Former President Donald J. Trump began his news conference on Thursday in the lobby of Trump Tower, standing in front of seven American flags. He laid a bound folder down on a lectern and declared that he was going to focus on the southern border, where his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, is headed on Friday.
That lasted about 10 minutes.
Mr. Trump quickly appeared to grow bored with the remarks he read from, and drifted repeatedly toward other topics.
. . . At the beginning of the news conference, Mr. Trump struggled at times to articulate his thoughts or make a point clearly. He stumbled over some words as he read from remarks he had plainly not written. He bootstrapped one thought onto another based on whether the words associated with something else, as opposed to having a clear through line.
After he accused Ms. Harris of ruining San Francisco while she was the district attorney, a recent favorite line of attack, Mr. Trump followed it up with tangents that related loosely to the city of San Francisco as opposed to the reason he was at the lectern.
. . . Then he dodged several questions about whether Ukraine should cede its land to Russia in order to end the bloody incursion that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia first began in 2022. Ms. Harris earlier in the day made a jab at Mr. Trump, arguing that people who would propose Ukraine cede some of its territory to Russia were asking the country to surrender.
“It would have been a lot easier to work out prior to the start,” said Mr. Trump, who has praised Mr. Putin over the years and described the invasion as “smart” when it first occurred.
He answered a question about whether he would rescind his endorsement of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who’s running for governor and who has been linked in a CNN report to making homophobic, racist and antisemitic statements on a pornographic website before he was a candidate. Mr. Trump responded, “I don’t know the situation.”
As he left the lobby, he stopped when someone asked if Ukraine should give up territory.
“We’ll see what happens,” Mr. Trump said.
Oh, there’s definitely blame to go around, but not holding Trump to at least some standard would be compounding the mistakes of the past.
No one can argue someone else out of being a Trump supporter, but I still believe there’s a chance to justifiably mock him enough to maybe change some minds. If more coverage focused on how laughably batshit insane he was instead of “ooh, look, he’s not following convention and he’s breaking the rules” it would help a lot. His lot can’t abide weaknesses and he’s definitely weak.