Old Man Trump Cites Made-Up Polls to Excuse Low-Energy Campaign

Donald Trump tried Thursday to explain away his apparent staycation amid a tightening presidential race, but unfortunately for the former president, his numbers just didn’t add up.

Ever since Trump’s rally in Atlanta this past weekend, the former president has been lying low at home. Meanwhile, his running mate, J.D. Vance, has seemingly been sent to follow Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz across the country, to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

During a press conference from the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, Trump was asked about his apparent pause in public appearances. He didn’t take it well.

“You have not had a public campaign event for nearly a week now; tomorrow you’ll be in Montana, which is not a swing state,” said one reporter. “Some of your allies have expressed concern that you’re not taking this race seriously, particularly—”

“What a stupid question,” Trump interjected.

“At a time where there is enthusiasm on the other side. Why haven’t you been campaigning this week?” the reporter asked.

“Uh, because I’m leading by a lot and because I’m letting their convention go through,” Trump said, implying he had taken a step back before immediately contradicting himself. “And I am campaigning a lot.”

Trump then claimed that he’d kept busy working on “commercials that are at a level that anybody’s ever done before.”

The Republican nominee also said that he’d been doing remote interviews.

“I’m speaking to you on phones, I’m speaking to radio, I’m speaking to television. Uh, television is coming over here,” Trump said. “Excuse me, what are we doing right now?”

Earlier this week, Trump called in to Fox & Friends to push the baseless claim that Harris had picked Walz out of antisemitism against another contender, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, but he couldn’t get through it without reviving his own offensive comments about Jewish voters.

Trump then criticized Harris for not speaking more with the press. “She’s not doing any news conferences. You know why she’s not doing [them]? She doesn’t know how to do a news conference. She’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Trump said Thursday.

This claim seems to be a new line of attack for Trump and Vance, who made a comment about it Wednesday on the tarmac in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Someone close to Harris’s campaign told Politico that there was little “incentive” for Harris to speak more with the press. “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out,” they said.

As for Trump’s claim that he’s “leading by a lot,” that’s not necessarily clear.

When listing recent polls that had him ahead, Trump cited a recent Rasmussen Reports survey published Thursday, which found that Trump was leading 49 percent to 44 percent. Rasmussen was recently dropped from the national poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, after it was determined to be too right-leaning to be considered reliable.

Trump cited a CNBC poll published Thursday that found the former president to have a two-point lead over his opponent. He also mentioned an MSNBC poll that placed him ahead, but such a poll did not appear to exist.

While Trump claimed he’d taken the lead in swing states, an Ipsos poll published Thursday found that the two candidates were neck and neck, with Harris taking a slight lead. On Wednesday, two key national poll aggregators found that after months of struggling, the Democratic Party’s candidate had overtaken Trump in the polls.

Trump is well aware that he’s beginning to struggle in the polls—apparently, it’s driving him nuts.

Donald Trump hasn’t let up on insisting that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently became Black.

During a bumbling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee deflected a direct question probing his reasoning for claiming that the biracial Democrat had “turned Black.”

“Kamala Harris’s father is Jamaican American, and she went to a historically Black college,” prompted a reporter, referring to Harris’s attendance at Howard University. “How is she only recently deciding to be Black?”

“You’ll have to ask her that question because she’s the one that said it. I didn’t say it,” Trump said. “But I’ve known her a long time, I actually contributed to her campaign a long time ago, because I was a developer—I contributed to lots of campaigns, to Democrats, Republicans; some were liberal, some were conservative, but you’ll have to ask her about that.

“To me it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “But to her, from her standpoint, I think it’s very disrespectful to both, really. Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful to both. To me it doesn’t matter.”

Trump’s outrageous claim sprang up at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, when the 78-year-old white candidate tried and failed to curry favor with the crowd by trash-talking Harris’s racial identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said at the convention, seemingly unable to grasp how a person could have two parents from different cultures but still manage to appreciate both. (More than 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2020 census, is multiracial.)

Donald Trump announced Thursday he has agreed to debate Vice President Kamala in not just one September debate but three.

The news of the three new dates, however, didn’t arrive without a confusing flub. In the middle of a rambling, short-notice press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced his intentions to debate Harris on September 4 on Fox News, September 10 on NBC News, and in another September 25 debate on ABC News.

But moments after Trump made the claim, it appeared he had mixed up some of the dates and their networks. Spokespeople for ABC said the network had agreed to proceed with the originally scheduled September 10 debate, while NBC News said they had agreed to host a debate on September 25, reported The Daily Beast’s Corbin Bolies.

“She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview,” Trump said of Harris. “But I look forward to the debates.”

Harris’s campaign reaffirmed that she would be up for the September 10 ABC News debate shortly after the details were ironed out.

Trump’s announcement came as a complete reversal of where he stood on the debates just last week, when he wrote on Truth Social that he had “terminated” the September 10 ABC News showdown over the fact that the Democratic nominee had changed when he had only agreed to debate “Sleepy Joe Biden.” In its place, Trump offered an alternative debate on Fox News in front of a live crowd, which Harris’s campaign did not sign up to.

The sudden announcement of three back-to-back debates may have been a last-ditch effort to regain lost favor with some of his fans, who were stunningly disappointed by his decision to back out of the first scheduled debate—so much so that they got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending on Truth Social after the news broke.

Stephen Miller tried to invent a new, outrageous attack against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, calling them the “number one traffickers” of “girls into sex slavery on planet Earth” on MSNBC Wednesday night.

On The Beat With Ari Melber, the former White House adviser and Trump campaign surrogate went into a rant after Melber questioned Miller about the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.  

“A lot of innocent people have been persecuted by a corrupt system!” Miller shouted. “What kind of corrupt system throws Republican lawyers in jail for offering good, sound legal advice but does nothing with secretaries of state who plainly violate their own state laws and constitutions? How many people are in jail right now?

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the number one traffickers of children—girls into sex slavery on planet Earth! How many people are in jail for that?” Miller added, before Melber stepped in to cut him off. 

“We’ve gone this far—we’ve gone. We’ve gone this far in an exchange, we’re not doing just anything you want to rip off the internet that’s false. And we’re not doing defamation here!” Melber replied. “As you know, there’s other Trump allies who’ve got a lot of trouble with that. We’re not doing that here.” 

The exchange was a small part of a 30-minute interview Melber conducted with Miller, who has not reacted well to Biden stepping away from the 2024 election and Harris taking his place. He freaked out the day the news was announced, loudly complaining on Fox News.

“They held a primary!” Miller lamented at the time. “People—they had ballots! They filled out circles that went to the voting booths! They spent money on advertisements, and as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.”

Miller has spent his post–White House career concern-trolling, from TV appearances attacking Democrats over immigration policies or spreading lies about Hunter Biden, to fake, culture-war-driven lawsuits over stuff like allegedly gay Pop-Tarts. His latest rant proves that the architect of the Muslim ban is a professional troll now, and will take on that role again if Donald Trump returns to the White House. 

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted President Joe Biden to drop out because she was startled by his poor debate performance and, apparently, not that impressed by his political machinations.

In an interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker published Thursday, Pelosi discussed the debate, her appearance on Morning Joe, and her influence over Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race.

To hear Pelosi tell it, she was always one step ahead of Biden and his campaign.

Despite what Pelosi described as a pervasive confidence among her people that Biden would outperform Donald Trump in the debate, she claimed to have advised Biden against participating. “I said, [Trump’s] doggy doo-doo. You’re going to get doggy doo-doo on your shoe. It’s not a good thing,” Pelosi said.

Like many Americans, Pelosi was “startled” and “stunned” by Biden’s poor performance in June’s presidential debate.

Pelosi appeared on Morning Joe in July, where she signaled that she was no longer aligned with the messaging of the Biden campaign. While the campaign continuously asserted the incumbent’s unwavering intention to seek reelection, Pelosi spoke with a less definitive tone.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run,” Pelosi said, an implicit rejection of the decision stated by the campaign. “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is.”

Although Pelosi did not cop to her status as a highly influential political operator, Remnick wrote that Pelosi’s appearance on Morning Joe signaled a “permission structure” to others to call on Biden to end his campaign.

It was previously reported that Pelosi, along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, made direct appeals to Biden urging him to drop out.

“I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening.… We couldn’t see it go down the drain because Trump was going to be president and then he was going to take the House. Imagine! Imagine how that would be! Well, we don’t have to imagine. We saw,” Pelosi said.

“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she admitted of Biden. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: This ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The president has to make the decision for that to happen.”

Unprompted, Pelosi denied rumors that she was in any way the mastermind behind Biden’s decision. “People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines; I was talking to Chuck [Schumer]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all,” she said.

“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next?”

Her goal, she added, was simple: “That Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”