The general consensus about Trump’s speech announcing that he is running again was that it was long and boring. It did not help that he had telegraphed what he was going to say a long time ago. It also did not help that much of it was mostly a rehash of the speech he has been giving at rallies. The difference was that he was very low energy. This may have been deliberate in that he was trying to appear ‘presidential’ and reading from a teleprompter, which is not something that he does well. Or it may be because the audience was not the raucous crowds at his rallies that he seems to relish speaking to.
Even Fox News cut away from the speech and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post had at the bottom of its front page the single line “Florida man makes announcement”. That must sting.
In contrast, the late night talk shows reviewing the speech were pretty funny.
Here is Jimmy Kimmel.
Here is Seth Meyers.
On the still of Seth Meyers above, the “Watch on YouTube” graphic covers the “A C” on the title panel at the bottom, leaving “Loser Look” as the apparent title. LOLOL!!
He may have had to rewrite it at the last minute. He probably had a speech prepared last week that proclaimed how his selected candidates won and his followers drove the red wave that swept the Democrats from power. When the Republicans had a terrible election and Trump selected candidates mostly crashed that all had to be purged.
I don’t need to watch any of those late show takes -- nothing any of them could say could be a funny as that, right there. It’s so good on so many levels.
The intriguing thing about that is that that is the exact phrase he used to describe Jeb Bush in the apparently long-forgotten days of 2015. One of the central bits of genius of his strategy for dismantling the Republican party as it had existed up to that point and reshaping it in his own image was picking a nickname or slur to aim at an opponent, then hammering on it until they broke and he moved on to the next target. Bush was “low energy”, Cruz was “lyin’ Ted”, Clinton was “crooked Hillary”. One of the benefits of these things was that all those things were demonstrably true, so they resonated with his target audience, who could only be relied upon to remember one single thing about each candidate.
For him now to be the “low-energy” guy is a lovely bit of irony, given that that was the very first of his attack vectors when he first started down this track in earnest.
The actual text of the NYPost’s Page 26 “article” is even funnier.
Titled “Been There, Don That,” it reads:
A special council has been appointed to handle the investigation about the secret documents and handle some of the Jan 6th casework involving Trump. So Trump got at least part of what he wanted. We shall see if it works out for him.
CNN
I don’t know anything about him but his involvement in Hague court cases makes me nervous. You have to be guilty of huge crimes before enough countries will organize to bother sending you to the Hague courts. It still takes decades for the cases to run through.
I’m sure they are annoyed because it means the case isn’t going away but that was never going to happen. At a basic level how classified documents ended up in Mar-a-lago requires somebody take the fall. This could easily be throwing them into the briar patch, setting up a situation where the case can be put into an endless cycle of questioning and appealing the questioning.
[JM: counsel, not council]