{"id":601250,"date":"2026-08-22T14:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T14:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/601250\/"},"modified":"2026-08-22T14:00:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T14:00:16","slug":"trump-finds-his-happy-place-as-the-bad-news-piles-up-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/601250\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump finds his happy place as the bad news piles up \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a bus stop on Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the White House, a digital tracker offers live, real-time reporting of the US<\/a> national debt. It\u2019s nothing fancy but it\u2019s almost like an art installation: inviting harried commuters, whether in the buggy heat or black cold of a Washington<\/a> season, to consider with horror the fact that Uncle Sam is up to his neck in debt. It\u2019s just one of a series of nationwide debt clocks that were installed by the Peterson Foundation before the 2020 election campaign.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, sombre toned newscasters informed the United States<\/a> that the national debt had now crossed the $40 trillion (\u20ac34 trillion) threshold. Over the past year, the cost of the Trump administration\u2019s war with Iran<\/a>, along with tax cuts contained within the \u201cbig, beautiful Bill\u201d, saw $2 trillion added to the overall total. Fortunately, the administration\u2019s key figures were at hand to offer a reassuring reason as to why this had happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder Joe Biden the cost of food went up almost 25 per cent,\u201d agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean this is what we are battling against right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent was also in a just-because-things-are-bad-now-doesn\u2019t mean-they were-good-before frame of mind. \u201cRemember, we did not get here in a day,\u201d he instructed his fellow Americans. \u201cWe were left with a mess.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vice-president JD Vance<\/a> was also in no doubt that the real culprit was the guy who retired from public office in January 2025 \u2013 and was clear about who would get the US out of its deepening fiscal hole.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though we inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration, we actually have a plan to get the economy growing faster than the debt. Scott is very much on top of it. He knows it\u2019s a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald Trump<\/a> does not wait for buses and may well be unaware of the debt clocks. Nobody will ever accuse the 47th president of worrying about life unduly. On Wednesday morning, even as the total debt reached that bleak milestone, Trump was in a mood to discuss cocktails on the helipad. Seized by an almost boyish excitement, he took the regular White House press corps on an unscheduled tour of the restoration work now near completion on the drive that winds around the famous building, before signing the decorative eagle plaque that will form the centrepiece of the new helipad. Needless to say, the entire show was broadcast live.<\/p>\n

It was about 30 degrees and swampy in Washington on Wednesday and the grounds around the White House are a heat trap. Trump spoke for 35 unbroken minutes, ad-libbing and unusually appeasing in voice and gesture: he was almost like an usher showing guests around.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Trump\u2019s approval falls to 33%, the lowest of his presidencyOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cLike I\u2019m fixing the country, I\u2019m fixing the White House too. It\u2019s the people\u2019s house,\u201d he told his audience before embarking on a detailed, geekily enthused description of the white granite stone driveway set to replace the \u201cvery basic asphalt\u201d, the flaws and ugliness of which had irritated the president to the point of embarrassment.<\/p>\n

\u201cLiterally they had potholes in it … it\u2019s ridiculous the way this place was taken care of \u2013 nobody, including other presidents, they didn\u2019t see it. But I see it because I\u2019m very good at real estate, maybe the best in a lot of ways. And I love construction. I love seeing things properly taken care of.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had many other things to say as well, about the beauty of tapered flag poles (\u201cI\u2019m very good at flagpoles,\u201d he explained) and about the possibility of using the helipad as an outdoor cocktail area before guests could walk to the ballroom on the flawless granite. He told them that the Palm Court had been done by \u201cJackie O\u201d but that the tiles had been cheap. He explained his thinking on the angle of the slope on the granite also: that the old asphalt had, to his mind, looked almost like a downhill ski slope.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt we had too much slope. One half of one degree slope but I didn\u2019t want the slope they had. And so, before we put the letters down, we lifted it and made it dead flat \u2013 sort of reminded me of the Wollman rink in Central Park.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was something extraordinarily jolting about that comparison: a sudden subconscious time lapse connecting this 80-year-old president given to tyrannical whims with the brash, privileged New York son of a notorious landlord out there on the ice.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Bad news for Donald Trump in Florida: The rise of David JollyOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

It was Trump at his most strange and uninhibited and eccentric. He sounded happier than he has done in months as he chattered away with the sound of workmen hammering away in the background. To anyone observing, it seemed as though Trump had stepped away from the crushing realities of an administration losing altitude by the day: with the Iran \u201cwar\u201d caught between farce and tragedy, the prices refusing to come down, key administration figures exiting, the Save America Act stalled, and for Trump, the prospect of a post-midterm \u201clame duck\u201d two years to serve out \u2013 the sting in the tail for every two-time president.<\/p>\n

Previous presidents have turned to prayer or the bottle in times of high stress. Construction was always Trump\u2019s obsession and comfort. As he told guests in the early stages of the demolition of the East Wing, he loves the noise of the machinery and crashing bricks. \u201cOther people don\u2019t like it. I love it. When I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t go home again?<\/p>\n

Says who.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a bus stop on Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the White House, a digital tracker offers live,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32143,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,969,61,60,154123,90,14053],"class_list":["post-601250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-donald-trump","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-keith-duggan","tag-us","tag-washington-dc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}