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He literally staged a press conference so that listeners could not hear the questions being asked.

He filibustered answers with long-winded stump speech riffs filled with falsehoods and deliberate lies. All absent of fact checking.

It wasn’t a true press conference. It was staged political theatre to pretend he was accessible.

What it really was, The Theatre of the Absurd.

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For a change, the NYT had excellent coverage that included almost live fact-checking. Nailed him repeatedly for lying, though that word was never used.

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NYT! That IS a change.

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My sentiments exactly.

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Their headlines are otherwise. As if Trump is normal. They fall for the grift and are as insane as he is.

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Which is really weird given that everyone else in NYC knows for a fact he is a grifter.

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IKR?

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I disagree: I thought that the coverage was mimsy at best and tried to construct heavily edited "answers" to questions, without providing actual quotations that demonstrate how deranged he is. The NPR coverage was hilarious: it was clear that the people covering CFDT are just sick and tired of him: the weariness in the voice of the reporter (can't remember which one) was palpable.

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Must have been a Haberman story or Michael Schmidt.

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Thank you. I will look for it.

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If only Dana Bash and Jake Tapper had done the same during Trump’s Gish gallop of lies and misinformation during his “debate.”

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Yes, but that debate brought us to where we now are.

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They refuse to call him out for any of his lies!

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For DonOLD life is one long episode of the Apprentice. And the polls are his Nielsen ratings, And are his crowd sizes.

He's fuming because she is outdrawing him and getting more press.

The networks need to start showing the crowds at his rallies about 60 minutes into his drivel. And next to it show the Harris/Walz crowds at their rallies at almost any point.

When the story isn't about a rally always show Kamala's picture next to DonOLDs. He looks bad and he looks old and even if you show his creepy smile it's a turnoff for most people.

Like HCR says, he is still talking about women and their doctors murdering babies after they are born or any of his other bullshittery which he spews without proof.

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My sister-in-law drove from the Twin Cities to Eau Claire for the Harris/Walz rally then walked 3 miles after parking to get inside. (She said a friend drove back to Tomah after trying to go and finding parking impossible.) She arrived home that night to share with us the incredible joyful energy she experienced there. Reminds me a bit of the massive energy of the Women's march after the 2016 election...only this time it's before the election! It's much more fun these days to hang with the Democrats.

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I have a friend who attended the Phoenix rally yesterday evening. I live in DC, so am looking forward to her report. Pictures taken before the event started showed a packed house.

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A Trump rally these days gets several hundred people to show up at venues that can hold thousands, and they don’t want people to see just how few people show up at these events, and how much empty seating is there.

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Theater of the absurd indeed!

Eugene Ionesco would have loved it. Except with Trump, I suspect Hippopotamus, and not Rhinoceros would have been the fauna title

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And the press literally covered him saying nothing instead of Harris and Walz speaking to the UAW as they accepted their endorsement. They did not even discuss that they got this powerful endorsement. No gravitas for reporting this election except a few people like Jennifer Rubin, Lawrence ODonnell, and I would not know anyone else because I don't watch the US TV news, except the other day which was a bad enough experience I won't be doing it soon again. I am more likely to watch German news, which is paid for by every household paying 18 Euro a month fee which one is billed when one moves into ones home. Also grateful for independent presses like ProPublica, who has broken a story where they summarize 14 hours of secret Project 2025 training videos that were leaked to them. At the end is a link for the full 14 hours. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-project-2025-secret-training-videos-trump-election?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=feature

Please share this with people.

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A friend in England told me yesterday the Brits are asking how the Americans got this crazy.

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There are quite a few Americans asking themselves the same question.

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Good heavens! Thank you, Linda.

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Or theater of the malignant.

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And that is what the "debate" on September 10th will be like. A chance to ignore every question and to lie and bully endlessly.

VP Harris is smart and she will ignore everything he says. Don't take the bait. Ignore him and use her time to tell the American people the truth. It doesn't matter what the question was, just explain that fascism is in the works if Trump is elected. Talk about Freedom for women. Talk about the Climate Crisis. Ask Trump if he is afraid of his sentencing for fraud in two days!

Just use the time as a podium to speak to voters. It's not a debate. It's a chance for free publicity.

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She'll know what to do! This is the woman who tells hecklers, nicely but firmly, that she's talking now.

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I personally think she should hold some town halls like Clinton did. That was super effective.

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It was a bid to take the spotlight and press coverage of the Harris/Walz campaign that Trump seems to think belongs to him and him alone.

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Trump is a narcissist. He thinks the spotlight should be on him and him alone, and he’ll hate anyone or anything that takes the spotlight away from him.

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I think he’ll ramp up his theatrics and lies as he perceives his influence eroding.

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It's pretty hard to ramp it up much further. I think he's headed to a certified meltdown. In my career I've seen it happen 3 times to political candidates up close. One was so bad he went MIA. We found him in a psyche ward. He was an incumbent Mayor, ahead by 20 points...he lost by 20. This was about 60 days from election day. He was not a bad guy...not real bright...but not trouble. The other 2 won...but the meltdowns happened less than a week from the election. We were able to keep it quiet. None of them were able to go out in public, until after the elections and the stress went away.

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Trump is ALWAYS theatre of the absurd...he excels at it.

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And yet the “ journalists” arrived leaving their pens behind replacing them with spoons.

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And yet almost half the country is sticking by this ass hat.

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