About Trump's Stupid, Pathetic Presser And His Crowds 'Bigger Than MLK's'
So anyway, Kamala's still doing great.
Donald Trump held a press conference on short notice Thursday afternoon at his Florida retirement trash palace, ostensibly for the purpose of announcing that he has graciously deigned to debate Democratic nominee Kamala Harris at the previously scheduled September 10 debate on ABC News, which he had tried to weasel out of. That took like 20 seconds, and then for another hour or so he took questions that nobody could hear, including Trump some of the time, because there were no mics on the press.
Did we mention that he lied constantly and loudly, repeating claims he’s made again and again even though they’ve been debunked again and again? Haha, we don't really need to even say that, do we?
Here’s the full video, cued up to the beginning, where Trump explained that America is at this very moment in the greatest danger in our history, because the economy is about to collapse (it isn’t), crime is out of control (it isn’t), and we’re “very close to a world war” (we aren’t). He never stopped lying after that, although ABC News did confirm he agreed to the September debate. (That said, in his remarks he got the network wrong, saying it was NBC News.)
There were so many lies packed into the presser that we won’t even attempt to cover ‘em all; the Harris campaign put together a hilarious press release that hit most of the big ones, sending it out with a heading that quoted “dril,” the wonderfully weird Twitter shitposter, and announcing that “Donald Trump took a break from taking a break to put on some pants and host a press conference public meltdown.”
The rest of the press release/fact check is funnier than a roomful of Donald Trumps hopped up on Diet Mountain Dew could ever hope to be. That frees us to hit a few of the chief themes of the hour-long lie conference here:
Trump Is Really Rattled
Trump looked and sounded far more paranoid and unhinged even than usual, starting with his opening claims that if Kamala Harris becomes president, the apocalypse will be upon us. His comments about Tim Walz were particularly bizarre; not only were they untrue, they were just plain difficult to make sense of.
She's a radical Left person at a level that nobody's seen. She picked a radical Left man that is — he's got things done that, he has positions that are just — it's not even possible to believe that they exist. He is going for things that nobody has 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. He doesn’t mind people coming in from prisons, and neither does she, I guess.
All those worlds! And the things that nobody has ever heard of!
Trump also dug deep into the misogyny bucket, insisting as he has before that Harris is essentially an incompetent halfwit who is “not smart enough to hold a press conference, and I’m sorry, we need smart people to lead this country.” Sounds like a surefire strategy to win over women voters.
Oh Boy, Crowd Size Again!
It’s almost pathetic how transparently insecure Trump was about the fact that lately, Harris’s crowds have been bigger than his. An inordinate portion of the presser was devoted to Trump’s insistence that the press is falsely hiding the size of his crowds while inflating Harris’s. He claimed that Harris had only 2,000 people at her appearance in Detroit Wednesday; the campaign said there were 15,000, although Yr Editrix, who was there, thought it looked like it was more like 8,000. Hilariously, though, in the course of a few minutes, Trump said it was only “fifteen hundred” people, and then a moment later, merely a thousand.
Nobody's had crowds like I have, and you know that. And when she gets 1,000 people and everybody starts jumping. You know that if I had 1,000 people you would say, people would say, “That's the end of his campaign.”
Trump also insisted that he has enormous crowds everywhere he goes, claiming that 150,000 people attended a May rally in New Jersey. That’s the same rally that Trump previously claimed was attended by 100,000, although Fox News said it was more like 30,000 people. And the town itself, as you can see in that hilarious Wonkette link in the last sentence, explained that its “80,000” number was everybody who’d been in town that summer Saturday. Oh, town.
Along similar lines, Trump said that a rally in South Carolina was attended by 88,000, although in truth, he had actually appeared for a few minutes at this year’s Clemson-South Carolina foot-the-ball game, an annual spectacle that did in fact draw 88,000 fans. Of football. But he did walk out onto the field with Gov. Henry McMaster for a few minutes, and he waved to the crowd without speaking.
And Trump fans say Tim Walz lied about his record!
Bigger Than Jesus, Or At Least MLK
The most ridiculous lie involved a bullshit claim that was new to me, but it turns out is an embellishment on a lie Trump has been telling since 2022. Back then, he insisted that the crowd for his “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2001, right before the invasion of the US Capitol, was the biggest crowd he’d ever seen, although he didn’t give a number that first time. He also explained that nobody can now verify that, because “They have censored the pictures.” You know, they.
Yesterday, Trump lied that there were more people at that January 6 rally than at the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“I've spoken to the biggest crowds, nobody spoken to bigger crowds than me. 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, the same number of people. If not, we had more.”
Trump was so excited about the crowd that he didn’t even bother reciting the one line Republicans think the speech was about.
We won’t get into the comparison of historical photos of the 1963 march and the 2021 mob the way several media outlets did (King’s quarter of a million person audience was easily five times the highest estimates of Trump’s crowd), but we do want to applaud Buzzfeed for its angle on the story, headlined “These Pictures Show The Huge Difference Between Donald Trump And Martin Luther King Jr.'s Crowds.” The article had contrasting photos of the crowds, all right, showing King’s was far larger, but it mostly showed the two events from closer angles: people in 1963 holding signs calling for jobs and voting rights, and people in 2001 attacking cops. 1963: a multiracial crowd singing and smiling; 2021: Screaming and rage. Also some more crowd size photos.
The Usual Bullshit
Trump also repeated a lot of the crap he’s said before, reminding Americans that he’s a terrible liar. Or in one case, just terrible, since he once again got excited at how much North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un loves and respects him.
With no pushback from the reporters in the room, Trump lied again that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade simply did what everyone in both parties wanted by leaving a fundamental right up to the whims of (gerrymandered) state leaders. He also predicted that abortion wouldn’t be much of an issue in the election since now everyone is happy about Dobbs, and repeated his weird lie that Democrats want to allow post-birth abortions. (There’s no such thing, unless he means school shootings.)
He once again insisted that any Jews who vote for Democrats “should have their head examined,” that “nobody died” on January 6, and even that there was a “peaceful transfer of power” following the 2020 election. He once more insisted that he never ever agreed with the crowds chanting “lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton (of course he did, and he said it several times, in both 2016 and 2020), although he did add a new take on Clinton, suggesting that he respected her more than Kamala, who’s dumb. Gross!
In conclusion, Trump lied a lot more but we’re done, enough, not worth our time.
[Harris-Walz press release / BuzzFeed / Post and Courier / USA Today]
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OT*: Had someone say some real misogynist bullshit today at work, questioning my "rapid rise" to where I am now. Rather than removing his testicles via his nostrils, I've chosen to pour a new cup of coffee and go back to yesterday's Taylor Swift post to re-listen to "The Man". Fuck that guy, I got here because I'm fucking fabulous.
*not really OT, come to think of it, because misogyny is PAB's whole schtick. Well, that and racism.
𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐲 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐨𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝𝐬
It's true. I have it on good authority that Walz is a frequent visitor in both Narnia and Middle Earth.