Dead man talking

 

Breaking:  Trump checks out of 2024 campaign.

Yesterday he held another rally at his Bedminster Golf Resort and Cemetery to which only select media were invited (it was billed as a press conference).  It was time to mend fences with the very generous Miriam Adelson and Trump, being Trump, did it in the worst possible way.  "I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  It's the equivalent of the Congressional [sic] Medal of Honor but a civilian version.  It's actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor.  That's soldiers.  They're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they're dead.  But she gets it and she's a healthy, beautiful woman.  That's right.  And they're rated equal."

Well, after slagging America's war dead, Gold Star families, former POWs, and generals he would replace with football coaches and NASCAR drivers, there was no place left to go.  

But go he did.  Asked if he would heed calls to "deliver a more disciplined message" instead of personal attacks, he responded, "With all the abuse we've taken from the fake news media, all of this horrific abuse we take and all I want to do is make the country great.  We did so many great things but that's the way it's been for Republicans, and I guess more so for me than anybody in history.  And that's OK because we're leading in the polls.  We were leading Biden by a lot."  Is that the disciplined message?  "I mean, she certainly attacks me personally.  I'm angry at her.  I don't have respect for her intelligence.  She attacks me.  She calls me weird.  'He's weird.'"  So...no discipline?  Actually, it's "a very calm campaign...all we have to do is define our opponent as a communist, a socialist, someone who wants to destroy our country."  Message!  Now let's see him deliver it.

And why was he standing in front of a pile of groceries?  Oh, yes, the economy.  Nobody can afford to buy anything.  He held up a real box of TicTacs and one evidently made for a child's doll house to illustrate inflation; the word he couldn't come up with is "shrinkflation," a real problem Joe Biden has frequently addressed, selling less product for the same price.  And then the message went poof and the weird obsessions returned:  "You got windmills all over the place and you have birds.  You want to see a bird cemetery?"  You want to talk about cemeteries a few feet from Ivana's neglected grave?  "You're allowed to rob a store [in California] as long as it's not more than $950," a bullshit interpretation of 2014's Proposition 47, reducing penalties for some offenses, and also not the work of then-attorney general Harris.  "San Francisco was a great city fifteen years ago.  Now it's considered almost unlivable."  Fifteen years ago the mayor was Gavin Newsom and the district attorney was Kamala Harris.  

Universal health care:  Threat or menace?  "She cosponsored legislation to abolish very popular private health insurance, which 150 Americans rely on, dumping everyone into inferior socialist government-run health care systems with rationing and deadly wait times, while massively raising your taxes.  She wants to take away your private health care."  I see why fact-checkers give up and become beachcombers in Fiji -- he's exhausting.  "You're all going to be thrown into a communist system it's a communist system you're going to be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care...you got to see some of these plans, how they work in other countries, it's disgraceful."  

Communism!  Dental plans!  Tanks in the streets!  Actually in far-from-communist Britain the National Health Service functions quite well when it isn't being starved by governments intent on privatization.  It also shares patients with private plans and even private hospitals.  Everybody gripes about it but when Thatcher tried to take it away she had an insurrection on her hands.  Could we try that?

Then he went for the big finish:  "I don't think people know who she is yet.  When people, really, 'cause people didn't know.  You can ask the man on the street.  I saw it on one of the shows today, they asked the man on the street, what's the last name of Kamala?  Nobody knew.  It's Harris.  Nobody knew the last name.  I don't even use it because nobody knows who I'm talking about.  People don't know who she is."

A grand strategy emerges:  Keep talking about "Kamabla" and mispronouncing "Kamala" and the voters will be so confused they'll turn gratefully to a name they can pronounce and with tears in their eyes, vote for Donald Dump.  Well, that's what Joe Biden called him.  Far from being filled with anger or regrets, Biden sounds like he has put down a burden and is enjoying being president.  You don't like it when I nap on the beach?  Pog mo thoin.  

The Harris-Walz campaign has better writers than SNL.