Truth and fantasy had another run in lately as Donald Trump had to cobble together another Big Lie to make sure that his narrative of becoming emperor stays juiced. Sunday it was reported that 100,000 people had attended his Wildwood, NJ rally and today after Trump left court he mentioned that same figure and mentioned that the courthouse was impossible to approach, police have the area so “locked down.” Both of these contentions have been disproven numerous times in numerous articles. There are no crowds jostling daily to get near the Manhattan Criminal Courts building and there was nowhere near 100,000 people in attendance in New Jersey. Those facts are false. But here’s something real.

Here’s Trump claiming the crowd was 100K and reading off his great poll numbers. If these polls worry you, let me remind you that Hillary was polling at 90% to win and you saw how that worked out. And then there was the Red Wave in 2022 with the GOP picking up 40 seats. Righto.

He catches himself after he says Nev-AHH-duh. Maybe he is polling 12 points ahead. I can tell you that I was in the hospital this weekend and I had my computer open and a technician saw what I was reading and laughingly inquired, “Oh, what’s Trump doing now?” and I told him and chuckled together. Trump’s a joke everywhere I go and I go normal places like the grocery store, post office, mall, nothing that you could mark as a *liberal* gathering place. Here’s the promo Trump cut.

Here’s an ad in Trump’s thread under the promo.

I wonder if a white woman who got denied could ask Stephen Miller (this is his group) for help? Or this is white male only?

And here’s another Trump promo.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry watching this stuff. It’s right at the level of self parody. Yet we are told that Trump’s making a lot of money in donations, and polling to beat the band. Here’s what Dan Rather says about polling:

One news organization said the polling industry is “a wreck, and should be blown up.”  It turns out pollsters didn’t factor in enough white, non-college-educated voters, who apparently are less likely to answer pollsters’ questions. They also happen to be Trump’s biggest support base.

How about the “Red Wave” predicted in 2022? Or the surveys that said Americans cared more about the economy than abortion after Roe v. Wade was struck down? Voters said otherwise.

Analysts from the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight explained the 2022 election results this way. “[A poll’s] true utility isn’t in telling us who will win, but rather in roughly how close a race is — and, therefore, how confident we should be in the outcome. Historically, candidates leading polls by at least 20 points have won 99 percent of the time. But candidates leading polls by less than 3 points have won just 55 percent of the time. In other words, races within 3 points in the polls are little better than toss-ups — something we’ve been shouting from the rooftops for years.”

I am not a gambler, but those don’t seem like very great odds. Here are a couple of other important points:

Most voters aren’t really paying attention to the race yet. Based on historical trends, that won’t happen until the conventions this summer at the earliest, and more likely not until after Labor Day.

Pollsters are struggling to keep up with changing technology. Not long ago, data was collected by calling voters at home on landlines. Now with the ubiquity of cell phones with caller ID, answer rates for pollsters have been plummeting. Also, some folks, maybe more than we think, just flat-out lie, to mislead the pollsters.

You can also point the finger at news organizations that trumpet every poll regardless of its quality because a horse race engenders clicks.

I don’t want to think that the mainstream media is so jaded as to put the pursuit of profit above the pursuit of truth, but I do know for an absolute fact that the method of political journalism that existed pre-Trump is still the one in use and it doesn’t work on Trump. Trump needs to be covered in clear, factual terms and not normalized, as has been the case the past nine years. Both siderism is deadly in this day and age. And the sycophantic normalization of Trump’s crimes and behavior that the GOP is doing needs to be reported that way, too.

I sometimes wonder if I’m going insane looking at these polls. How anybody with the slightest sense of decency can consider voting for this crook is utterly beyond me. But then I remember the Red Wave that wasn’t, in 2022, and feel much better. Rather says,

What the latest Times/Siena poll should be is a great motivator. Sure, don’t believe the polls, but also don’t believe that Donald Trump’s many legal troubles will spell his political doom. Please, get involved. Make sure you’re registered and your friends and family are registered too.

This is our only hope. We must destroy this buffoon at the ballot box. We must blow him into electoral dust.

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6 COMMENTS

  1. I think he has a magic shoe horn that lets him squeeze 100,000 people into an area that holds 20,000 (and still has room to spare)

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  2. “I don’t want to think that the mainstream media is so jaded as to put the pursuit of profit above the pursuit of truth, . . . .”

    You mean the same folks who follow the motto of “If it bleeds, it leads?” You mean the same folks who, in 1979, started a nightly late-night news show devoted SOLELY to coverage of the Iran hostage crisis (which would eventually turn into “Nightline”)? You mean the same folks that Don Henley was savagely parodying in 1982’s “Dirty Laundry” (“We got the bubble-headed bleach blond, comes on at 5/She can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye” and also, “Can we film the operation? Is the head dead yet? . . .Get the widow on the set” and “When it’s said and done we haven’t told you a thing/We all know that crap is king”)?

    Decades ago, networks allowed their news divisions to be largely above the “profit motive” but, in the past 20 years, those news divisions are expected to turn profits and the ones that don’t bring in the bucks (via those all-important ratings) find their budgets getting cut while the morning talk shows start turning into “tryout” plays for new anchors as well as “retirement” spots for anchors whose day in the sun is fading.

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    • Amen. You nailed it. If I may I’d like to add something from Rather himself that came from his book The Camera Never Blinks about his days in local news, a variation on the if it bleeds it leads theme. He wrote about the bosses wanting to attract viewers via LE making arrests and people who’d gotten killed in whatever manner. The slang for mixing in the sensational stuff was “Fuzz and Was.”

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  3. Jesus fed the multitude with a few loaves of bread and a few fish…but it wasn’t 100,000. Maybe trump is the reincarnated messiah after all.
    Uh…waiter…please bring me my glass of grape juice…the Jim Jones special. I’m discharging myself from this insane asylum.

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