Trump says he will hold a news conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday.
nytimes.com
Donald J. Trump plans to hold a “general news conference” on Thursday afternoon at his private club and home, Mar-a-Lago, the first such event he has held in months.
Mr. Trump announced the event on his website, Truth Social, on Thursday morning.
It would be hilarious if he was dumping Vance from the ticket, but I have a hunch this will be something racist - maybe he’s going to accuse Kamala of not being American and we’re going to have to deal with a whole Birtherism 2.0 “movement”
AKA BM 2.0
Oh, shit…
Not Number Two.
Damn - I totally blew the opportunity for BM #2
😭
Whatever you do, don't blow a BM.
I suspect he's dropping out on some pretense, now that the campaign stopped being fun. If there is any chance in hell he could get a deal to get his sentence(s) commuted, I think he'd do it in a heartbeat.
His dropping out seems very unlikely. Not impossible by any means, but unlikely. He doesn't seem like the person who's capable of admitting defeat, especially considering his legal troubles
I agree, and I think we're working from the same priors. I just have a funny little hunch.
Heh, I get it. Let's see what happens – I'd certainly enjoy the chaos that Trump dropping out would cause. Republicans would go fucking nuts
It would have a pleasing symmetry with the headache Biden has caused with the old guard in the Dem party that wanted him out.
More likely than him "dropping out" would be him saying that there would be no Republican candidate for president "because the election is rigged!!!"
I could see this also, a bad faith withdrawal and pivot to inciting further insurrection. My gut tells me that some kind of historical first is coming down the pipe.
Could use it as an excuse for another coup attempt
I think if Trump was projected to lose by an embarrassing margin - I'm talking like 75-25 - he might prefer trying to weasel out of having a legitimate devastating loss on official record. That's not happening though with how big his base is, and with the electoral college being the way it is he is still probably favoured to win - though yes the polls are slipping.
Regardless, I can't see him dropping out now.
No way. Trump would just use that as "proof" that the election was rigged. In his mind there is no way people wouldn't vote him into office, so any scenario where he loses, his narcissism would force him to claim there was election malfeasance .
You're probably right.
He is still in quite a bit of legal jeopardy. I highly doubt he would drop out knowing that some lawsuits have only been held at bay due to the position of power a presidential candidate and the godhead of a cult has.
Not that I believe this is the case AT ALL, but to further this line of thought:
If he was dropping out, it would be because he's already got the party machine going on a new (guaranteed) nominee who would have already promised to pardon trump (and this promise would be assured by some damning fact trump could use as an assurance)
He won't. The only reason he is running this time is to stay out of jail though I think.
If he drops out, I guarantee he's going to be doing a runner shortly after.
It's more likely he'll use this event to set up things for a civil war
I could easily see that. Right now the only thing I'm not expecting is for the next couple of months to be uneventful.
0% chance. Narcissists cannot admit defeat.
Can he dump Vance at the moment though? The RNC has already voted and he's already been certified as the VP candidate.
I know Vance could step down and Trump could appoint a new VP, but I'm not sure that Trump has the ability to "fire" him.
Trump would be the type to announce he's firing Vance so he can be The Strong Man™ but it would in reality have to be Vance stepping down. It all works out to be the same result though.
That's never stopped him before
I'm sure it'll be tactful, thought-provoking, revealing, humorous, witty, intelligent, factual, and memorized word-for-word to be recited ala Churchill, JFK, MLK et al for centuries to come.
PS - 'shrooms for sale! DM for info.
No lies even!
Prediction: he's going to announce he's selling golden Trump brand dildos so everyone can go fuck themselves.
"golden" dildos, at $1000. But if you opt for the "I've always supported you, and believe all your lies" version for $100,000 you can get the ultra special trump bucks dildo, modeled off your savior trump's dick itself*. (*Note: all special versions are the same as the regular, any and all payments are recurring subscriptions and cannot be cancelled except in person)
Why is mine tarnishing? Is this even real gold?
It's crusted with diamond dust!
Golden couches.
With a special pocket for glove and lube storage.
Not too many comments actually make me laugh out loud, thanks for the laugh!
Nah, with J.ust D.umb Vance now on board, it'll probably be a new "Freedom Couch" sold exclusively at Bob's Discount Furniture.
"Why aren't you all paying attention to me anymore?"
Realistically, no matter what the topic is, this is the core problem.
My diaper's full and I need changing! 🧷
Harris should hold a town hall at the exact same time....
Is it to claim that he has really important news about Kamala’s birth certificate and he’ll be sharing it at a later date?
But what about the long form birth certificate? /s
It’s not October yet
Rant and rave about nonsense for an hour (given)
Announce that all "bogus" charges against you have been dropped
In a completely unrelated event, announce that you're dropping out of the race
Fuck off to Moscow forever
He’s going to announce that he’s dumping JD “Couch Fucking” Vance and his new VP pick is Vladimir “Genocidal Clown” Putin.
Adina Ross gave him an Elon so now Trump is gonna let the briber have Vances spot
I’d love for Kamala to sue him for defamation.
I still remember hearing that scum sucker Trump talk about wanting to tighten the libel laws before he was president, obviously so people couldn't accurately talk about him as president.
He needs to pay his bill from EJC suit. Maybe with an actual consequence followed through he will learn to shut his mouth.
I see some people saying he's going to drop out.
Almost having his head turn into pink mist plus slipping in the polls. He can't take it anymore.
That will never happen. His free life depends on him winning and using the DOJ to wipe away the remaining cases against him.
"Judge" Cannon has been buying him time so he can win and erase everything, but she can't drop the cases for him.
That and whatever deal he has with Putin will have him stuck with this. He does in fact want a Trump Moscow hotel after all.
His ego would never allow it
To protect himself from polling behind and losing to a coloured women though?
That's not how his brain works. From his point of view he's always winning. It's like a law of nature for him. That's where all the fake facts come from. If the facts say he lost, the facts must be wrong
Why is this news?
It isn't, but it drives clicks.
I'm calling my shot: by the end of September, he drops the hard R in public.
Maybe it’s finally JFK back from the dead to anoint Trump King of America
Or are we not doing that anymore?
JFK is gonna hold off cause he doesn't wanna run against his nephew
And he's going charge everyone to attend. Just ignore the shithead. Why does it have to be on his own private venue? Just do it in a McDonald's; it's basically his second home
Let's hope he is dropping out of the race because of mental health issues.
I used to watch his bullshit rallies because he'd come up with some funny shit sometimes. I tried to get through that presser, and I was just zoning out. boring AF, from an old, tired has-been.
Hes going to abandon Couch Fucker in the middle of Michigan.
NYT:
Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference In an hourlong exchange with reporters, the former president criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for not doing the same, insulted her intelligence and boasted about the size of his rallies.
17m ago Donald Trump stands behind a lectern in a gold-colored room. Four U.S. flags are behind him, and a group journalists stand in front of him. Former President Donald J. Trump held a hastily scheduled news conference on Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.Doug Mills/The New York Times Aug. 8, 2024Updated 5:56 p.m. ET
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Former President Donald J. Trump tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself back into a national conversation that Vice President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding an hourlong news conference in which he assailed Ms. Harris’s intelligence and taunted her for failing to field questions similarly from journalists.
Throughout the event, held in the main room at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump assailed the state of the U.S. economy, described the country as in mortal danger if he did not win the presidential election and falsely described his departure from the White House — which was preceded by his refusal to concede his election loss in November 2020 and the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of his supporters — as a “peaceful” transfer of power.
Mr. Trump also flashed frustration when asked about the size of Ms. Harris’s crowds while boasting about the attendance at his own rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and insisted that the group of hundreds that stormed the Capitol was relatively small. But he fixated on the size of the crowd that he initially gathered on the national mall, making comparisons to — and declaring it was larger than — the one drawn by Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Mr. Trump said. “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, same number of people, if not — we had more.”
The Trump team has been looking for ways to interrupt Ms. Harris’s momentum as she has quickly consolidated the Democratic Party behind her and risen in the polls. The goal of Mr. Trump’s news conference, which he announced on Thursday morning on his social media site, was to highlight that Ms. Harris has yet to hold a news conference of her own or to give an unscripted interview to the news media.
It was a point he made during his event, arguing that she had avoided doing so because “she’s not smart enough.”
Mr. Trump insisted that he was “not complaining” about the Democratic Party’s late decision to replace President Biden atop the ticket — as he proceeded to lodge a litany of such complaints. He has called the move to replace Mr. Biden with Ms. Harris “unconstitutional,” but when challenged about what section of the U.S. Constitution would prohibit the change in the ticket, he acknowledged that perhaps it was not actually unconstitutional.
At the same time, he said that while the move was unfair to Mr. Biden, it had not affected his campaign. “I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all,” Mr. Trump said.
When a reporter asked about how muted his public schedule has been over the last few weeks, including this past week, Mr. Trump snapped, “What a stupid question.”
Mr. Trump is set to appear in Montana on Friday to help a Republican Senate candidate, Tim Sheehy, who is facing off against Senator Jon Tester in one of the election’s most competitive races.
“What are we doing right now?” Mr. Trump said, citing his schedule of radio interviews and adding of Ms. Harris, “She’s not doing a news conference.”
His wide-ranging remarks were sometimes meandering. Mr. Trump mused that the legal system was unfair to him, described the quick recovery of his ear after last month’s assassination attempt (“I’m a fast healer”) and defended the clemency grants he issued to violent felons and high-level drug dealers as president, when asked how they were different from his characterization of Ms. Harris’s time as a prosecutor in California.
Mr. Trump seemed most uncomfortable when asked specific questions about abortion policy — the issue he views as the biggest political danger for Republicans. He refused to say how he would vote on Florida’s abortion referendum in November, which asks whether voters will support a state constitutional amendment to protect and expand abortion rights.
Mr. Trump instead resorted to his go-to evasion, saying he would be holding a news conference at a later date to announce his position.
When asked if he would direct the Food and Drug Administration to revoke access to abortion pills, he seemed not to understand the question and provided an incoherent answer that did not address it.
“So, you can do things that will be, would supplement, absolutely. And those things are pretty open and humane,” Mr. Trump said. “But you have to be able to have a vote. And all I want to do is give everybody a vote. And the votes are taking place right now as we speak.”
Much of the news conference was consumed by familiar remarks. Mr. Trump laid out an apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic rule — focusing his attacks especially on the economy, crime and immigration.
He also promised that a depression on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s would result if Ms. Harris won election. This is also a recycled refrain, one that Mr. Trump used against Mr. Biden in the 2020 campaign.
Mr. Trump declined to elaborate on his comments last week, delivered to a group of Black journalists, in which he questioned Ms. Harris’s ethnicity.
Asked how he could claim, as he did to those journalists, that a woman who attended a historically Black university was only recently claiming to be Black, Mr. Trump said: “Well, you’ll have to ask her that question, because she’s the one that said it. I didn’t say it. So you’ll have to ask her. And I very much appreciate that question, but you’ll have to ask her.”
He added that she was “very disrespectful” to both aspects of her heritage, her Indian mother and her Jamaican father, without explaining what that meant.
But later he tiptoed toward identity politics as he described some of her appeal.
“She’s a woman,” he said. “She represents certain groups of people.”
Taylor Robinson contributed research.
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/us/politics/trump-press-conference-mar-a-lago.html
It's fun seeing him spin out.
Washington Post:
Opinion What Trump chooses to obscure reveals the truth Karen TumultyAugust 8, 2024 at 5:13 p.m. EDT
Former president Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) “Unhinged” has become a shopworn word in the years since Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower. But the former president’s hour-long news conference on Thursday afternoon from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida might have been a new personal best.
It’s clear what is going on. Trump, who only three weeks ago thought he had this election in the bag, is freaking out over the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket.
Trump sees what we all see: the euphoria that has overtaken Harris’s party, the tens of thousands who are flocking to her inaugural swing through battleground states, the torrent of poll numbers that show the race is suddenly tied. “We were given Joe Biden, and now we’re given somebody else,” he said, adding — not convincingly — “I think, frankly, I’d rather be running against somebody else.”
But rather than framing a sharp and coherent case against Harris, which his strategists so desperately want him to do, the former president on Thursday veered from grievance to grievance like a pinball. As he took questions from the media, desperation was practically oozing from his pores. And without the cheers of a rally crowd punctuating his rambling monologue, the incoherence of what he had to say was all the more apparent.
Follow Karen Tumulty
How much Trump misses and needs those throngs of supporters was clear. Again and again, he boasted — lied, actually — about their size. “Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump said, claiming that he drew more people to the National Mall than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did in 1963 when the civil rights leader gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He lamented, falsely, that the numbers that Harris is drawing have been inflated by the media.
Yet Trump has been strangely absent lately from the stage he loves, and his most recent appearances have been disasters. He delivered a racist rant about Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists convention on July 31, and days later attacked Georgia’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, during a rally in Atlanta.
This week, his only rally is on Friday in deep-red Montana. Asked why he is doing so little campaigning, Trump first dismissed that as a “stupid question” and then claimed it is “because I’m leading by a lot and because of letting their convention go through a lot, I’m doing tremendous amounts of taping here. We have commercials that are at a level I don’t think that anybody’s ever done before.”
Really? In the first five days of this month, Trump and his allies spent about $16.5 million on advertising, according to AdImpact. That compares with about $23 million by President Joe Biden, Harris and their allies. Since early March, the ad-tracking firm estimates, the Democratic side has spent nearly three times as much as Trump’s has.
The truth about Trump and his fixations is often made clearest by what he chooses to lie about. He’s scared, because he is running behind — in polls and in fundraising. And he isn’t at all sure what to do about it.
And, oh, there was some actual news in this news conference: Trump proposed three dates next month for debates with Harris. As of this writing, Harris has agreed to one of them, on Sept. 10, sponsored by ABC News. That is the same arrangement previously agreed to by Trump and Biden.
There have been many unpredictable twists in this campaign, and surely there will be more to come. For now, however, the biggest question is whether Trump, a master of driving events, can climb out of the back seat in which he finds himself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/08/trump-news-conference-harris-grievances/
Cool maybe he can have a heart attack in front of cameras!
How'd that work out?
New laxative recommendations?
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