Right after the Brett Baier/Kamala Harris interview, I started seeing stories from right-leaning sources claiming Baier had beat her up (metaphorically) and dragged her around the stage. I’m not sure I’m buying. Baier has had to come out and make excuses for his performance throughout the thing. She wasn’t easy to re-direct, he said. He showed the wrong clip. Baier screwed up, not Kamala.

Meanwhile, people are saying on the left that Trump is cancelling one event after another for some reason. Is that true? I don’t know. I heard that Monday, but then, on Monday night, Trump did a rally. That doesn’t sound like cancelling, to me. As the election looms, the claims from BOTH are becoming increasingly charged – and decreasingly accurate. That’s a bit of a bummer.

Apparently, Trump went back to Detroit. You remember, Detroit is the city that Trump went to and told them that if Harris gets elected, the whole country will be in the same terrible shape as Detroit! People who live in Detroit probably didn’t care for the reference – especially since Detroit has done such an amazing job re-inventing itself. So now he has gone back. The way he’s been doing things recently, I imagine he went back to tell them he thinks they’re stupid, too. It’s an odd campaign strategy, if you ask me…

The only thing Trump seems to be cancelling is one-on-one interviews. He has backed out of several. He’s still on the rally trail, though. The obvious difference is that he gets to just stand up in front of a crowd of adoring sycophants and blather at his rallies – or maybe just sway back and forth to some of his preferred music – but in one-on-one interviews, he has to respond to questions (which he can’t do) and sound rational (which he ALSO can’t do). Simple enough solution: avoid them.

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Most of the time, not always, but most of the time, I don’t find conservative humor funny. There’s a specific reason. Their “jokes” rely heavily on their dishonest talking points. Humor often depends upon unexpected viewpoints on otherwise shared and common experiences for their punch. When the experience being referenced is made up out of whole cloth (therefore, not “shared”) the joke that relies upon it isn’t funny.

Trump went to this Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner, a political tradition. It’s important to understand that the Al Smith Dinner is an annual Catholic Charities event. The candidates are supposed to make some humorous, and even self-deprecating comments. Kamala just sent a greeting video so she could attend a campaign event, but Trump actually showed up, which doesn’t sound like cancelling to me, at all.

To his credit, he DID try. He tried to make some jokes but he’s trapped inside the conservative bubble. His jokes relied on fraudulent talking points and they were just not funny. MOST of his comments, were really just more whining and crying about how unfair life has been to the pampered and rich bully. He mentioned he was supposed to make a couple of self-deprecating comments but just…couldn’t do it. He’s SO insecure, he can’t even make a few lighthearted jokes about himself.

The very first thing the guy who brags about never using a teleprompter noted was the presence of the teleprompter he had wanted to use. Weirdly, he’s STILL trying to convince people he’s NOT weird. That really got under his oh-so-thin skin, didn’t it? I actually think he started off okay but, it’s Trump, so it didn’t last long. He had only been speaking a few minutes when he earned his first “boos.” He riffed, a bit, on ‘The Democrat Party.’ It’s petty and most people think it’s stupid. What, you’re running for President and you don’t even know the name of one of the two major political parties? (He does…)

Left-leaning media portrayed his speech as “profanity-laced.” It wasn’t. He DID drop one scatological reference. One. Yeah, yeah, it was in front of priests. It’s my understanding priests don’t have much moral ground to stand on, so I’m guessing they can put up with a single utterance of a “bad” word. That description bothered me a lot. Whoever wrote that piece is counting on the fact that most people on the left can’t stand to see Trump’s face or hear his voice and just DO NOT want to endure one more second of his blather. That is to say, they count on the fact that lefties probably didn’t watch the speech. So they lie about it. It WAS boring, but not “profanity-laced.”

For me, the most ridiculous whine in Trump’s arsenal is when he quips that “There’s never been a president that has been treated so badly as me.” Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy might disagree. They were all assassinated. I think being murdered is worse treatment than being asked a tough question by a journalist. Apparently, Trump can’t tell the difference…

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There has been another document dump regarding Trump’s criminal trials, as well. Trump tried to stop it and has characterized the dump as “election interference.” The Judge in the case, Tanya Chutkan, ruled that NOT releasing information relevant to the candidate could, itself, be election interference and allowed the release.

The documents show about $3 million dollars being budgeted for the January 6th rally and coup attempt and some promotion of the event. Other than those details, though, there didn’t seem to be much new stuff in the release so I’m not sure why Trump worried so much about it. Who is it going to affect? Rational Americans all KNOW Trump lost the 2020 election and the details of his coup attempt. MAGA doesn’t know, doesn’t WANT to know, and doesn’t care. Trump focuses on the weirdest things…