You Know That Thing When The Baby Won't Stop Screaming Unless You Put The TV On A Certain Channel?
The theme of the day is that Donald Trump is losing it, what little of it he had left to lose. In response, his sycophants are doing everything they can just to calm Senile Grandpa Big Macs down, to make him feel better, to contain the terrified rage emanating from the empty White House bunker that is Trump's brain cavity.
The Daily Beast has a hilarious news bite: The Trump campaign is spending lots of money running TV ads in DC — where Trump has zero chance of gaining any new voters — just to make Trump feel less angry and sad about his loser lot in life, because they know he will see them on the TV, because all he does is watch TV.
It comforts him, OK?!
Oh sure, they say they are also doing it to make congressional Republicans feel better, but that's not really the audience of one this is about.
[T]he Trump campaign has spent slightly more than $400,000 on cable news ads in the Washington, D.C., area, buying time largely on Fox News but with some smaller buys on CNN and MSNBC as well, according to filings with the Federal Communications Commission. [...] The purchases have no real shot of moving D.C., Maryland, or Virginia into the Trump column.
But they might make him feel better.
The Trump campaign said the ad buys were an attempt to reinvigorate and reassure the president's supporters in the nation's capital. "We want members of Congress and our DC-based surrogates to see the ads so they know our strong arguments for President Trump and against Joe Biden," wrote Tim Murtaugh, the campaign's communications director, in an email on Monday.
Fuck off, whatever.
But two knowledgeable sources—one a Trump campaign adviser, the other an individual close to the president—said the D.C.-area ads had another purpose as well:
To make him feel better.
This is the most pathetic thing we have ever heard today, and we hear 50 pathetic things about Donald Trump by breakfast each morning. They're having to put ads on the TV to settle the president down, not only because the president's self-esteem is thatlow, but also because he watches that much TV and therefore they know he will see it.
So they're just fucking with him, for their own benefit.
With Trump stuck in that milieu of anxiety, his re-election team is hoping that the ads may put him at ease that his formidable political machine is hard at work defending him and attacking his enemies. Trump is a voracious consumer of cable news, and—the thinking goes—is likely to see the spots pop up between segments of his favorite shows.
Oh my god this is so sad. The Daily Beast adds that they are trying to settle down Trump's outbursts when he sees a mean ad, like one of those great ones from the Lincoln Project, because they know he sees those too, because of the constant TV he watches. (The Beast reports that the only reason the Lincoln Project is buying ads in the DC market is to fuck with Trump. The new one out today is brutal.)
Trump has been losing his shit for weeks about his polling numbers, going as far as to lash out at campaign manager Brad Parscale's neckbeard and threatening to sue it. Yesterday, there was that poll from CNN that showed Trump losing nationwide by 14 points. That's the biggest gap we've seen, but as New York Times pollster Nate Cohn points out, it's following a certain trend, where Trump's numbers are plopping into the toilet at a violent pace, while Biden extends his lead to an average of more than 10 points:
That basically gives us a full 'wave' of the major national polls for the first time since 3/15-4/15, and Biden's l… https://t.co/58yVPrUr1X— Nate Cohn (@Nate Cohn) 1591611277.0
He really is losing. Bigly.
Of course, the insurmountable problem the Trump campaign has is that the candidate is Donald Trump, the stupidest, most loathed president in American history. He is the problem.
In response to the CNN poll showing him 14 points down, Trump decided he was going to hire notoriously wrong idiot pollster John McLaughlin to UNSKEW THE POLLS, because he can't handle the truth. (The truth is much like "stairs" in that regard.) It's funny because McLaughlin's biggest claim to fame, as far as we can tell, is that he mis-called the Virginia race between Eric Cantor and Dave Brat by over 40 points, back in 2014. (We have a whole post on McLaughlin coming very soon!)
Meanwhile, along the theme of Trump just losing his shit at everybody who treats him with cruelty by telling him the truth, Vanity Fair has a new Gabe Sherman special, about how Trump hates Prince Jared The Dumb now, and also still Parscale:
Trump is malignantly crazy about the bad poll numbers," a former West Wing official said. "He's going to broom Kushner and [Brad] Parscale—the numbers are not getting better," a Republican close to the campaign said.
Bless their hearts.
On the other hand, Trump did a roundtable on Monday and called Jared "my star," so maybe things are fine. (Jared was claiming he's fixed criminal justice. Aren't you glad that's solved now?) Or maybe Trump really hates Jared.
Oh well, don't care. Back to Vanity Fair and President Dumbfuck:
Over the weekend, Trump called around to New York friends and outside advisers in hopes they would validate Trump's belief that the polls are wrong. "He's asking people to agree with him that the polls are biased. But no one is telling him what he wants to hear," said a Republican briefed on the calls.
Sad.
Even congressional Republicans — you know, the ones who are supposed to feel better because the Trump campaign is buying TV ads to show them in the DC market! — know what's up. Sherman reports that Mitch McConnell last week "told Republican senators that they couldn't abandon Trump," which is revealing to us, because it tells us that at least some significant number of them want to cut Trump loose and save themselves.
It's really fuckin' bad for Trump, is our point. You just hate to see it.
(Also in that VF article? General James Mattis calling Trump a "proto-neofascist." Yep!)
At press time, the president was tweeting conspiracy theories saying maybe the 75-year-old man Buffalo police knocked to the ground and gave a concussion to for looking at them was an ANTIFA PLANT. Because of course he is tweeting that.
Guess there aren't any shiny happy Trump ads on the TV right now to entertain the baby. Buy some more ads, Brad!
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