy around his dysfunction.” Armstrong, looking for balance, compared it to former President Joe Biden. “It’s not altogether unlike the inner circle of Biden collapsing around him,” he said.
“He was frail, he was really unqualified to be president. They knew it and they collapsed around him. And that was no good.
And similarly, treating the current president with kid gloves by his advisors or by the press or by anybody else is a bad idea. It was a bad idea with a Democrat, It’s a bad idea with a Republican. We shouldn’t do it.” Wallace had a rebuttal: “I guess the only difference is Joe Biden would never tank the global economy if he found out that someone had made a joke about him.
What you’re all saying to me here on live TV is, Trump would.” “Joe has a sense of humor and Trump does not,” Armstrong said. “And one of them is willing to destroy things for fun. The other is not,” said Wallace, who ticked off the times Trump has balked on his tariffs — which is how he got the TACO nickname: Trump Always Chickens Out.
“I would push back on the premise that anyone has humiliated Donald Trump other than Donald Trump,” she said. “I mean, the truth of the number of times that he blinked is a data point that exists in public. No investigative journalists dug up the number of times Trump balked because of the poor reception to his tariffs.
“I’m no economist, but I can read a newspaper. No one’s humiliating Donald Trump except Donald Trump.” Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
