Maybe I just don’t understand how the media is supposed to report the news, but I always thought that when an outlet like PBS or C-Span lets some politician use their network to make a speech, that the person making the speech had something important to say about a problem or a topic we need to understand because it would make a difference in our lives.
Now, if a politician just wants to let us know that he exists, or that he’s running for this or that political office – fine – let the guy buy all the broadcast time he wants. And at the end of the message, you get the line which says that what you were just watching was approved by so-and-so, which means that so-and-so paid for the time.
But this isn’t what happened last night when Trump walked into the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago and droned on for twenty minutes or so saying the exact, same things he has been saying at every political rally he has held over the past eight years.
I was doing some busywork on my laptop during the first few minutes of Trump’s speech, so I didn’t really pay that much attention to what was going on. Then, all of a sudden, I heard him say something about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
What?PBS is giving Trump a national media platform to talk about Hunter Bien’s laptop? What the f***?
So, now I began listening watching and listening. And what I heard was the exact, same ‘nobody has been attacked the way I’ve been attacked’ spiel that Trump says every time he opens his mouth except this time he added several new names to the list of his attackers, like the judge and the DA in the New York case.
Even Trump himself looked bored while he was giving his speech. And when he finished by reminding the crowd again that he’s the only thing standing between them and the entire disappearance of the American way of life, he quickly trooped off the stage and that was the end of that.
He even remembered to mention George Soros, but I didn’t hear any nasty comments about the ‘fake news.’ After all, it’s this ‘fake news’ which has now embraced Trump and allowed his bumbling remarks filled with the same, endless lies that he always tells to become the stuff for prime-time programming on video and TV.
Trump’s lying was so blatant that he even rolled out the nonsense about how we left billions of valuable military equipment behind when we pulled out of Bagram Airbase, just another one of the massive foreign-policy failures which would never have occurred if the 2020 election hasn’t been stolen from him.
That’s right. Trump hasn’t abandoned the election ‘fraud’ narrative in the slightest. If anything, I suspect he’s going to ratchet up his calls for a ‘free and fair’ election as we get closer to 2024.
I love that phrase – ‘free and fair.’ I guess it means that red states like Mississippi and Alabama can no longer charge a poll tax – all you need now to vote in those states is to pay for a government-issue ID.
By the end of last night’s speech, I began hoping that Judge Juan Merchan will not issue any kind of gag order on Trump, even though there was media chatter about the possibility of such an order coming down today.
That’s the last thing Joe and the Democrats need next year – a chastened Donald Trump who can’t shoot his mouth off or push out those mis-spelled messages on his social media feed. There’s no way that Trump actually wrote the comment yesterday in which he claimed that the trip from Trump Tower down to 100 Centre Street was ‘surreal.’ Trump wouldn’t know how to use a word like ‘surreal’ or even know that such a word exists.
The more that everyone keeps saying this indictment will boost Trump’s standing in the polls, the more I hope such judgements are correct. I can just see Trump getting up at a presidential debate against Joe next year and telling the audience that we still don’t know what’s on the Hunter Biden laptop.