Exhausted Trump Repels Al Smith Dinner With Terrible Low-Energy Speech. Sad!
We don't care that POLITICO thinks he 'WON THE DAY.'
The annual Al Smith Dinner is one of those highbrow events that no one outside of every green room in New York and Washington could possibly give a crap about. But every four years, the two major party presidential candidates drag their butts to it, fire off some gently ribbing humor at their opponents and themselves, prostrate themselves before whatever cardinal or bishop is presiding, and then we get on with our lives.
Kamala Harris skipped Thursday night’s dinner in New York City, sending a short video in her place and becoming the first Democratic nominee to nope out of the even since Walter Mondale in 1984.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s handlers propped his dessicated husk upright, squeezed him into a tuxedo, and shot him full of whatever stimulants he needed to stay awake long enough to deliver his speech to a roomful of Catholics and movers and shakers and Catholic movers and shakers. How did he do?
“Tendentiously,” according to The Washington Post, which somehow let that little bit of opinion sneak into a straightforward news story about Trump’s appearance. (Is everyone okay over there?) The speech was almost 30 minutes of the usual bullshit, though Trump seemed to stick mostly to his prepared notes as he fired off quite a few “below-the-belt” cracks. Which, come on, Washington Post, all his cracks tend to be below the belt.
Trump mostly played his old hits, with a mixture of timely sneering about wokism and transgender people. He could not mention Barack Obama without mentioning his middle name Hussein. He mocked Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff for admitting to having had an affair during his first marriage, which is a little like a Cro-Magnon mocking someone’s intelligence. He knocked Harris for using a teleprompter — that old chestnut! — despite having opened his speech complaining that the dinner’s organizers did not allow him to use a teleprompter.
He also told Chuck Schumer, who spent most of Trump’s speech sitting sourly with his arms folded and a look on his face like the waiter had just served him a ham, that if Harris loses, Schumer still has a chance to become the first woman president.
To no one’s surprise, Trump admitted on “Fox & Friends” on Friday that a couple of Fox writers had helped him write the speech. So that explains its total lack of funniness.
We wonder if Trump needed stimulants to make it through the dinner because he has been backing out of events and interviews left and right. POLITICO reports that it is due to “exhaustion.” Sad!
In a conversation earlier this week, when describing why an interview hadn’t come together just yet, a Trump adviser told The Shade Room producers that Trump was “exhausted and refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
To make up for a lack of a Trump interview this close to the election, those two people say Trump-supporting rapper WAKA FLOCKA FLAME was offered up as an alternative.
Really bringing out the A-list celebrities in the final weeks of the campaign, aren’t they?
In recent days, Trump has canceled interviews with NBC, CNBC, and “60 Minutes.” He also canceled an appearance at an NRA event, though given his recent experiences with assassination attempts, that decision may have been less about being tired and more about not wanting to be in a room full of heavily armed lunatics.
The interviews he has stuck with are with friendly outlets like “Fox & Friends” and Dan “Meathead” Bongino’s podcast. His campaign seems to be keeping him away from anyone who might challenge him even a tiny bit, perhaps because he’s too tired to handle tough questions and also because his incoherence has even the mainstream press noticing that holy shit, that dude is old and undergoing cognitive decline at a rapid rate.
Trump famously believes that every human is born with a finite amount of energy that they then spend their entire life using up. Kind of like those batteries in your carbon monoxide detector that you probably haven’t checked in a while. If Trump is correct (we know, but humor us here), does that mean that his own batteries are running down?
Well, that is how it looks to The Washington Post, which on Friday suggested Trump’s advanced age is catching up with him, much like it caught up with Joe Biden and forced him to drop out of the presidential race. And furthermore, petard, meet hoist:
Thanks in part to the efforts of Trump’s allies and campaign team earlier this year to suggest that Trump’s then-opponent Biden was incapable of fulfilling his duties as president, age and mental fitness has been an undercurrent to the 2024 contest. It’s now dragging down Trump.
And yet despite all this, despite the rambling and bored delivery of the speech, the context of his alleged exhaustion, POLITICO on Thursday night also declared that Trump had WON THE DAY in their daily “Which presidential candidate WON THE DAY” feature. No, seriously, it’s a real thing:
At a moment when voters say they are eager to learn more about Harris, she instead left the stage to Trump.
Harris actually spent Thursday at a rally in Wisconsin, where she earned herself a viral video moment that we are betting will eventually get her way, way more earned social media than Trump’s humorless speech to a semi-obscure group of rich Catholics in New York.
THIS ONE.
She sent a video. It was … well, they should have let the feral 25-year-olds running her online comms write this one too. The best we can say about Trump is that he did not let out a fart audible enough to be picked up by the microphone.
[POLITICO / POLITICO / WaPo / WaPo]
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Of course Cardinal Dolan invited Trump. Afterr all, he is famous for protecting sex offenders.
Reposting from last night:
The NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER rips Timothy Cardinal Dolan a new one for inviting tfg to the Al Smith Dinner.
https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/editorial/editorial-cardinal-dolans-al-smith-dinner-disappointment-misdirected
…
The sin here is not that Kamala Harris had the good sense to reply, "No thank you, I'm previously engaged." The real scandal is that the good Catholic cardinal of the great city of New York would not have the courage to say, this year, that the current Republican candidate is a walking example of so much the Catholic Church finds repugnant in today's politics that he would suspend the normal invitations.
The real controversy is that an event that touts its history of raising funds for society's most needy is going to host someone who is one of the culture's greatest threats to that kind of caring. The real outrage is that Trump, given the public nature and extent of his repulsive record, should be invited to a fundraiser for an organization, Catholic Charities, that has long worked in the trenches to save and transform lives on society's farthest margins. It is tragic that the guest of honor this year will be someone whose personal example and policy wishes are in a collision course with the principles of Catholic social teaching.
We are triply disappointed, Cardinal Dolan, that in the name of the church and its witness to the wider culture, you did not suspend the norm this year and invite someone worthy of the event's cause. We are disappointed you didn't have the courage to stand up to Trump, a looming threat to the democratic ideals that allow the church to host such a high-profile public gathering.