Donald Trump just swung and missed badly

| 11:30 pm EDT August 13, 2019
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Three strikes and you’re out, right? If only that meant Donald Trump had to resign. But he did just strike out, rather dramatically, based on one of the metrics that he keeps insisting is the most important to his own reelection. We’ve lost track of how many meltdowns Trump has had on Twitter about how major media outlets will all go out of business if he loses in 2020, because they need him for ratings. Well, guess what?

Donald Trump gave some kind of asinine campaign speech in Pennsylvania tonight. At least we assume it was asinine, because we didn’t watch it. As a matter of fact, we couldn’t have easily watched it, because no one aired the thing. As respected CNN reporter Manu Raju pointed out, none of the three major cable news networks – not CNN, not MSNBC, not even Trump’s once-beloved Fox News – bothered to air it. But there’s more.

If you want to see Donald Trump strike out on three more pitches, consider that none of the three CSPAN channels aired the speech either. The sitting President of the United States gave a public speech, as part of his reelection campaign no less, and no one bothered to air it.

As much as we’d like to give these news outlets credit for simply doing the right thing for its own sake, the cold hard reality is that they don’t usually air Donald Trump’s speeches these days because Trump’s inane racist rambling isn’t the ratings draw it used to be. Trump can insist all he wants that the media needs him to stick around so it can stick around. But the media doesn’t need Trump – and it just proved as much.