Trump Team Says Trainwreck Press Conference Is a Sign of Discipline

Donald Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called the campaign “disciplined” Thursday after one of the most chaotic press conferences he’s had so far.

During an appearance on Fox News, Leavitt praised the Trump team’s supposedly controlled efforts against Vice President Kamala Harris, just as Trump gave a wild press conference from Mar-a-Lago.

“This is a disciplined campaign,” said Leavitt. “And we’re disciplined because we are led by President Trump, who wakes up every day and focuses on the issues that matter to the American people.”

But Trump was anything but disciplined during his meandering rant Thursday, as he ricocheted between making wild claims about his crowd sizes and weak excuses for his lackluster week of campaigning. In one afternoon, Trump seemingly flip-flopped on whether he would agree to debate Harris, going from not debating her at all to offering three dates.

Trump is so unrestrained that he couldn’t help but put his foot in his mouth, once again attacking Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who refused to overturn his state’s presidential election results in 2020.

Trump previously spoke about Kemp at his rally in Atlanta over the weekend, the last campaign event before his apparent staycation, taking a significant portion of his stage time to cut down Kemp.

Trump’s decision to skewer Kemp has reportedly sparked some concern from Trump’s allies, who had hoped he might actually win in Georgia. Several people close to Trump’s campaign told The Washington Post that there was a concerted effort to persuade Trump to stay on message and focus his attacks on Harris and other Democrats, not Republicans like Kemp.

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung dismissed concerns from allies about messaging. “Our message discipline is second to none,” he told the Post. “It’s why President Trump was able to take out Joe Biden in the debate; it’s why we’ve been so successful thus far, and it’ll be why President Trump will win the election.”

While the word “disciplined” certainly seems to have worked its way into the Trump team’s talking points, its candidate continues to be anything but.

The far right is attempting to smear Governor Tim Walz by claiming that he replaced the old Minnesota state flag with one that is designed to resemble the flag of Somalia.

The Guardian’s Ben Makuch reports that racist and xenophobic attacks against Walz have spread since Vice President Kamala Harris named him as her running mate Tuesday. The claim that Walz deliberately chose a flag design close to Somalia’s national flag has been echoed on X (formerly Twitter) by right-wing accounts including End Wokeness and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. Fox News’s Jesse Watters also picked it up on Tuesday.  

But the claim isn’t true. Both the fact-checking website Snopes and The Washington Post have debunked it, showing that the flag went through a long redesign process following complaints that the old flag, which contains the state seal, was offensive to Native Americans. In 2023, the Minnesota state legislature created a commission to redesign the flag and seal and received more than 2,500 new proposals.

The commission narrowed the flag submissions to six, and then three, before selecting a base design created by Andrew Prekker, which received slight modifications. After 10 attempts, the final design passed both the Minnesota House and Senate and was flown for the first time on May 11, 2024. The commission also released a report breaking down the process for the redesign. 

The new flag bears very little resemblance to Somalia’s flag, though both use shades of blue and a star. The star on Minnesota’s flag has eight points compared to Somalia’s five-pointed star, and the shades of blue are different.  

The far right seems to think that Walz is kowtowing to Minnesota’s 60,000-strong Somali American community, the largest in the U.S. But a member of the Minnesota Historical Society, which took part in the redesign, told conservative website The Dispatch that the designer isn’t Somali, included the star to represent the North Star, and incorporated the shape of the state into the flag design. 

This noncontroversy joins the many weak attacks against Walz and Harris from the right, including shots at his military record, baselessly accusing the campaign of antisemitism, or calling him “far left.” Maybe one day they’ll come up with one with substance.  

At Donald Trump’s Thursday’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the former president compared himself favorably to Martin Luther King Jr.

After incorrectly claiming that “no one was killed on January 6th,” Trump went on to gloat that the crowd at his insurrection rally was larger than the March On Washington, which Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” said the former president. “If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech and you look at ours...we had more.”

Growing ever more furious at this perceived slight, Trump began throwing (made up) numbers around. King, he said, spoke to a million (actually 250,000) people. But, according to Trump, the January 6th crowd actually looks just as big in photographs as King’s! and yet the biased experts insist that only spoke to 25,000 would-be insurrectionists and rioters (actually 10,000).

One could give Trump the benefit of the doubt, maybe he is experiencing a “senior moment” and actually confusing his (famously sparsely attended) inauguration and the events of January 6, 2021.

Clearly, the Republican presidential nominee is rattled by the massive crowds that have greeted Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz over the past week. Early Thursday morning, Trump took to Truth Social to complain. “If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes “crazy,” and talks about how “big” it was - And she pays for her “Crowd.” When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!” In the same press conference, Trump also made the same point in an arguably even madder fashion. (It is, in fact, difficult to think of another moment where he was this angry.)

In the past, Trump has drawn large crowds, perhaps even approaching that 100,000 number, but certainly January 6 was not one of them—or one to brag about.

Donald Trump tried Thursday to explain away his apparent staycation amid a tightening presidential race, but unfortunately for the former president, his numbers just didn’t add up.

Ever since Trump’s rally in Atlanta this past weekend, the former president has been lying low at home. Meanwhile, his running mate, J.D. Vance, has seemingly been sent to follow Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz across the country, to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

During a press conference from the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, Trump was asked about his apparent pause in public appearances. He didn’t take it well.

“You have not had a public campaign event for nearly a week now; tomorrow you’ll be in Montana, which is not a swing state,” said one reporter. “Some of your allies have expressed concern that you’re not taking this race seriously, particularly—”

“What a stupid question,” Trump interjected.

“At a time where there is enthusiasm on the other side. Why haven’t you been campaigning this week?” the reporter asked.

“Uh, because I’m leading by a lot and because I’m letting their convention go through,” Trump said, implying he had taken a step back before immediately contradicting himself. “And I am campaigning a lot.”

Trump then claimed that he’d kept busy working on “commercials that are at a level that anybody’s ever done before.”

The Republican nominee also said that he’d been doing remote interviews.

“I’m speaking to you on phones, I’m speaking to radio, I’m speaking to television. Uh, television is coming over here,” Trump said. “Excuse me, what are we doing right now?”

Earlier this week, Trump called in to Fox & Friends to push the baseless claim that Harris had picked Walz out of antisemitism against another contender, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, but he couldn’t get through it without reviving his own offensive comments about Jewish voters.

Trump then criticized Harris for not speaking more with the press. “She’s not doing any news conferences. You know why she’s not doing [them]? She doesn’t know how to do a news conference. She’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Trump said Thursday.

This claim seems to be a new line of attack for Trump and Vance, who made a comment about it Wednesday on the tarmac in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Someone close to Harris’s campaign told Politico that there was little “incentive” for Harris to speak more with the press. “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out,” they said.

As for Trump’s claim that he’s “leading by a lot,” that’s not necessarily clear.

When listing recent polls that had him ahead, Trump cited a recent Rasmussen Reports survey published Thursday, which found that Trump was leading 49 percent to 44 percent. Rasmussen was recently dropped from the national poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, after it was determined to be too right-leaning to be considered reliable.

Trump cited a CNBC poll published Thursday that found the former president to have a two-point lead over his opponent. He also mentioned an MSNBC poll that placed him ahead, but such a poll did not appear to exist.

While Trump claimed he’d taken the lead in swing states, an Ipsos poll published Thursday found that the two candidates were neck and neck, with Harris taking a slight lead. On Wednesday, two key national poll aggregators found that after months of struggling, the Democratic Party’s candidate had overtaken Trump in the polls.

Trump is well aware that he’s beginning to struggle in the polls—apparently, it’s driving him nuts.

Donald Trump hasn’t let up on insisting that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently became Black.

During a bumbling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee deflected a direct question probing his reasoning for claiming that the biracial Democrat had “turned Black.”

“Kamala Harris’s father is Jamaican American, and she went to a historically Black college,” prompted a reporter, referring to Harris’s attendance at Howard University. “How is she only recently deciding to be Black?”

“You’ll have to ask her that question because she’s the one that said it. I didn’t say it,” Trump said. “But I’ve known her a long time, I actually contributed to her campaign a long time ago, because I was a developer—I contributed to lots of campaigns, to Democrats, Republicans; some were liberal, some were conservative, but you’ll have to ask her about that.

“To me it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “But to her, from her standpoint, I think it’s very disrespectful to both, really. Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful to both. To me it doesn’t matter.”

Trump’s outrageous claim sprang up at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, when the 78-year-old white candidate tried and failed to curry favor with the crowd by trash-talking Harris’s racial identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said at the convention, seemingly unable to grasp how a person could have two parents from different cultures but still manage to appreciate both. (More than 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2020 census, is multiracial.)

Donald Trump announced Thursday he has agreed to debate Vice President Kamala in not just one September debate but three.

The news of the three new dates, however, didn’t arrive without a confusing flub. In the middle of a rambling, short-notice press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced his intentions to debate Harris on September 4 on Fox News, September 10 on NBC News, and in another September 25 debate on ABC News.

But moments after Trump made the claim, it appeared he had mixed up some of the dates and their networks. Spokespeople for ABC said the network had agreed to proceed with the originally scheduled September 10 debate, while NBC News said they had agreed to host a debate on September 25, reported The Daily Beast’s Corbin Bolies.

“She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview,” Trump said of Harris. “But I look forward to the debates.”

Harris’s campaign reaffirmed that she would be up for the September 10 ABC News debate shortly after the details were ironed out.

Trump’s announcement came as a complete reversal of where he stood on the debates just last week, when he wrote on Truth Social that he had “terminated” the September 10 ABC News showdown over the fact that the Democratic nominee had changed when he had only agreed to debate “Sleepy Joe Biden.” In its place, Trump offered an alternative debate on Fox News in front of a live crowd, which Harris’s campaign did not sign up to.

The sudden announcement of three back-to-back debates may have been a last-ditch effort to regain lost favor with some of his fans, who were stunningly disappointed by his decision to back out of the first scheduled debate—so much so that they got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending on Truth Social after the news broke.

Stephen Miller tried to invent a new, outrageous attack against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, calling them the “number one traffickers” of “girls into sex slavery on planet Earth” on MSNBC Wednesday night.

On The Beat With Ari Melber, the former White House adviser and Trump campaign surrogate went into a rant after Melber questioned Miller about the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.  

“A lot of innocent people have been persecuted by a corrupt system!” Miller shouted. “What kind of corrupt system throws Republican lawyers in jail for offering good, sound legal advice but does nothing with secretaries of state who plainly violate their own state laws and constitutions? How many people are in jail right now?

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the number one traffickers of children—girls into sex slavery on planet Earth! How many people are in jail for that?” Miller added, before Melber stepped in to cut him off. 

“We’ve gone this far—we’ve gone. We’ve gone this far in an exchange, we’re not doing just anything you want to rip off the internet that’s false. And we’re not doing defamation here!” Melber replied. “As you know, there’s other Trump allies who’ve got a lot of trouble with that. We’re not doing that here.” 

The exchange was a small part of a 30-minute interview Melber conducted with Miller, who has not reacted well to Biden stepping away from the 2024 election and Harris taking his place. He freaked out the day the news was announced, loudly complaining on Fox News.

“They held a primary!” Miller lamented at the time. “People—they had ballots! They filled out circles that went to the voting booths! They spent money on advertisements, and as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.”

Miller has spent his post–White House career concern-trolling, from TV appearances attacking Democrats over immigration policies or spreading lies about Hunter Biden, to fake, culture-war-driven lawsuits over stuff like allegedly gay Pop-Tarts. His latest rant proves that the architect of the Muslim ban is a professional troll now, and will take on that role again if Donald Trump returns to the White House. 

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted President Joe Biden to drop out because she was startled by his poor debate performance and, apparently, not that impressed by his political machinations.

In an interview with David Remnick for The New Yorker published Thursday, Pelosi discussed the debate, her appearance on Morning Joe, and her influence over Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race.

To hear Pelosi tell it, she was always one step ahead of Biden and his campaign.

Despite what Pelosi described as a pervasive confidence among her people that Biden would outperform Donald Trump in the debate, she claimed to have advised Biden against participating. “I said, [Trump’s] doggy doo-doo. You’re going to get doggy doo-doo on your shoe. It’s not a good thing,” Pelosi said.

Like many Americans, Pelosi was “startled” and “stunned” by Biden’s poor performance in June’s presidential debate.

Pelosi appeared on Morning Joe in July, where she signaled that she was no longer aligned with the messaging of the Biden campaign. While the campaign continuously asserted the incumbent’s unwavering intention to seek reelection, Pelosi spoke with a less definitive tone.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run,” Pelosi said, an implicit rejection of the decision stated by the campaign. “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is.”

Although Pelosi did not cop to her status as a highly influential political operator, Remnick wrote that Pelosi’s appearance on Morning Joe signaled a “permission structure” to others to call on Biden to end his campaign.

It was previously reported that Pelosi, along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, made direct appeals to Biden urging him to drop out.

“I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening.… We couldn’t see it go down the drain because Trump was going to be president and then he was going to take the House. Imagine! Imagine how that would be! Well, we don’t have to imagine. We saw,” Pelosi said.

“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she admitted of Biden. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: This ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The president has to make the decision for that to happen.”

Unprompted, Pelosi denied rumors that she was in any way the mastermind behind Biden’s decision. “People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines; I was talking to Chuck [Schumer]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all,” she said.

“I never called one person, but people were calling me saying that there was a challenge there. So there had to be a change in the leadership of the campaign, or what would come next?”

Her goal, she added, was simple: “That Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”

After President Biden backed out of the 2024 presidential election and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump attempted to weasel out of a previously agreed on debate on ABC News scheduled for September 10. Now Trump wants back in. 

The Washington Post reports that Trump is expected to propose a new debate in the next few days to Harris moderated by ABC News or NBC News with Univision, citing anonymous sources. The move comes after Trump had proposed a September 4 debate moderated by Fox News but was rebuffed by the Harris campaign and criticized by his own supporters. 

Only on Wednesday, the Trump campaign was dodging questions about how the former president and convicted felon ducked out of the previously scheduled debate. This followed a litany of excuses Trump has made since Harris entered the race. He claimed that he couldn’t go on ABC because of ongoing litigation against the network and that he didn’t need to debate because he was already leading in the polls (he wasn’t). His team said that he couldn’t debate someone who wasn’t officially the Democratic nominee and didn’t have former President Barack Obama’s endorsement. Hours later, Obama endorsed Harris. 

The real reason Trump has been hesitant to debate Harris is probably because he’s worried. Trump reportedly thinks it’s unfair that he has to run against Harris, complaining to confidants about the media coverage Harris is getting and about being overtaken in polls. He and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have been struggling to come up with any effective attacks against Harris and Tim Walz, trying out accusations of antisemitism and attacks on Walz’s military record that so far haven’t picked up any traction. 

But in a debate, Trump will have the opportunity to come up with new soundbites and insults, albeit against an opponent sharper than Biden, and he probably wants to do it on a bigger stage than Fox News, even though they would give him a home-field advantage. As Trump would say, the ratings will probably be sky-high.  

Donald Trump is losing in more ways than one. According to a Marquette Law School Poll national survey published Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by four percentage points.

Americans have identified Trump as the old man in the race since President Joe Biden dropped out last month, and key swing states that had previously identified as red are now considered toss-ups, according to the Cook Political Report.

Yet one issue above everything else is really gnawing at the bloviating populist: his dwindling crowd size.

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was—And she pays for her ‘Crowd,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

Photographic evidence proves otherwise. Pictures of Trump’s Philadelphia rally in late June—which was held at the same arena as Harris’s event on Tuesday—stand in stark contrast to images of the Democrat’s packed crowds. Photos of Trump onstage include backgrounds loaded with empty seats and even entirely empty sections.

Meanwhile, Harris’s explosion onto the campaign trail just a handful of weeks ago has brought scores of crowds lining up to see her speak, with some queues (like the one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin) trailing for more than half a mile to enter the arena, reported AFP.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Harris’s ability to meet and exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. On Thursday, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”

Other top stories on the site hinted at more chaos inside Team Trump, including concerns that Trump is “panicking” and that a short-notice afternoon press conference at Mar-a-Lago, which is reportedly only permitting the attendance of reporters hand-selected by Trump’s team, is evidence of Trump losing faith with his campaign.

“Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking,” wrote former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on X (formerly Twitter.) “I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/’save’ his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.”