Last Hurrah?
In Deep Shit?
Senile?
And those were only some of the ways he veered away from topics voters have said they care most about in what his campaign billed as a “press conference” Friday, with the first ballots to be cast soon in the presidential election. Trump took no questions from the news media.
It was yet another striking strategic choice by the former president, who is in a toss-up race with Vice President Kamala Harris in the polls and facing what could be a historic gender gap in November as he struggles to appeal to women voters. After attending oral arguments Friday morning in his appeal of the verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing advice writer E. Jean Carroll decades ago, he went before the cameras and repeatedly impugned his accusers. He dismissed a string of allegations as entirely meritless as he leaned into his core message that he is a victim of political persecution.
In a roughly 49-minute appearance that sometimes verged into a stream-of-consciousness rant that was hard to follow, Trump also reminisced about his early career as a real estate mogul and reality television star. (“I was,” he said, “a celebrity for a long time.”) He lamented his two impeachments, calling them “impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two.” And he mentioned Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton, at least three times…..
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For much of the summer in a tight presidential contest, Trump’s advisers have urged him to hew to a more disciplined message — focusing on inflation and immigration, which they see as Harris’s two greatest vulnerabilities. But his Friday morning event showed the limits of what his aides can do to keep him on course.
They have tried for weeks to pull him out of a self-pitying stage, where he was complaining frequently about having to take on Harris and lashing out publicly as he described President Joe Biden’s exit from the race as a coup engineered by Democrats. Over the weekend, several people close to him said they thought he was prepared to focus more on making the case against Harris after Labor Day.
But that was not his approach during Friday’s remarks. He invoked his fame, college basketball coach Bobby Knight, his “love story” with his wife Melania and criticized his own lawyers as they flanked him at the news conference.
Expect the below from Trump in the debate…..
Takeaways from Trump’s Wisconsin Rally
The Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel covered Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Wisconsin yetserday, noting he “was at times nonsensical, rambling.”
“His speech, which lasted nearly two hours, followed the whims of Trump’s train of thought, rapidly spinning through different topics. Going from criticizing Harris for her lack of action on the southern border, Trump would then switch to blaming the media’s portrayal of his rhetoric.”
“At one point, he brought up Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer from the early 1990s.”
Politicalwire