Trump News Conference Reveals Why No One Gives a Shit if Harris Talks to Media
People don't care about the media when the media don't care about the people
Aug. 9: Trump says things about stuff … Biden/Harris Great Depression already over … Chevron deference … Walmart slimery …
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Anyone catch former Pres. Donald Trump’s news [sic] conference yesterday? Remember when he was asked about pressuring the Federal Reserve not to lower interest rates before the election?
Or why the Federal Reserve is an independent body? Or why he allowed Wall Street to bet on commodity prices, spiking inflation?
It was hard to hear the questions, but from the answers it was clear that right out of the gate they fell into the same useless categories that tragically our current define TV news.
How do you feel about a thing?
What’s a thing we’ll find out eventually anyway?
What’s your guess about a thing?
What’s your guess about how you’ll feel about thing?
Not: What legislation or regulation will you make happen so that families can afford college or medical costs? Or what will you do about the $1,700 your tariffs will cost families annually? Or how he’ll save people from deadly heat or pay for natural disasters fueled by his four years of worsening climate change?
In fact, I’ll prove how fruitless the questions were. If they’d elicited substantive, meaningful responses, you’d see that in the headlines. But nooo…
Meanwhile, Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin wrote yesterday about the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t done a news conference or interview since becoming the nominee.
“Trump is holding a presser today, we interviewed him last week and [Sen. JD] Vance yesterday and Vance is taking open press questions. Time’s just about up on Harris to avoid this becoming a thing.”
Off Message journalist Brian Beutler responded, “Check out Benjy Soprano over here.”
The point being that when media predict stories about media-shy candidates, they’re threatening to write them. And in a long-lost golden age, there would be some merit to that!
But when you consider that Harris has had less time than anyone ever to stand up her own campaign, she’s also had to pick a running mate, and she has to plan for convention a little more than a week from now…the idea that an interview, which takes lots of prep and planning, or even a news conference would somehow merit priority would always have been goofy.
And at a time when our media are so disappointing and increasingly irrelevant and frankly too likely to elevate toxic, insubstantial bullshit rather than put something meaningful to people’s material lives on the national radar, Why. The. Fuck. Should. She?
She literally has an entire staff that will answer questions the media have!2
Now, it’s one thing if the media want to report:
Go right ahead! But threatening to frame it with the onus on her as afraid or whatever is just another great example of why it’s not a priority for her.
And if it’s unclear why most people don’t give a shit, those Trump headlines from yesterday’s news [sic] conference should make it pretty clear.
Rich People Are Dumb Actually
The stock market bounced back yesterday, after days of Wall Street uncertainty about what itself would do.
Literally, this is a tiny group of rich people whiplashing between irrational exuberance and irrational fear driven by uncertainty over which of those two options they themselves will actually choose.
The inmates are not only running the asylum, they also forget they’re running the asylum, and they live in terror of how they themselves are running the asylum in which we are all forced to live.
Again, these are rich people. The masters of the universe. The monkeys with the money.
How primal are our fellow primates? They still haven’t agreed on why the market threw up all over itself this week, but they’re positive that the rebound is thanks to one (1) good data set on one (1) week of jobs numbers.
In no sane person’s mind does one set of weekly data about the number of job-seekers establish irrefutably the core solid fundamentals of the entire United States economy. But it can cheer up sad rich Wall Street bros enough to buy some stocks!
And if the markets bounced back yesterday for irrational “reasons,” what does that say about the rich geniuses whose company tumbles on the same day?
Warner Bros.-Discovery-Animaniacs lost more than $1.6 billion in value in yesterday’s early trading, hitting a record low after announcing the company had lost $9.1 billion in the value of its television networks. Imagine having all that money, all those resources, all that power, and still not being able to not lose $10.7 billion in a single day.
I’m unemployed and even I managed not to lose $10.7 billion yesterday.
(Al Jazeera America and Vice are just two examples, just from media world, that even I, an actual knucklehead, could tell were doomed even as genius media execs poured in hundreds of millions of dollars.)
Your Obligatory Contrarian Fucking Buzzkill
One reason stanning politicians is so dangerous is that we can get swept up in the revelry around whatever they do or say. Even when said doing and saying is bad. And suddenly, there we are, embracing bad doings and sayings because to do otherwise would constitute criticism of The One We Lurv.
Vice President Kamala Harris clapped back at protesters Wednesday in a way that I found problematic but could easily excuse because, hey, I get it, it’s in the moment, you’re new to the presidential-nominee thing, and a tiny fraction of your audience are yucking your yum.
The problem for me was that everyone loved it. Which means she’s less likely to see the problem with it.
Protesters in Detroit — where a lot of people care about Palestinians — were chanting during her rally, “Kamala, Kamala you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide.” Of course, she wasn’t hiding, she was holding a rally. Which, not hiding.
As the New York Times incoherently put it:
…her patience ran thin. “You know what?” Ms. Harris said, with the sudden force and resolve of a parent in the driver’s seat who has had it. “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
First of all, the protesters weren’t children and Harris isn’t their parent. Secondly, we’re supposed to speak better to kids than we do to adults.
Harris’s clapback wasn’t resolve, it was losing her patience, a failure of resolve. It takes resolve to keep your composure, not to lose it. And any parent knows that feeling, when your resolve to be a good parent runs out and you snap. That’s a failure in parenting and presidenting and people-ing and it happens to all of us and we are forgiven.
What’s gross is impugning their motives. What’s really gross is suggesting that the only message they can share is supporting Trump. “…Say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking…”
Wha-huh?
Am I nitpicking? I am. Not because she said it, but because Democrats cheered it. That’s unthinking tribalism. Which, bad. Wielded against people obviously engaged in a moral cause. Also not good.
To Harris’s credit, she tried to tamp down the crowd outshouting the protesters, saying, “It’s all good” and “Everyone’s voice matters.” But the crowd roared when she lost it, even though Harris had just reminded everyone “I’m here because we believe in democracy.”
I also pick nits because it’s not an isolated incident.
Also on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) responding to her primary loss, which AIPAC engineered, by telling AIPAC “I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”
Jean-Pierre condemned Bush’s remark and said, “We cannot have this type of inflammatory, divisive language in our political discourse.”
Say what now?
Fact check: We can, have, and will. Far more dangerous than Bush’s obviously metaphorical turn of phrase is the White House dictating the terms of our political discourse. Self-styled defenders of democracy should act like it, especially when it’s inconvenient.
Good Thing Crawls from Slime of Supreme Court Ruling
The Supreme Court earlier this year put an end to Chevron deference, the practice of judges deferring to the expertise of federal regulatory agencies to avoid making tyro3 mistakes like that time Chief Justice John Roberts referred to nitrogen oxide, a pollutant, as nitrous oxide, laughing gas.
The obvious consequence: Corporate America, abetted by the judges they hired, running roughshod over people who breathe air, eat food, drink water, and buy things.
But the American system is one of Newtonian political physics. Every action has a reaction, etc.
And we’re seeing a positive reaction that has potentially huge implications, this time, for not evil.
The point of the Supreme Court ruling was that Congress can’t just appoint agencies to regulate by proxy. If Congress wants something done, it has laws for that kind of thing.
Which means Congress is about to get very in the weeds on things like weedkillers. So now Roll Call reports there’s a growing bipartisan consensus for more staff to help thwack through the weeds.
That’s a good thing for a number of reasons. First of all, obvi, it means Republicans are on board for making Big Government Bigger Government. Ha ha.
It also means that members of Congress will have more bandwidth for things like improving internet bandwidth.
Isn’t it a wash, though, if both parties get more staff, you skeptical Newsfuckers may ask? My incisive Newsfucker, it is not a wash.
The reason it’s not a wash is that right-wing members of Congress already have massive amounts of support — in the form of think tanks and advocacy groups toiling day and night for the billionaires who need them to generate rationales for people to embrace toxic ideologies.
Right-wing members of Congress don’t need staff to write legislation; they just have to open the most recent email from the Club for Growth or Americans for Tax Reform or the Heritage Foundation or whatever.
Democrats have some of that, too. But in nowhere near the same amount. Which means the added staff will benefit the left asymmetrically. Hell, having more right-wing staff could — in absolutely unproven theory – even empower ornery right-wingers to push back against their corporate allies donors masters.
Next time you attend a congressional or campaign town hall, try speaking up in favor of paying for more congressional staff. See what happens!
Of course, no one should expect a flood of Hill jobs on LinkedIn any time soon, with an election coming. But in the next Congress? Could be, rabbit, could be!
Crime Watch
WALMART Y’know how Republicans keep telling us that rampaging Black people are destroying our cities and only buying guns will protect us? Well, the real — as in actually physically existing — predators are already in the house.
ProPublica breaks another great story, as they do, about how it worked.
In a ten-year period ending in 2022, scammers armed with phones and slick scripts stole more than one (1) billion dollars from people by posing as the FBI and getting them to buy $500 Walmart gift cards and send the numbers to the FauxBI to help fight money laundering.
I know. I know.
But creating a climate of rampant fear has made it easier than ever for thieves to capitalize on posing as law enforcement, so let’s cut our credulous victims some slack.
The point here is that Walmart is helping the FBI thieves. They’re not ramping up security enough. They’re not training employees well enough to spot/stop this. And they’re breaking the commitments they made to regulators trying to protect people from these scammers.
Why would Walmart do such a thing? What part of “to buy $500 Walmart gift cards” did I leave unclear, dear Newsfucker?!?
But sure, keep being afraid of strangers instead of skeptical about fear-mongering. It’s almost as if the only thing we have to fear is something something!
TCB
Holy shit I didn’t mention the Democratic vice-presidential candidate once! The cleanse feels good!
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Go get ‘em, kids, and give yourself and those you care about a restful, restorative weekend!
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I should note that two of them have ignored me. I have good questions!
Great word, right?
I was there. She didn't lose her composure. She remained composed. Your other points about Democrats eating it up, etc, and why that may be bad remain, but ... she didn't lose her composure at all.
A little *nuance* regarding Kamala and the Gaza protestors.
From the Guardian (the only mainstream rag covering these campaigns even remotely honorably) …
“After a series of hugely energetic rallies this week Kamala Harris seemed to hit her first bump on the road in Michigan on Wednesday, when protesters heckled her by chanting “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide.”
Harris paused her speech and the broader crowd tried to out-chant the protesters by shouting, “Kamala! Kamala!”. But Harris said repeatedly, “It’s all good.” As the crowd died down, Harris seemed to look in the direction of the protesters, and said, “I’m here because we believe in democracy. Everyone’s voice matters. But I am speaking now.”
When they continued to chant, she stopped again, and said, “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
…
Before the rally, Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz met briefly with leaders from the Uncommitted movement. The protesters at the rally were not from Uncommitted, organisers told the Guardian.”
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/08/kamala-harris-meets-with-uncommitted-gaza-protesters-after-they-disrupt-rally-in-detroit