The Witness Chronicles, August 11, 2024
Trump’s tank is empty
They Bring the Nasty, But This Time Nobody is Buying It
The Trump campaign has run out of gas
Here’s why: they have no ideas and no vision. And they don’t seem to get it. We’ve had eight plus years of Trump’s endless lying and no one is paying any attention any more.
NPR counted 162 lies and distortions at Trump’s recent press conference. He surpassed himself. Now we are hearing he refers to Kamala Harris, in private, as ‘that bitch’. No big surprise there. One of his favorite insults is calling people nasty.
It takes one to know one. But it is obvious what is going on here. His campaign and party are in panic mode, flailing around with the only political weapons they know, lying and insults. It’s no wonder. Their campaign manager Chris LaCivita, is famous for the Swift Boat story that brought down John Kerry years ago, a lie desecrating Kerry’s brave service in Vietnam.
Now, all these years later, J.D. Vance and LaCivita are back to the old playbook doing character assasination on a 24 year veteran who happens to be Harris’s running mate for Vice President, Tim Walz. They claim he quit the service out of fear of being deployed to Iraq.
It’s an old lie, dragged out by Republicans trying to beat him as governor of Minnesota, a race he won handily, twice. The reality, for the record, is that Walz announced his retirement from the National Guard because he had filed to run for the House of Representatives. No deployment orders had been issued at that time.
We should be asking, is this all they have, the best they can do? And the answer, over and over again, is yes.
On the Sunday morning news shows today, Vance made the rounds, trying to extricate himself from some of his own lies while doubling down on most of his crackpot ideas about women, childbearing, his opponents…the usual. But it only reinforced something I see in this man. He has no actual personality, just a veneer of Trump rhetoric and unrelenting anger at something or other.
Look at the things the Trump campaign is obsessing about. Rally attendance numbers take up a lot of column inches of Trump coverage. Donald Trump was so used to Biden’s weak numbers that he simply cannot stand seeing those images of Harris speaking in front of huge crowds.
One of those lies was his claim that the crowd at his January Sixth rally, that led to the insurrection attempt, was larger than the crowd at Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech. It wasn’t even close. And, btw, what was the point of that, other than to always claim anything he does is bigger and better?
Remember, this man does not read, knows nothing about history, and always has a cable news station on, mostly Fox, for obvious reasons, and occasionally CNN. He is in a bubble, surrounded by those who know they cannot control him but try to by telling him whatever he wants to hear.
After years of writing about this stuff, nothing about this man has changed or grown. If anything he has become a caricature of himself, if that is even possible. And then he chooses a mini me as a running mate, ensuring no one in his campaign outshines him.
Now, as we see a candidate in Harris, who obviously is enjoying the limelight while still comfortable dissecting Trump’s lies, the contrast between sanity and obsessive narcissism is even more striking. Harris has a message of a better future without glossing over the problems we face, like immigration and price gouging (I won’t call it inflation).
She is effectively reminding voters that Trump killed a bipartisan funding bill for immigration enforcement that could have gone far in getting control of the border. He did this, not while serving as an elected official, but as a private citizen exercising power for his own benefit.
And his party kowtowed and killed the bill to give him an issue to run on. I know this is an old story, but it says everything about how this man could care less about the misery at the border. And it is only a single example of how everything he stands for is entirely about his own agenda, not what is good for the country.
This is powerful cannon fodder for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and they will be increasingly reminding Americans that facts and vision are what changes things, not egotism, fear, and paranoia.
Meanwhile Trump and Vance keep to their tired attack playbook, looking more and more out of touch with America every day.
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Not to mention, Trump's speech on Jan 6 was a list of why the election was stolen and Biden was occupying the seat illegally. Then told the MAGA folks dressed in body armor, armed with whips, chains and bear spray to go get wild. Martin Luther King came with a dream that people would find peace and cooperation. Keep writing, you have much to say. I pray his tank is empty. That his 12 cans of diet Coke a day and endless fast food burgers does his plumbing in forever.
Keep it up. Telling the sad, boring truth about this situation. The only thing magical about this thing is the playing out of their magical thinking