A Day in the Life of Two Presidential Candidates
January 6, “a day of love.” Really?
Vice President Kamala Harris' foray into the lion’s den at Fox News was considered a win by all parties concerned. Bret Baier tried his best to trip her up, and his rudeness was promptly rewarded.
The Fox bubble machine featured three of its heavy hitters immediately following the Democratic candidate for president’s appearance, all of whom claimed the interview was a disaster for Harris. I’m guessing they’ve figured out she’s Black, since the ‘angry’ descriptor popped up.
While I think the Foxian™ spinners doth protest too much, it was clear that the Very Special audience of one was willing to buy the spin.
Via the Daily Beast:
Great job by Bret Baier in his Interview with Lyin’ Kamala Harris,” the former president wrote.
Trump then claimed Harris suffers from “a massive and irredeemable case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” boasting that she spent most of her time talking about him.
Over at MSNBC, they were ecstatic over Harris’ answers and demeanor. CNN had Pete Buttigieg praising her performance.
The Vice President refused to let Bret Baier talk over her. Early in the interview I thought Brent Baier was determined to rattle off questions based on Trump talking points until Harris did something stupid. She didn’t break down and pushed back hard. She was disciplined and stayed on message.
Kos at Daily Kos:
Baier wanted to talk about President Joe Biden’s mental faculties, Harris turned it around deftly and made it about Trump. Time and again, Baier trotted out a Republican talking point, only for Harris to quickly jiu-jitsu it back on Trump. For example, Baier, angling for a “deplorable” moment, asked Harris “are [Trump supporters] stupid?” Harris answered, “Oh God, I would never say that about the American people. He’s the one who tends to demean and belittle and diminish the American people.”
Via the Washington Post:
Harris sidestepped questions about a position that she took earlier in her career supporting the use of taxpayer dollars for gender-affirming surgeries for prison inmates. Trump has prominently featured those remarks in some of his ads, which Harris described as a scare tactic.
“I will follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed,” Harris said when asked whether she still supports using public funds for those surgeries. “Under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available on a medical-necessity basis to people in the federal prison system. And I think, frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like throwing, you know, stones when you’re living in a glass house.”
Most importantly, she refused to yield to bad faith framing or downplaying Trump as an existential threat to our democracy. And, in terms of what will be remembered a week from now, she was the one who pulled a “gotcha” moment out of a hat, calling out Baier for showing an edited clip stripped of Trump’s now-routine diatribe about using the military to counter “enemies.”
She spun that into a moment to remember, restating his claimed intention to use the military against peaceful protests and lock up people who disagreed with him.
“This is a democracy,” Harris said to Baier. “And in a democracy the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he'd lock people up for doing it."
At least Fox News ran the entire interview.
Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice:
Harris’s message was what she said. But her message was also that she showed up
So much for the bs media narrative about Harris being unwilling to do a tough interview. And Trump’s claims about Harris being stupid and “slow and lethargic in answering even the easiest of questions” were shown to be plucked from the gutter.
Via Jay Kuo…Former campaign manager and Democratic consultant David Doak noted that the very fact Harris did this interview at all was great for voters to see:
Often times in politics the message sent has nothing to do with the questions asked. Like Nixon looking [s]weaty and nervous, JFK cool and calm, Dukakis answer to death penalty for someone who [raped] his wife.....here the FOX interview showed a woman so confident she would go into the lion’s den, so tough and ready to be President that she could take the heat. The non verbal message was she is ready to be President, fearless, and tough.
What was going on in MAGAland? Trump War Room and top advisers @JasonMillerinDC and @TimMurtaugh alone tweeted **40** times during the interview.
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Also on Fox earlier in the day was Donald Trump appearing at a town hall-style event with an all female audience. What viewers didn’t know was that the audience was packed with Republican women on record as supporting the Trump candidacy and that moments when the partisan makeup of the audience was apparent were edited out.
From CNN:
During another moment missing from Fox’s broadcast, Trump asked the crowd who they were voting for, leading to a chant of “Trump, Trump” breaking out by the attendees.
Fox News did not respond to CNN questions about the missing remarks.
The crowd of women was overwhelmingly supportive of the former president, welcoming Trump with a standing ovation and often breaking out into applause during his responses. When Trump called President Joe Biden “the worst president in history” and Vice President Kamala Harris “the worst vice president,” the crowd burst into cheers.
After falsely claiming wide agreement among legal scholars for the issue of abortion rights being returned to the states, Trump declared himself the “father of IVF.” Cough, cough.
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Later on there was another town hall on Univision, entitled "Latinos Ask... Donald Trump Responds." The audience obviously wasn’t prescreened. They were, as advertised, Latino voters who (at least) said they were uncommitted.
The former president got some tough questions, including one from a farmworker asking who’d be picking produce after the promised mass deportations.
Trump avoided answering directly. “We want workers, and we want them to come in, but they have to come in legally. They have to love our country. They have to love you, love our people.”
The former president repeated his false claim about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, promising to visit the area.
This was just reported. I was just saying what was reported, that's been reported – and eating other things too, that they're not supposed to be.”
But the bomb-ero™ of the affair came in response to a question from Ramiro Gonzales, a Cuban American resident of Tampa, Florida.
“Your own vice-president doesn’t want to support you now,” said Gonzalez, a Republican who said he was no longer registered with the party but wanted to give Trump the chance to win him back.
“You had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me; they came because of the election,” Trump said. “Some of those people went down to the Capitol — I said, ‘Peacefully and patriotically.’ Nothing done wrong at all, nothing done wrong. … ASHLI BABBITT was killed. Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there; we didn’t have guns — the others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. … But that was a day of love.”
Mmm, mmm. January 6, a day of love.
I don’t think Trump won over many voters in that appearance. It puzzles me that the political media, when reporting on Black and Latino men leaning toward Trump, misses the most obvious reason– machismo/sexism.
The photo at the top of this post is of three women listening to Trump’s response about January 6.
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Candidate Kamala Harris also had a busy day of campaigning, starting with a media event alongside a group of roughly 100 Republican supporters in historic Washington Crossing, where Gen. George Washington launched his forces across the Delaware River in a turning point of the Revolutionary War.
From the Associated Press:
Pennsylvania farmers Bob and Kristina Lange also spoke, describing themselves as lifetime Republicans who’ve had enough. Kristina Lange said “it’s time to turn the page on Trump and on his chaos and the way he divides us.”
The Democratic nominee then took the podium. Harris said the Constitution is meant to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power, and “is not a relic from our past.” She said the Constitution “determines whether we are a country where the people can speak freely, and even criticize the president, without fear of being thrown in jail.”
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News You Outta Know
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NRA chief involved in gruesome cat killing as college fraternity member by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in The Guardian
Douglas Hamlin, who was appointed to lead the NRA this summer in the wake of a long-running corruption scandal at the gun rights group, was involved decades ago in the sadistic killing of a fraternity house cat named BK, according to several local media reports at the time.
Hamlin pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty brought against him and four of his fraternity brothers in 1980, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The charge was brought against Hamlin under a local Ann Arbor ordinance. All five members of Alpha Delta Phi were later expelled from the fraternity.
The details of the case, described in local media reports at the time, are gruesome. The house cat was captured, its paws were cut off, and was then strung up and set on fire. The killing, which occurred in December 1979, was allegedly prompted by anger that the cat was not using its litterbox.
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Donald Trump’s other mental health problem that we’re not talking about by Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer
It probably won’t surprise you that — despite his tendency to link mental health to everything from mass shootings to undocumented immigration — the Republican’s actual policies, such as they are, around the issue are either weak or a massive step backward. As the 45th president, Trump would have set mental-health care back decades if he’d succeeded in his promise to repeal Obamacare. As a 2024 candidate, Trump has proposed nothing as comprehensive as the regulations rolled out just last month by the Biden-Harris administration to require insurers and providers to expand coverage.
But experts say the worst Trump idea around mental health is his recurring proposal to bring back large-scale mental institutions — the kind that were phased out beginning in the 1970s amid widespread patient-abuse scandals, most famously at the Willowbrook State School in Trump’s hometown of New York City — as part of sweeps of the urban homeless, and possibly for involuntary commitment of other people that an authoritarian Trump finds undesirable.
“We’re going to have to start talking about mental institutions...” the then-president told a governor’s confab after a 2018 school shooting. “You know, in the old days we had mental institutions. We had a lot of them. And you could nab somebody like this, because they … knew something was off.”
As a candidate in 2023, Trump fine-tuned this into a major part of his plan for dealing with the unhoused, declaring that “for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions, where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.”
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In the filed complaint, Miller claims that he was attempting to enter a parking lot about half a mile from the rally venue when he informed a deputy guarding the area that he had two firearms in his vehicle, both of which he intended to leave inside of his parked vehicle. Miller says he was almost immediately handcuffed and placed into the back of a patrol vehicle.
Despite not receiving permission to look inside the vehicle, Miller says deputies then “proceeded to conduct an unlawful and unconstitutional search of all compartments of the vehicle, retrieving Miller’s personal documentation and other personal items.”
Miller alleges that Sheriff Bianco — who is also an avid Trump supporter — then began making false and defamatory claims about the incident
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