How do you know if Trump means what he says? From aides to foreign leaders, audiences struggle to translate
WASHINGTON - When President Donald Trump threatened to take action against Google this week unless it altered its search engine to show more positive news about him from conservative sites, even his aides were flummoxed.
Was Trump proposing to regulate the internet, threatening to launch an investigation into one of the world's biggest companies or simply venting about something he saw on Fox News? They couldn't say.
Nineteen months into his presidency, confusion over how to interpret Trump's pronouncements has only grown more vexing as his impulsive tweets have increased to match the growing legal and political pressure on him. Nearly two years after Americans elected a man supporters lauded for "telling it like it is," his audiences - from West Wing aides to reporters, lawmakers, corporate boards and foreign leaders - routinely struggle to understand exactly what the president is trying to say.
For aides scrambling to figure out if a statement or a tweet is an order or an aspiration, questions abound: Is the president trying to shift the media's
