The Press Conference Donald Trump Could Not Have Given

All eyes were on Biden, but could Trump have given a coherent press conference in his place?

by Ben Cohen

I watched president Biden’s ‘big boy’ s conference last night, curious to see how he would handle unscripted interactions with the press.

Despite some embarrassing slip ups (he called Kamala Harris ‘Vice President Trump’), a faltering voice, and some odd whispering, it went better than I expected. Biden might wander off track and be prone to long winded responses, but he still has an excellent grasp of the issues. Biden displayed a formidable understanding of America’s complex geopolitical challenges and relished interactions with journalists on issues like China and the Middle East.

For what is is worth, the conference reassured me that Biden is still capable of performing at a reasonably high level despite an obvious decline. It nudged me slightly further towards him staying rather than leaving, particularly given the time constraints and challenges of running a new candidate. But while the press conference was supposed to be a referendum on Biden’s capabilities, I spent much of it thinking about what Donald Trump would be saying in his place. Because even in his diminished state, Biden was infinitely more coherent, truthful and knowledgable than his predecessor ever has been.

A tale of two candidates

To put Biden’s press conference in perspective, let’s compare it with recent statements made by Donald Trump. Here was the former president at a rally in Florida earlier this week:

Did anyone ever see the lovely movie ‘The Silence of the Lambs’? Did you ever see it? Did you ever hear of Hannibal Lecter? He was a lovely...He would love to have you for dinner. He will take you. He had many people for dinner....We have a lot of people coming in. ‘Oh, that’s terrible what Trump would say. He is rambling about Hannibal Lecter.’ No, I’m not rambling. We are allowing people from insane asylums and mental institutions into our country by the tens of thousands.

And then:

We will institute the powerful death penalty for drug dealers, where each dealer is responsible for the death, during their lives, of 500 people or more. Mothers will never again be forced to watch their children overdosing in hosp … and we will never allow mothers to watch their child hopelessly dying in their arms screaming, ‘What can I do, what can I do? Help me God, what can I do?’ We are a nation whose once revered airports are a dirty, crowded mess… You sit and wait for hours and then are notified that the plane won’t leave, that they have no idea when they will. Where ticket prices have tripled. They don’t have the pilots to fly the planes, they don’t seek qualified air traffic controllers, and they just don’t know what the hell they are doing.

Let’s contrast that with Biden responding to a question on how he is trying to interrupt the partnership between China and Russia and stop the communist regime bankrolling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

[President] Xi believes that China is a large enough market that they can entice any country, including European countries, to invest there in return for commitments to — from Europe to do A, B, C, or D, or not to do certain things.

What’s happened is, we had a long discussion about what we cannot — we have to make clear China has to understand that if they are supplying Russia with information and capacity, along with working with North Korea and others to help Russia in armament, that they’re not going to benefit economically as a consequence of that — by getting the kind of investment they’re looking for. 

And so, for example, we’re in a situation where when — and we’ve reestablished direct contact with China after that — remember the “balloon,” quote, unquote, going down and, all of a sudden, the thing came to an end?  Well, we set up a new mechanism.  There’s a direct line between Xi and me, and our military has direct access to one another, and they contact one another when we have problems.

The issue is that we have to make sure that Xi understands there’s a price to pay for undercutting both the Pacific Basin, as well as Europe, and as relates to Russia and dealing with Ukraine.

One candidate talked about Hannibal Lecter being an illegal immigrant who wants to eat you for dinner, while the other articulated the intricacies of complex geopolitical negotiations. One candidate invented stories about pilots and threatened to murder drug dealers, while the other gave the press a lesson on realpolitik and diplomacy.

Not fit to run

Again, Biden was not perfect during his press conference, and the calls for him to step aside have still not dissipated. This is understandable given what we all saw during the debate, and the fear that Biden may decline further. But it is abundantly clear that Biden is still infinitely superior to Trump, and if he is the candidate, there is no choice.

Donald Trump is not capable of answering complicated questions about geopolitics, trade, or diplomacy because he is is lazy and pathologically incurious. There is no thought beyond his immediate needs, no motivation to do what is best for his country, and no depth of knowledge to draw from. Trump, a convicted criminal, is running to save himself from jail time and no other discernible reason. He cannot do the job because he has no interest in it, and every time he speaks, he makes that abundantly clear.

Does anyone believe Trump could have held a press conference like that in front of the world? Of course not. He would have lied, blustered and rambled incoherently all night.

“I don’t even order bacon anymore,” the former president told the crowd in Florida.

“They say it’s gone up four times since I – four times,” he went on. “So we don’t eat bacon anymore, right? No more.”

Do we really want four more years of this?

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Dumping Biden and Kneejerking Into The Unknown

Have Democrats really thought through what it would mean to kick Biden off the ticket?

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – As I write this, it’s the thirteenth day of deeply irrational garment rending, undermining the campaign of the only leader standing between us and authoritarian, idiocratic tyranny. I think you can tell where I land on the issue of whether President Biden should step aside ahead of his re-nomination in August, all because of a badly botched 90 minutes on CNN that most of us wish we could forget.

The solution proposed by fellow Democrats, some NeverTrumpers, and the political news media is to nominate fill-in-the-blank and then something-something-something leading to victory. To borrow the Underpants Gnomes’ business model:…

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