Since the US mass media are concentrating as they typically do on the “horserace” aspects of the Presidential campaign, staying as far as possible from substantive issues at stake, I don’t need to add to that fog.
But I took it upon myself to watch convicted felon Donald Trump’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago from August 8. (1) The video is an hour long, so viewers need to choose how much of their time they want to spend on this nonsense.
It a weird set-up - “weird” being an inspired choice for 2024 for Harris and Walz to characterize against the Trump-Vance ticket - he’s giving a press conference in a meeting room of some kind with an array of American flags behind him. There are reporters asking questions. But the camera remains on Trump in that video the whole time. And all we hear of the reporters’ questions over an hour is a whispered sound when you can hear them at all. Since Trump has to repeatedly ask the questioners to speak louder, the acoustics must have been pretty bad.
The whole thing comes off more like a badly-written play in which the sole actor is responding to imaginary questions. So what you see and hear is Trump rambling through various insults and vague claims with disjointed sentences, a mean old man giving a confused monologue.
I did learn something new, though. Apparently, not only does the City of San Francisco no longer exist, neither does the entire State of California. Because, you see, Ka-MAL-a Harris destroyed them both. I guess everyone I know there must be loving in tents or the ruins of abandoned buildings, or something. Sad.
If this is a good example of anything except Trump’s confused and disturbed state of mind, it would an example of what can easily happen to people who had the unusual luck (or curse) to grow up and live his whole adult life surrounded by people who flattered him and kissed up to him. It’s a tacky habit of bosses who enjoy being cheap bullies to everyone around them and like to say things that are flatly wrong or nonsensical as a way of showing he doesn’t need or want their respect and who are expected to take cheap humiliations in stride day after day and year after year.
Jake Tapper and other commentators on CNN wade through what analysis they can piece together out of Trump’s dingy hour-long rant: (2)
Jake opens this segment: “Donald Trump holding a lengthy and at times, meandering? spiraling? news conference from Mar-A-Lago.” He also adds that Trump criticized the media's coverage of crowd sizes at Harris's rallies. He also continued to spread false claims about U.S. elections and January 6th and wow, so much more.”
My main takeaway: Trump really cares a lot about crowd sizes.
More grimly, he makes it very clear that he intends to go all-out on fixing the results of November’s election if he doesn’t win it. Also grimly, and weirdly, he says that no one was killed on January 6.
The CNN report does do fact-checking, which is good. But with a rambling monologue like this, it almost seems beside the point.
I’m not a particular fan of “Democratic strategist” James Carville, who is also featured in this clip and can be a bit disjointed himself. But he was also struck by the emphasis on crowd sizes: “And what I took away, he couldn’t stop talking about crowd size. I mean, the guy is just in a, he just can't believe what his whole world is crumbling around him. And he's just a scared, fat old man.”
Carville was presumably meaning to be insulting. But “just a scared, fat old man” makes the felon Donald Trump seem to be a more sympathetic figure than he is.
Notes:
(1) LIVE: Trump's first press conference since Harris picked Walz (FULL STREAM). Associated Press YouTube channel 08/08/2024. <https://www.youtube.com/live/ma_xCjJHdFc?si=KIG99evYp_VtvCgH> (Accessed: 2024-09-08).
(2) ‘Spiraling’: Anchor reacts to Trump’s speech and analysts discuss. CNN YouTube channel 08/09/2024. <https://youtu.be/nKOz00xqtj8?si=yKanc5otyGmbY-Kf> (Accessed: 2024-09-08).
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