Nov.16

electoral-vote.com

Dem 50

Ties 1

GOP 49

He's Baaaaaaaack!

As expected, Donald Trump walked up to a podium at Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening and announced that he will be a 2024 candidate for President of the United States. Here's the FEC form, just so you can see for yourself.

If you would like to see the announcement, you can view it here:

We can't imagine why you would want to do so, however. Maybe if you're Catholic and you need to do penance, we guess. Or if you're really into S&M and the whips just aren't getting it done anymore. Or you are playing a drinking game where you take a shot of Baijiu every time someone mispronounces "China."

Whether you watch it or not, the fact is that it was a standard Trump performance. That means:

• Braggadocio: If you believed everything said in the speech, then the Trump presidency was the greatest era in American history, with the finest leadership, the best economy, the strongest foreign policy, the highest standard of living and the happiest citizens that the nation has ever seen. Actually, he said that the economy was the best that any country in the world has ever seen. The 1950s and 1990s might have something to say about that. Mansa Musa I, Julius Caesar, George III and Emperor Gaozong might have some thoughts, too.
  
  
• Braggadocio, Part II: Again, if you believed everything said in the speech, then this year's midterms were an enormous success for the Republicans in general, and for Trump in particular. He went on at length about his batting average, neglecting to mention that most of his "wins" were in races that were uncontested or that could have been won by a talking chicken as long as the chicken had an (R) by its name.
  
  
• Finger Pointing: Of course, the counterpart to "I am the greatest president ever" is "Joe Biden is the worst president ever." Trump had much to say that presented the Democrats and their leader as some combination of the Keystone Kops, Satan's armies and the student body at Mrs. Grumby's School for the Mentally Challenged (it's a feeder school for certain universities in downtown L.A.).
  
  
• Conspiratorial Thinking: The former president sees plots, plans and schemes everywhere he looks, of course. The one he emphasized yesterday was that China interfered with the 2020 election, to give the victory to Biden. Change that to Russia, 2016 and Trump, and now we might be on to something.
  
  
• Airing of Grievances: The companion of the conspiratorial thinking is Trump's sense that he is treated very unfairly by... pretty much everyone. He pointed the finger at the media, of course, and made a few veiled references to having been cheated in 2020. That said, he didn't hammer on "stop the steal" all that much. Maybe someone has finally persuaded him that airing that particular grievance is now a political loser. We kinda doubt it, though.
  
  
• Lies, Lies and More Lies: It wouldn't be a Trump speech, of course, without copious quantities of baldfaced lies. He claimed he built the border wall. He harped on the alleged Russian missile that landed in Poland on Thursday, and said "People are going absolutely wild and crazy and they're not happy." You can always tell Trump is BSing when he talks about what "people" are saying. In truth, it's not clear whose missile it was, and it may well have been a Ukrainian misfire. If you would like a fuller accounting of the falsehoods, here is the one from CNN, and here is the one from The New York Times.
  
  
• Unintentional Irony: Trump also has a penchant for saying things that he (or his speechwriters) don't seem to have thought all the way through. For example, in the address last night he decreed: "I never respected critics. I never respected critics, they tell people what's wrong but can't do anything about it themselves." Hmmmmm... sounds like someone we know.
  
  
• Logical Contradictions: Trump spent so much time talking about what a stellar president he was, and then so much time talking about how the country has gone to hell since then. Does he not realize that one thing that makes a president great is positive change that lasts beyond their time in office? Think Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt. In other words, to moan and groan about how bad the country is right now is ultimately, at least in part, an indictment of Trump himself. To take another example, he talked about how tough he was on China, and how that probably made them interfere with the elections, but then later he talked about how great his relationship with Xi Jinping is. So which is it? Does China like Trump or does it hate him?

Ultimately, the most important thing to know about the speech is probably this: Trump is supposed to be a veteran entertainer, but last night he put aside his prepared remarks after 15-20 minutes and started riffing. And as a result, he prattled on and on and on. Does he not know that you can only maintain an audience's attention span for so long? Once it was clear that he'd wandered off into... whatever place he goes when he's improvising, the various networks started cutting away from the speech. MSNBC didn't carry the announcement at all. CNN cut away after 25 minutes or so. Even Fox jumped ship at 45 minutes or so (though they cut back for the final portion).

The point here is that he's really not all that newsworthy. Yes, he's a presidential candidate, but that election is 2 years away, and he's saying and doing the same things he's now been saying and doing for 6 years. It seems that he expects to get the same kind of attention he got back in 2016, but that's not happening. He's not a circus sideshow anymore. "Can you believe what Trump said?" doesn't raise any eyebrows anymore.

For our part, we've been trying to think about what Trump-related things we'll end up covering in the next 6-12 months. We'll write up big developments on the legal front, but we would have done that regardless of whether he was a candidate or not. And we'll probably write up some of the many Trump vs. Biden or Trump vs. DeSantis polls that are coming down the pike. And we might write about the occasional Trump running mate speculation. But it's hard to think of much else, because his rallies and his wild pronouncements just aren't worthy of attention. And most other politics-centered outlets, even Fox, are clearly thinking the same way. So, Trump is likely to be disappointed by how much (or really, how little) attention his 2024 campaign gets. (Z)