Dear Commons Community,
Former President Donald Trump spoke for an hour in a rambling press conference yesterday, making dozens of false and outrageous claims in an effort to wrest the spotlight away from Vice President Kamala Harris’ surging 2024 presidential campaign.
Addressing reporters at Mar-a-Lago, the GOP presidential nominee insisted his campaign was drawing large, enthusiastic crowds on the campaign trail (Harris’ rallies have been attracting tens of thousands this week) and claimed that the vice president wasn’t “smart enough” to take questions from the media as he was doing. Here is an excerpt courtesy of The Huffington Post.
“She’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Trump said.
Trump also claimed he was willing to do three debates with Harris: Sept. 4 with Fox News, Sept. 10 with ABC News, and Sept. 25 with NBC News (the announcement required a clarification from Trump’s campaign regarding the host networks). Both campaigns had agreed to the Sept. 10 debate when President Joe Biden was still the presumptive nominee
“The honeymoon period is gonna end,” Trump said of Harris’ standing in the race. “She’s got a little period, the convention is coming up […] Everything she’s touched has turned bad.”
It was the first time Trump took questions from reporters since Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday. Trump called both Harris and Walz too liberal and dangerous to run the country.
“She picked a radical left man,” Trump said. “He’s got things done that he’s … he has positions that are just not, it’s not even possible to believe that they exist. He’s going for things that nobody’s ever even heard of, heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds having to do with safety. He doesn’t want to have borders. He doesn’t want to have walls. He doesn’t want to have any form of safety for our country.”
Trump said he wouldn’t change anything about his campaign or attacks now that he’s running against Harris. “I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all. It’s the same policies — open borders and crime. I think she’s worse than Biden,” he said.
During his press conference, which ran just short of 90 minutes, Trump compared the crowd size at the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, to the audience for Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech on the National Mall, where about 260,000 people showed up.
“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” he said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not, we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.”
Trump also falsely claimed that “nobody died” during the attack on the Capitol by hundreds of his supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election he had lost. At least seven people died in connection to the riot, including several Trump supporters.
Asked why Harris was doing well in the polls, Trump said it is because “she’s a woman” who represents “certain groups of people.” He predicted her support would drop after “people find out about her.”
Trump also complained about having to face Harris in the 2024 race instead of Biden, who dropped out last month after his poor debate performance against the former president. Harris, Trump baselessly alleged, “was working with the people that wanted him out.”
Dozens of Democrats publicly called for Biden to pass the torch to a younger candidate, but there’s no evidence Harris was working behind the scenes to push out her boss.
I watched most of Trump’s press conference. I found it a sad display for a presidential candidate – full of lies, fear mongering, and negativity. Also, the conference was poorly planned since viewers could not hear any of the questions.
Tony
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