News Analysis: Trump seeks to reclaim spotlight with old playbook of lying, talking smack to media

Standing next to a spread of coffee, cereal and breakfast meats at his New Jersey golf club on Thursday, former President Trump started what he billed as his second news conference in as many weeks by highlighting increased costs of everyday foodstuffs due to inflation — a major issue for voters in November.

Then, he veered off into a rambling 40-minute speech — uninterrupted by media questions — in which he aired old political grievances and debunked conspiracy theories, and lied, repeatedly, about the state of the economy, the safety of the nation and the policies of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running against him in the presidential race.

Among other things, Trump made the false claim — easily debunked — that Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, made it legal for thieves in California to “rob a store” if what they take is worth less than $950.

Thieves are “going into stores with calculators, calculating how much it is, because if it’s less than $950, they can rob it and not get charged,” Trump said. “That was her that did that.”

Trump’s event was part of a new campaign strategy to draw a contrast with Harris, whom the Trump campaign has been hammering for not taking media questions as she rides a wave of Democratic enthusiasm. But it and other recent events have had the additional effect of reviving a much older Trump strategy for drumming up attention — which is essentially for him to stand in front of reporters and talk smack.

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At his recent events, Trump has delivered a steady stream of insults about the country, about Harris and about the media — which have responded by showering him with headlines.

Some of those headlines have been critical, such as an NPR analysis that concluded Trump made at least 162 “misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies” during his hourlong presser at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida last week — or “more than two a minute.”

However, many others have simply repeated his most outrageous claims, furthering their reach.

The Harris campaign has largely ignored calls for her to speak more often with the media — which has frustrated reporters — and responded instead by mocking Trump’s gaggles as pathetic grabs for the spotlight. Before Trump’s Thursday event, for example, the Harris campaign predicted to the press that the GOP nominee would “deliver another self-obsessed rant full of his own personal grievances to distract from his toxic Project 2025 agenda, unpopular running mate, and increasing detachment from the reality of the voters who will decide this election.”

“Tune in for the same old thing,” the message concluded. In another statement after the event, which it called “Our statement on Trump’s ... whatever that was,” the Harris campaign reduced Trump’s long speech into him having “huffed and puffed.”

Jennifer Mercieca, a political historian and communications professor at Texas A&M and author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” said the Republican’s latest use of news conferences — and interviews with sycophants such as billionaire Elon Musk, who this week lobbed softball questions to the former vice president on his social platform X — is classic Trump.

“It’s information warfare. He wants to flood the zone with his content, he wants us to be talking about what he wants us to talk about, through his frame,” she said. “He cares about dominating — dominating the news cycle — and these press conferences provide him with an opportunity to dominate the news cycle.”

Many of Trump’s deviations from the truth stem from his style of political speech, where he routinely speaks in superlatives and employs populist language to cast himself as a strongman leader who can do no wrong. In his version of things, everything he does is the best or the “greatest,” while any plan, policy or output from his opponents is the “worst.”

At Thursday’s event, Trump was cheered by a group of supporters — making it feel more like a campaign event than a news one — and took only a handful of questions, some of which seemed teed-up for him, such as one in which he was asked why God decided to save him during the attempt on his life in Butler, Pa.

He railed against California and Gov. Gavin Newsom — whom he called “Newscum” — and suggested Harris had destroyed the state.

“San Francisco, you know, was a great city 15 years ago. Now it’s considered almost unlivable. You can’t live there,” he said.

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He repeated a false claim that all new jobs in the country are going to migrants, and said if Harris is elected, the U.S. would have a “1929 crash” — a reference to the Great Depression — and watch Social Security and “probably the nation itself” go bankrupt.

“You don’t have to imagine what a Kamala Harris presidency would be,” he said, “because you’re living through that nightmare right now.”

He said Harris “is in favor of the death of the American dream,” and repeatedly insinuated that the 2020 election was stolen, which it was not. And as with his other recent media events, he ridiculed the press — at one point alleging without any evidence that members of the “fake news” were destroying old video that would prove Harris has flip-flopped on policy.

“All you have to do is go back and look at your tapes — which many have been discarded, discarded by the fake news, because they don’t want people to see what she said just a year ago,” Trump said.

Robert C. Rowland, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Kansas and author of the book “The Rhetoric of Donald Trump: Nationalist Populism and American Democracy,” said Trump has never shown any real capacity to focus on policy, at least not in any detail. The former president has always spoken off the cuff about what threatens his base.

That can work, but it has become more difficult lately, Rowland said, as inflation has slowed, food prices have moderated and some wages have been increasing. Making matters worse for Trump is that his ramblings are becoming less coherent than ever.

“That tendency to ramble, to elaborate on stream of consciousness and to brag shamelessly — all of those things have become much stronger, and much less coherent than in 2016 and 2020,” Rowland said. “The stream of consciousness has become less clearly connected to real events, and more connected to a sense of grievance and anger.”

Mercieca said that politicians answering questions directly from the media is a good thing — an important part of any democracy — but that Trump has managed to flip that on its head, using his lies to undermine the media, people’s trust in the Fourth Estate and “democracy itself.”

Trump says whatever he wants — truthful or not, bigoted or braggadocian or cruel — because he knows the media will repeat it, and because he knows he won’t be checked on any of it by his base or the Republican establishment, which has handed the party over to him.

To avoid being used, Mercieca said, reporters should write about Trump’s “news conferences” only if he says something newsworthy, not whenever he says anything outrageous — because the latter, at this point, is his standard shtick, a stump speech that’s old news.

“When a plane lands safely, that’s not news, because it happens every five seconds,” Mercieca said. “When Trump says something outrageous, that’s not news, because it happens every five seconds.”