There have been a lot of changes in Donald Trump’s campaign in the last couple of weeks, but they haven’t been able to change the candidate. He’s more Trumpy than ever.
When the last round of terrible polls were released, showing Trump badly trailing Joe Biden both nationwide and in the key battleground states, Kellyanne Conway and others inexplicably suggested that the president should reignite the dumpster fire formerly known as the coronavirus briefings. That’s not going well. Have they been as bad as the White House coronavirus rallies in the spring, where Trump spent what seemed like hours every day insulting the press corps and generally making a fool of himself? Not yet. But that’s only because he has managed to stick to answering a few questions after droning on for 20 minutes as if he were reading someone else’s book report.
The substance of that book report is the same old happy talk and cheerleading, virtually always based on half-truths and outright lies. And the Q&A period is predictably a disaster. One day he wished his old friend Ghislaine Maxwell, the accused sex trafficker, well, spurring speculation that he was sending her the kind of signal he had earlier sent to his pal Roger Stone, whose sentence he commuted after Stone made clear he hadn’t ratted him out. (Perhaps that’s unfair, but since Trump commonly says things that sound like a slightly less erudite Tony Soprano, it’s only natural to wonder.) Continue reading.