I honestly was both distracted and exhausted enough over the last few days where I still thought tonight was going to be the first time that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris would share a stage. After all, even if one Googles that thought you’ll be prompted with this article, dated on the 3rd of the month, from ABC NEWS’ Jon Haworth:
Former President Donald Trump said he has agreed to an offer from Fox News to debate Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 4, according to a post on Truth Social late Friday.
“I have agreed with Fox News to debate Kamala Harris on Wednesday, September 4th,” he wrote on Truth Social. In the post, Trump claimed that ABC News’ debate, scheduled for Sept. 10, had been “terminated in that Biden will no longer be a participant.”
Alas, it was dated AUGUST 3rd. I suspect you knew that in the interim that September 10th won out and thanks to largesse of the network allowing simulcasting I’ll still be able to watch on my DIRECTV-enabled device.
But we will still get yet another mega (MAGA?) dose of Trumpian bullsh-t tonight, as THE DESK’s Matthew Keys informed those of you paying better attention than moi over the holiday weekend:
The Fox News Channel will host a town hall-style interview with former President Donald Trump early next month, the network announced on Friday.
The town hall will take place on Wednesday, September 4 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Fox News commentator Sean Hannity will interview Trump on a wide range of topics, to include his preparations for the ABC News presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. The interview will air in prime-time at 9 p.m. Eastern Time, and will be pre-taped earlier in the day, a network spokesperson confirmed by e-mail.
Sure sounds like exactly what Harris and her new dance partner Tim Walz did last week for CNN’s Dana Bash, which naturally prompted taunting and derision from Trump and his sycophants, much of it in real time. That said, CNN was able to deliver 6.2 million viewers on a very slow and typically low-viewing level night on the cusp of a holiday weekend. Given that, as Keys reminded us, Hannity hosts the longest-running prime-time cable news program on television — the self-titled show “Hannity” — which has consistently ranked as the top show in the core demographic of adults ages 25 to 54 years old, tonight should give even Hannity’s numbers a boost.
But anyone who thinks Hannity will come close to asking anything close to the level of probing questions that Bash at least tried to sneak in will no doubt be disappointed. Tonight may very well be classified as an infomercial, and one where the content will be no less original than what one might see on one of the dozens of channels that DIRECTV isn’t blacking out that sell Dual Zone ovens and Generac generators nonstop. I, for one, wouldn’t be surprised a spot or two for his spanking new $99 digital trading cards.
All the more reason that if Harris’s team chose not to be dragged into this arena in person tonight and elected not to make good on her challenge to let him “say it to her face”, a hope I had previously expressed in this space last month, said team needs to have as much of a second screen ominpresence as Trump’s did last Thursday night.
After all, according to your most recent statements, he’s incapable of anything original, so you already have a pretty good idea of what those “wide range of topics” will be, and how unlikely he is to address any of them without riffing and monologuing. I even have a pretty good idea what to expect and, like I said, I’ve been preoccupied and distracted.
So fact-check the living crap out of him. Not as a post-mortem reaction, but in real time. With better punctuation and grammer, please. After all, your audience demands it.
If nothing else, you’re as entitled to interfere with this “town hall” as he claims he was with the 2020 election. I’ve at least been paying enough attention this week to have seen this little nugget from MSNBC’s Steve Benen that dropped yesterday:
About a year after Donald Trump was initially indicted over his efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, special counsel Jack Smith and his team decided it was time for a new superseding indictment related to the same underlying crimes. The move was apparently necessary as a result of a scandalous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that, to a radical degree, elevated the American presidency above the law.
Days later, as NBC News reported, the former president made his defense attorneys’ job a bit more complicated.
Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that he had “every right” to interfere with the 2020 election, even as two criminal cases involving those allegations hang over him. On Monday, Kamala Harris’ campaign charged that the comments were evidence that Trump believed he was “above the law”.
It’s not clear exactly which day the interview was conducted, but in an exchange that Fox News aired on Sunday, the Republican nominee ranted for a while about his country’s justice system before whining that he was “indicted for interfering with a presidential election,” which he added he had “every right to do.”
And this after a week where he’s blindly retweeted all of those allegations about the common thread of how oral sex impacted the career trajectories of both Harris and Bill Clinton. One doesn’t have to have the level of psychological training of, say, his niece to recognize this is a classic case of projection.
On a night when it’s quite likely he will suck, it would be both timely and justified to troll him right back.
Frankly, I’d prefer if this was something that your team did on YouTube with a panel because, honestly, the last media outlet I want to contribute salable audience to these days is FOX News Channel. My household already does a disproportionate amount of that.
And, if nothing else, you’re probably capable of at least putting out something original and funnier. After all, think of all the talented comedians and pundits who would be more than willing to ghost write for you.
But since it’s way too short notice for y’all to put that option out there, I suppose I’ll have to settle for some observations on Threads. It’s probably too much to ask for you to engage wider-reach social media platforns.
All I ask is that point is that you don’t just sit back and take this kind of abuse. Whether you like it or not, childish, boorish and misoygnistic behavior is essentially in a dead heat with your version of strategy. There are seven swing states of consequence. Trump leads three, Harris leads three and they are tied in the other. If you add up the collective number of statistically insignificant percentage points each has over the other, those numbers are equal as well.
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll get a reaction. Perhaps you might just irk him enough for him to get even more unhinged than usual. Maybe you might even coax a few more honest and original thoughts out of him. The ones that literally get to the heart of his issue.
He simply cannot bear the thought of possibly losing an election, let alone his freedom, to a woman of color who isn’t sexually attracted to him.
Only he might just use far less nuanced language to characterize that.
As THE BULWARK’s Bill Kristol reminded in this morning’s newsletter:
Trumpism, we’re once again reminded, has more staying power than one would wish. And so here we are, two months out, with basically a toss-up election.
So every little thing can matter. And little things in campaigns have a tendency to bounce every which way, for good and for ill—which means one’s mood bounces up and down several times a week. Sometimes several times a day.
It can be exhausting. It can be harrowing. It can be exasperating. It can be enervating. It can be hard in such circumstances to keep one’s focus, to sustain one’s morale, and to keep calm and carry on. It’s a slog.
So for heaven’s sake, don’t take the high road, at least not tonight. Don’t give him a chance to gain any sort of ground. Give us a reason not to watch him and, bear in mind, I can’t even watch tennis tonight as an option.
You need not aim low. But please don’t be silent.
Until next time…