Donald Trump held a press conference at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club on Thursday, where he rambled on for more than an hour in front of two tables piled with groceries. The groceries were meant to illustrate the points about inflation and increased food costs Trump’s team promised he would make.
Thursday’s press conference was also an attempt to right the ship after Wednesday’s North Carolina rally, originally billed as Trump’s first big speech about the economy. That plan went sideways.
And Wednesday’s rally speech was supposed to right the ship after Trump’s Mar-a-Lago press conference last week, which also went sideways, due to Trump’s obsessions with Vice President Kamala Harris’ and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s crowd sizes.
True to pattern, the ship was not righted on Thursday. Yet again, Trump delivered fact-check fodder and frequently meandered off-topic.
The Republican nominee offered a somewhat incoherent attack on Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“[Harris] destroyed California along with Gavin Newsom—and she, San Francisco, you know, was a great city 15 years ago. Now it's considered almost unlivable.” Trump lamented. Others were quick to point out that not only was Newsom the mayor of San Francisco 15 years ago when, according to Trump, the City by the Bay was “great”—but Harris was district attorney.
Trump also rambled on about how crime is through the roof. Crime rates have been trending down for a very long time, and continue to do so under the Biden-Harris administration. But Trump insisted he read a “recent article” that says “you're allowed to rob a store as long as it's not more than $950.”
He wasn’t done. “You can rob a store and you have kids, thieves going into stores with calculators, calculating how much it is. Because if it's less than $950, they can rob, but not get charged.”
The law Trump seems to be referring to is Proposition 47, voted on by Californians and enacted in 2014. It reduced penalties for some nonviolent drug crimes and petty theft offenses, and raised the threshold for felony theft to $950. It didn’t make such crimes legal, and it didn’t erase punishment.
But what about those groceries behind him?
In a key display of his everyman bonafides, Trump took a moment to marvel at the food displayed behind him, and decided on the spot to take a box of Cheerios “back to my cottage.”
Otherwise, Trump was too busy tilting at literal windmills to get around to the groceries. At one point, Trump launched a well-worn routine, wherein he pretends that people who use wind power are unable to watch television on a still evening. This strange preoccupation with windmills goes way back for Trump.
On Thursday, he also leaned into his long-held concerns for birds.
“[Y]ou got windmills all over the place and you have birds. You want to see a bird cemetery?”
Can’t wait to see how Trump tries to right the ship next time!
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