The president then turned to his loyal press secretary Leavitt and blurted out that he needed to stop himself from falling down.
She looked around the flight cabin for something to prop the
boss up.
'I'm looking for something to grab here. Because it's going to get rough. I think you did this to me, you put me in a position where there's absolutely nothing to grab,' Trump said, blaming reporters.
'So I'm looking for something to grab. And it's not going to be Karoline!'
Leavitt appeared to briefly pull back from Trump but smiled as she moved his hand toward a nearby curtain.
It was a very weak joke, followed by the press secretary giving Donald a little approbration as he'd demand. Leavitt then retreated slightly, appropriately.
Though not humorous, the remark was light-hearted and if Trump ever grabs Leavitt, it won't be in public, anyway, because he's too young for her. It was not a matter of public interest, so the media ignored it and moved on to significant topics.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt snapped Thursday at a reporter who didn’t buy her attempt to dismiss President Donald Trump’s repeated mentions of canceling elections.
Four days later, this was no joke.
During a White House press briefing, a reporter asked Leavitt why the president kept mentioning canceling elections. Trump had pointed out while speaking to Reuters that presidents never do well in the midterm elections, and bragged that because his administration has already accomplished so much, maybe the democratic process wasn’t necessary at all.
“When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election,”
Trump said. The president had made a similar remark while speaking to
Republicans at the Kennedy Center last week.
“The president was simply joking,” Leavitt said. “He was saying, ‘We’re doing such a great job, we’re doing everything American people thought, maybe we should just keep rolling.’ But he was speaking facetiously.”
The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg posed a follow-up. “Are you saying the president finds the idea of cancelling elections funny?”
“Andrew, were you in the room? No you weren’t. I was in the room, I heard the conversation. And only someone like you would take that so seriously, and pose that in a question in that way,” Leavitt replied.
In June, 2020 a reporter for the American Journal noted eleven (11) times when Trump, according to a member of his team or himself, was joking, being sarcastic, or "needling." In the latter case, Marco Rubio was characterizing Donald's remark "China should start an investigation into the Bidens."
That was 5-8 years before ABC News recently listed the nine political opponents, past and present, of Donald Trump whom the President's Justice Department is investigating. (There also are three- James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton- who have been indicted, the first two at least because they resemble a ham sandwich.) They are Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve chairperson; Lisa Cook, Federal Reserve governor; Mark Kelly, US senator; Adam Schiff, US senator; Eric Swallwell, US representative; Chris Christie, former NJ governor; Jack Smith, former special counsel; Miles Taylor, former chief of staff to the Department of Homeland Security; Christopher Kres, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Donald is not joking, being facetious, or even (primarily) trolling when he muse about cancelling elections. Oh, he enjoys getting a response from his enemies, But that's not his purpose.
Trump wants to see the reaction when he throws something against the wall, to see if it sticks. He is floating an idea, testing the waters. If no one notices or if there is little discernible revulsion, he is confident that he can put something into effect at the right (for him) time.
And if the reaction is antagonistic and the response contentious, he or a spokesperson can claim the President was only joking or being facetious. Yet, at the same time, Donald has moved the goal posts and softened the public up for when he's more inclined to make a move.
Reporters need to know how to counter this strategy. Feinberg was ready when he shot back at Leavitt "are you saying the President finds the idea of cancelling elections funny?" A reasonably effective variation might be "how is that joke (or facetiousness) funny (or amusing)?" It's tough to come up with something on the fly but the correspondents no longer have any excuse. They know if they ask a substantive question that the press secretary probably will say something nasty or reprehensible.
Allowing DonaldTrump's mouthpiece freely and without dissent to mimic the President she so slavishly serves is no way to run a free press.
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