Watching Barack Obama sit next to President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday was deadening. It felt not just like the end of something but the beginning, which for obvious reasons is worse. For Trump, though, it was just another day in his big dumb life, and he behaved exactly as he surely has in a million other important meetings. To be more specific, he bullshitted his way through it: As Politico reported, the first words Trump spoke in the Oval Office after his 90-minute meeting with Obama were untrue.
“This was a meeting that was going to last for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and we were just going to get to know each other,” Trump said. “We had never met each other. I have great respect. The meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half. And… as far as I’m concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer.”
The point was that he and Obama had gotten along so well that they just couldn’t stop chatting—that for all their differences, they were two guys who shared a mutual respect and had so much to learn from each other that they wanted to keep talking even after their time was up. Just one problem: the meeting was scheduled to last one hour, not “10 or 15 minutes.” In fact, as Politico points out, reporters at the White House were told not to assemble for the scrum until 30 minutes into the meeting.
Maybe Trump didn’t even know the meeting was scheduled for an hour—maybe what happened is he was nervous before the meeting started and his children/advisors told him it was only going to be 10 minutes to chill him out. Most likely he just made it up though. It is very much the kind of thing he would just make up.
