Keep talking Donald

| 11:08 pm EDT September 22, 2024
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When the Kamala Harris campaign ran a series of national TV ads this week, it consisted entirely of Kamala’s words from the debate. When a PAC for Kamala Harris ran a national TV ad of its own this week, it featured Donald Trump’s words from the debate. That debate was such a stunningly lopsided contest, it felt like one big long campaign ad for Harris. And now the campaign ads are literally just debate footage.

During that debate, Kamala made the unusual move of telling persuadable voters that they should try attending a Trump rally so they can get a true taste of how unwell and unhinged he’s become. I think she’s onto something with this. With the exception of the debate, no one really sees Trump speak anymore. His rallies aren’t televised. Most of his social media posts are buried on an obscure social network. By the time the general public hears about Trump’s words, they’ve been run through the media’s “sane washing” machine and end up paraphrased into something a lot more coherent than what Trump has said.

At this point I’m almost ready to tell the media to start airing Trump’s rally speeches. Break into the primetime lineup one day and air live footage of Trump telling his supporters that Hannibal Lecter is in the audience and that Oprah isn’t real, even as he slurs his words and keeps stopping mid-sentence to try to remember where he’s at. Just air five minutes of a live Trump rally, and it’ll cost Trump a million persuadable voters on the spot.

At the least, I’m ready for Donald Trump to start talking more. He’s still only holding a fraction of the swing state rallies that he should be holding by this stage of the calendar. But that may change before the election, and I hope it does. One of the best things we have going for us is that Trump does such an incredibly poor and self-defeating job of representing himself these days. Keep talking, Donald.