CSotD: The Fixer Speaks
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Rowe once more takes advantage of the time difference between here and Australia to respond to late-breaking news. I don’t imagine many American newspapers will have responses to last night’s speech, either in the form of political cartoons or editorials because most of them go to press about the time Trump was on the air.
Print deadlines are a fading consideration these days, of course, but even online, the New York Times had Trump’s speech below stories about the Canadian wildfires and the war in Ukraine, though the Guardian’s package on the speech led their main page.
There’s an ethical question of how much coverage to give a self-serving political announcement, and the networks were reluctant to run the speech on their main feeds because it was not addressing a national issue like the war or the economy but, rather, a matter of how Trump wants the Republican Party to handle the upcoming midterms. The security of our elections is very much a national issue, of course, but not when addressed as one party’s political strategy.
Rowe captures things well: It’s all stuff we’ve heard before, which you know if you read yesterday’s coverage here and then listened to the speech. It’s not that we had any magical insights, because everybody knew more or less what Dear Leader was going to say, so that the only “news” was what specifics he would emphasize. It was, indeed, a performance of his greatest hits.
There was, however, a small bit of news in Rowe’s “Caught in a Trap” reference, with the Epstein issue being fixed on Dear Leader’s leg: Senator Tillis said he wouldn’t green-light Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general unless Blanche met with a group of Epstein victims, which did happen but reportedly seemed more like fulfilling the requirement rather than advancing the issue.
That wasn’t much of a surprise either.
Luckovich may have had this one at least sketched out before the speech, since Trump was expected to deliver another series of complaints about having been cheated in 2020. Funny thing is that Dear Leader did indeed position himself between two flags, but they weren’t both the US banner. But Luckovich had the framing correct and he more or less nailed the gist of the speech.
McKee, however, not only got the flags right, but captured the angry, rapid-fire delivery of supposed interference and how it made Trump appear furious or possibly unbalanced and maybe a bit of both.
His accusations seemed like disconnected points that should have been elaborated on, but a full discussion would have revealed that, for all his talk about declassifying information, they were things we already knew and had resolved.
For example, there was an incident of false voter registration in Michigan, apparently caused by a person being compensated by the number of registrations gained. The phonies, however, were spotted early and not only did none of them result in fraudulent votes, but they never actually got on the books at all.
And one of the early responses to his claim of some 200,000 noncitizens registered to vote was to wonder why we never saw them prosecuted, assuming they existed? After all, this astonishing crime, if it happened, happened during his first administration.
German hit the ground running with a specific response to the accusation that China interfered in the 2020 elections, because it was not only a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but, as German notes with an asterisk, nothing we didn’t already know.
And he further points out that China only sought to interfere by planting information unfavorable to Trump, not by dragging him off in a helicopter, dropping bombs on him or planning an invasion of his country.
Tom Nichols took a quick dive into the speech, and his analysis is worth reading, though his main point is that the material Trump cited, and which is indeed now posted at whitehouse.gov, doesn’t back up the charges he makes.
The documents he offered tonight, though, tell a different story—so different that they raise the question of whether Trump, or anyone else in the White House, actually read them.
As Miles Taylor wrote before the speech, it was material White House security had assembled during Trump’s first administration, none of which make the points he leveled, which confirms Nichols’ accusation that Trump may not have actually read the sources he cites, and perhaps raises the by-now-familiar question of whether Trump believes the things he says or is deliberately lying.
For example, several people have already pointed out that Trump’s horrified revelation that China obtained voter lists is nonsense. The lists are publicly available and anybody running for office gets a copy. Where do you think all that political junk mail comes from?
The fact that the speech was a collection of arrant twaddle is not the point, however, since the faithful will likely believe his claims, given that they already believe the 2020 elections were fixed and so forth and so on, and they will back him should he announce, following the midterms, that they were fixed and he’s negating the vote.
At this point, it may be foolish to believe the things he claims, but equally foolish to believe he wouldn’t try, once more, to reverse the results of an election, as he did on January 6.
Meanwhile, as we in the Northeast gasp in the smoke from Canada’s wildfires, MacKay points out that the reason Canada and parts of the American West are seeing so many wildfires is climate change, and that not only has Trump been in denial of the clear science, but has pursued policies that specifically increase the phenomenon.
It’s not just that he encourages further use of petroleum, but, as Sack points out, he favors the coal and oil companies directly and specifically by actively interfering with attempts to build alternative energy sources. And, by the way, Steve Sack is a Minnesotan, which not only puts him in the path of smoke from Canada, but provides him with his own local wildfire crisis.
This is the point in Law and Order at which the assistant DA starts talking about “depraved indifference” and resisting his boss’s orders to make a deal.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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