After Politico reporter Eugene Daniels got wind that Donald Trump’s campaign was privately explaining interview cancellations were due to their candidates’ “exhaustion,” the campaign naturally denied it and said Trump was “running laps” around Kamala Harris. But there’s no doubt about the cancellations themselves. He was scheduled to talk to the National Rifle Association in Georgia, but it was called off. He has backed out of interviews with 60 Minutes, with NBC Philadelphia, with CNBC’s Squawk Box, and with The Shade Room, a site with a large Black audience.
This follows on his terrible debate performance and refusal to risk a repeat. It follows on his bizarre 39-minutes of trance dancing at a rally in Oaks, Pennsylvania, and his horrible car wreck of an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago.
When he has done interviews, they’ve been with friendly outlets, but they still haven’t gone well. Last Sunday, he raised eyebrows during an interview with Fox News when he avoided a question about having a peaceful election by saying, “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics,” and arguing that “it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by [the] National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” It’s unclear how Trump, as a mere candidate for office, could order the national guard or military to attack people on the left, but it gives some insight into how he plans to deal with critics if reelected.
On Friday morning, he went on Fox & Friends and seemed similarly dismissive about the First Amendment and the people’s right to free speech.
Before the former president left the show’s signature couch, he said he plans to meet Friday with [Rupert] Murdoch, the founder of Fox Corp. and the company’s longtime executive chair, and voice his displeasure with ads the network airs that are critical of him — and bringing on a myriad of guests on shows who are not supportive of him.
“I’m going to see Rupert Murdoch,” the former president continued. “I don’t know if he’s thrilled that I say it … and I’m going to tell him something very simple … don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days and don’t put on … they’re horrible people that come on and lie. I’m going to say, ‘Rupert, please do it this way.’”
It’s not just Trump trying this nonsense. On Thursday, a federal judge had to step in to stop Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida’s threats to criminally prosecute local TV stations “if they run a political ad in support of a referendum that would repeal the state’s six-week abortion ban.” This idea that political officeholders and even political candidates can silence their opponents’ right to run political advertising is new, but then the right’s full unapologetic embrace of fascism is new, too.
It’s clear that the American electorate is seriously considering fascism as an option, but I don’t think the prospect of censorship is what is tempting them. It’s not a winning message for the last three weeks of the campaign. Trump is seriously off message much of the time, and he can’t answer hard questions. This is reason enough to shield him from interviews, whether friendly or not. But Trump’s energy level has been suspect for some time. In July 2020, he responded to his pollster Tony Fabrizio warning him the American people were tired of chaos by snapping, “They’re fucking tired? Well I’m fucking tired and fatigued too.” And we all noticed that he could not remain awake during his trial for fraud in New York, in which he was convicted of 34 felony violations of state law.
The man is in the home stretch, and he needs a nap.
All the more reason for Harris to continue hammering low energy Trump while getting in front of as many non-voters and Trump voters as possible.
Having worked (in minor capacities) on various election campaigns over the years, I can confirm that “exhausted…tired & fatigued” is not how you want, or more importantly, want your standard bearer to feel as you’re entering the final 2-3 week stretch of the campaign. Most dangerously, it can lead to cascading errors.
Harris just needs to keep driving this point home, every single day, since that’s probably the only way it might get disseminated to the larger audience by the mainstream media. The media certainly are not going to report, of their own volition, on Trump’s exhaustion and incoherency, They have to be forced to do it by virtue of reporting on the Harris statements. It certainly does not appear that Trump is planning on making a sprint to the finish. Hell, I’m not sure he’s capable of personally powering a wheelchair to the finish line! He is going to depend on his wide swath of media lackeys to paint a “don’t fucking believe your lying eyes, just listen to us” scenario in these last two weeks. He has no plans to do anything but rallies and friendly interviews. Every instance when he has stepped outside those venues during this campaign he has magnificently and unfailingly stepped on his own dick every single time. His campaign has never had a plan or a strategy, apart from persistently throwing gasoline on the collective racism of a significant minority in the country, hoping that will carry him over the top. And the shitter to all this is that there is a not insignificant possibility that it might just fucking work out for him. That is indicative at just how dire the situation is in this country, even if Harris wins in a what appears to all of us to be a landslide. Even if the universe overwhelmingly smiles on me, and I’m given another 25-30 revolutions around the sun, I fear that this cancer we are dealing with will be here for the duration of my remaining time. If one looks at history, it seems to be an endemic situation in the vast majority of cultures over time. It certainly is here in the U.S. If that is a reality, it makes me very sad about the long term future of humanity. We have been fighting this fight since the beginning of recorded history.
Even though he was not talking about this specific sort of situation, Walt Kelly, famous author of the Pogo comic strip, had it so right.
I could not agree more.
The cold comfort is that… every nation/empire in the world has had to deal with this cancer. As you say, despite it all, Trump might win. We are not special. Very bad things will happen if not now, then someday and if I see it happen in real time and experience it, that is a sort of privilege – to know more fully what it is to live and to die as a human.
I’ve been to Russia a few times. Life isn’t great there for normal people and it hasn’t gotten any better in recent years. Yet they live.
Some historical context:
“The biggest obstacle to democracy in the US is the delusion that we are a democracy….Did we beat Italy to Fascism by over a century? Has Hitler in his treatment of the Jew caught up with our Founding Fathers’ treatment of the Negro? Has Mussolini’s treatment of the Ethiopian yet reached the hoodlum savagery that marked our democratic consideration for the Americans, or, if you know them better by their other name, the Indians?”
–Fr. Ed Dowling, SJ addressing the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Kansas City, MO, May 12, 1938.
P. S. Fr. Dowling is perhaps best known for his work as spiritual adviser to Bill W. in the early years of AA.
If democracy is a delusion, why are guys like Peter Thiel trying to do away with the illusion? Does the illusion not serve the interests of the wealthy?
Good and legitimate question. Fr. Dowling was speaking in 1938, when 70-90% of African-Americans lived under Jim Crow and effectively had not voting rights and when the near-extermination of Native Americans had been completed within the living memory of most Americans then alive.
Fr. Dowling (whose biography I’m reading) also had a passionate interest in democracy in general, and proportional representation (e.g., ranked choice voting) in particular. He considered any electoral system that resulted in the systematic exclusion of large groups of people—whether on racial, ethnic, geographic, or ideological grounds—from elected office (as in his native St. Louis where Democrats held 100% of local offices despite Republicans, Socialists, and Independents totaling roughly 50% of the electorate) to be, in some real sense, undemocratic.