It's fun seeing him spin out.
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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NYT:
Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference In an hourlong exchange with reporters, the former president criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for not doing the same, insulted her intelligence and boasted about the size of his rallies.
17m ago Donald Trump stands behind a lectern in a gold-colored room. Four U.S. flags are behind him, and a group journalists stand in front of him. Former President Donald J. Trump held a hastily scheduled news conference on Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.Doug Mills/The New York Times Aug. 8, 2024Updated 5:56 p.m. ET
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Former President Donald J. Trump tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself back into a national conversation that Vice President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding an hourlong news conference in which he assailed Ms. Harris’s intelligence and taunted her for failing to field questions similarly from journalists.
Throughout the event, held in the main room at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump assailed the state of the U.S. economy, described the country as in mortal danger if he did not win the presidential election and falsely described his departure from the White House — which was preceded by his refusal to concede his election loss in November 2020 and the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of his supporters — as a “peaceful” transfer of power.
Mr. Trump also flashed frustration when asked about the size of Ms. Harris’s crowds while boasting about the attendance at his own rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and insisted that the group of hundreds that stormed the Capitol was relatively small. But he fixated on the size of the crowd that he initially gathered on the national mall, making comparisons to — and declaring it was larger than — the one drawn by Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Mr. Trump said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours — same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not — we had more.”
The Trump team has been looking for ways to interrupt Ms. Harris’s momentum as she has quickly consolidated the Democratic Party behind her and risen in the polls. The goal of Mr. Trump’s news conference, which he announced on Thursday morning on his social media site, was to highlight that Ms. Harris has yet to hold a news conference of her own or to give an unscripted interview to the news media.
It was a point he made during his event, arguing that she had avoided doing so because “she’s not smart enough.”
Mr. Trump insisted that he was “not complaining” about the Democratic Party’s late decision to replace President Biden atop the ticket — as he proceeded to lodge a litany of such complaints. He has called the move to replace Mr. Biden with Ms. Harris “unconstitutional,” but when challenged about what section of the U.S. Constitution would prohibit the change in the ticket, he acknowledged that perhaps it was not actually unconstitutional.
At the same time, he said that while the move was unfair to Mr. Biden, it had not affected his campaign. “I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all,” Mr. Trump said.
When a reporter asked about how muted his public schedule has been over the last few weeks, including this past week, Mr. Trump snapped, “What a stupid question.”
Mr. Trump is set to appear in Montana on Friday to help a Republican Senate candidate, Tim Sheehy, who is facing off against Senator Jon Tester in one of the election’s most competitive races.
“What are we doing right now?” Mr. Trump said, citing his schedule of radio interviews and adding of Ms. Harris, “She’s not doing a news conference.”
His wide-ranging remarks were sometimes meandering. Mr. Trump mused that the legal system was unfair to him, described the quick recovery of his ear after last month’s assassination attempt (“I’m a fast healer”) and defended the clemency grants he issued to violent felons and high-level drug dealers as president, when asked how they were different from his characterization of Ms. Harris’s time as a prosecutor in California.
Mr. Trump seemed most uncomfortable when asked specific questions about abortion policy — the issue he views as the biggest political danger for Republicans. He refused to say how he would vote on Florida’s abortion referendum in November, which asks whether voters will support a state constitutional amendment to protect and expand abortion rights.
Mr. Trump instead resorted to his go-to evasion, saying he would be holding a news conference at a later date to announce his position.
When asked if he would direct the Food and Drug Administration to revoke access to abortion pills, he seemed not to understand the question and provided an incoherent answer that did not address it.
“So, you can do things that will be, would supplement, absolutely. And those things are pretty open and humane,” Mr. Trump said. “But you have to be able to have a vote. And all I want to do is give everybody a vote. And the votes are taking place right now as we speak.”
Much of the news conference was consumed by familiar remarks. Mr. Trump laid out an apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic rule — focusing his attacks especially on the economy, crime and immigration.
He also promised that a depression on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s would result if Ms. Harris won election. This is also a recycled refrain, one that Mr. Trump used against Mr. Biden in the 2020 campaign.
Mr. Trump declined to elaborate on his comments last week, delivered to a group of Black journalists, in which he questioned Ms. Harris’s ethnicity.
Asked how he could claim, as he did to those journalists, that a woman who attended a historically Black university was only recently claiming to be Black, Mr. Trump said: “Well, you’ll have to ask her that question, because she’s the one that said it. I didn’t say it. So you’ll have to ask her. And I very much appreciate that question, but you’ll have to ask her.”
He added that she was “very disrespectful” to both aspects of her heritage, her Indian mother and her Jamaican father, without explaining what that meant.
But later he tiptoed toward identity politics as he described some of her appeal.
“She’s a woman,” he said. “She represents certain groups of people.”
Taylor Robinson contributed research.
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/us/politics/trump-press-conference-mar-a-lago.html
Washington Post:
Opinion What Trump chooses to obscure reveals the truth Karen TumultyAugust 8, 2024 at 5:13 p.m. EDT
Former president Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) “Unhinged” has become a shopworn word in the years since Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower. But the former president’s hour-long news conference on Thursday afternoon from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida might have been a new personal best.
It’s clear what is going on. Trump, who only three weeks ago thought he had this election in the bag, is freaking out over the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Trump sees what we all see: the euphoria that has overtaken Harris’s party, the tens of thousands who are flocking to her inaugural swing through battleground states, the torrent of poll numbers that show the race is suddenly tied. “We were given Joe Biden, and now we’re given somebody else,” he said, adding — not convincingly — “I think, frankly, I’d rather be running against somebody else.”
But rather than framing a sharp and coherent case against Harris, which his strategists so desperately want him to do, the former president on Thursday veered from grievance to grievance like a pinball. As he took questions from the media, desperation was practically oozing from his pores. And without the cheers of a rally crowd punctuating his rambling monologue, the incoherence of what he had to say was all the more apparent.
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How much Trump misses and needs those throngs of supporters was clear. Again and again, he boasted — lied, actually — about their size. “Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said, claiming that he drew more people to the National Mall than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did in 1963 when the civil rights leader gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He lamented, falsely, that the numbers that Harris is drawing have been inflated by the media.
Yet Trump has been strangely absent lately from the stage he loves, and his most recent appearances have been disasters. He delivered a racist rant about Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists convention on July 31, and days later attacked Georgia’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, during a rally in Atlanta.
This week, his only rally is on Friday in deep-red Montana. Asked why he is doing so little campaigning, Trump first dismissed that as a “stupid question” and then claimed it is “because I’m leading by a lot and because of letting their convention go through a lot, I’m doing tremendous amounts of taping here. We have commercials that are at a level I don’t think that anybody’s ever done before.”
Really? In the first five days of this month, Trump and his allies spent about $16.5 million on advertising, according to AdImpact. That compares with about $23 million by President Joe Biden, Harris and their allies. Since early March, the ad-tracking firm estimates, the Democratic side has spent nearly three times as much as Trump’s has.
The truth about Trump and his fixations is often made clearest by what he chooses to lie about. He’s scared, because he is running behind — in polls and in fundraising. And he isn’t at all sure what to do about it.
And, oh, there was some actual news in this news conference: Trump proposed three dates next month for debates with Harris. As of this writing, Harris has agreed to one of them, on Sept. 10, sponsored by ABC News. That is the same arrangement previously agreed to by Trump and Biden.
There have been many unpredictable twists in this campaign, and surely there will be more to come. For now, however, the biggest question is whether Trump, a master of driving events, can climb out of the back seat in which he finds himself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/08/trump-news-conference-harris-grievances/
How'd that work out?
Cool maybe he can have a heart attack in front of cameras!
New laxative recommendations?
He's withdraing?