Yeah, not wanting to have been perceived as having made a mistake... bingo.
Reminds me of Trump after Charlottesville, and after the only actually acceptable speech he was talked into making (roped, hogtied into making) --reluctantly-- by the then WH chief of staff, staff secretary, some cabinet heads and advisers.
It was the speech that was well received. But, after making it, he switched on the TV and there was somebody on Fox saying something along line of "and now we have the first time in this still young presidency where we see the president having made a course correction..."
Trump then became livid, went completely ballistic, started screaming about he never should have made that speech, it made him look weak, and on and on... and it was after that he really messed up and made some more walking-back "both sides" remarks, ugly enough that white supremacist David Duke tweeted congratulations to Trump.
The fallout from that timeframe was incredibly chaotic with heads of US military forces having to tweet out rebukes of the president, CEOs resigning from the manufacturing and tech councils until Trump disbanded them to stop the embarrassment... and the global stage ending up with Gary Cohn giving an interview to the Financial Times to express his dissenting view from that of Trump regarding Charlottesville, possibly as a condition of his sticking around long enough to finish working on the tax cut legislation. The stock markets teetered for awhile after that interview, since it was not entirely clear Cohn would actually find himself able to continue working with Trump. After all, someone had drawn a swastika on the door of Cohn's daughter's dormitory room at college in the wake of the Charlottesville incident.
All that over Trump's fury that a TV commentator remarked that Trump had "made a course correction."
