Trump held another press conference – but it was the same old shtick

Donald Trump summoned reporters to one of his properties for the second time in as many weeks on Thursday -but they would be hard-pressed to find something new or interesting to write about.

Trump spoke for roughly 40 minutes before taking questions at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf resort. His lengthy diatribe touched on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, his former opponent, Joe Biden, and a wide range of other issues — trucks, domestic energy policy, China and the wars in Gaza and Ukraine — all while flanked by two tables covered in groceries including Cheerios, a pack of quickly-warming raw bacon and tins of coffee.

It was a spectacle that was clearly focused by his campaign to provide a platform for the GOP contender to attack Harris over economic issues, particularly inflation and the cost of consumer goods.

However, the lack of any central focus in Trump’s remarks led to the event dragging on and losing some of its edge. In his first question, he was asked about Israel and his communications with Benjamin Netanyahu, rather than the economy.

Questions were largely softballs and teed up the ex-president to launch attacks at Harris and set out a plan for his second-term agenda. But the president didn’t offer much of a vision for the future or how he would tackle the issues. Instead, he opted to look to the post to talk about the conditions when he was in the White House.

Journalists failed to ask about newly uncovered remarks from JD Vance, his running mate, declaring “the whole purpose” of post-menopausal women to be assisting with child-rearing.

“You’ve spoken very passionately about how God saved your life. And I’m wondering, have you put much thought into why God saved your life? As in, for what purpose has he been shielding you?” one reporter, veering closely towards cheerleading, asked Trump.

The ex-president responded by riffing about his teleprompter and a chart displayed behind him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he was nearly assassinated in July, before quipping: “Yeah, God has something to do with it. It’s, it’s a miracle, and God had something to do with it. And maybe it’s [because] we want to save the world.”

One change of pace for Trump appeared to be his apparent newfound acceptance of the fact that Harris will indeed be his opponent in the fall. While he derided the pressure campaign calling on Joe Biden to exit the 2024 race as a “coup”, there was no mention of his past suggestion that Biden would appear at the upcoming Democratic National Convention to attempt to “take back” his party’s nomination.

The former president also attempted to back away from his remarks in support of Elon Musk firing striking workers, though he vaguely suggested that he wanted workers to accept wages that would allow companies to make profits.

But more than anything else, this was a rehashing of the same flustered response to the newly-crowned Harris’s sudden recovery in the polls: none of his criticism of Harris or Tim Walz, her running mate, was any different from what Republicans have been slinging at the Harris campaign over the past few weeks since the incumbent president stepped aside from the campaign.

Perhaps the clearest sign of that was Trump’s ongoing inability to pronounce Harris’s name — “Kamala”, he repeated several times, with different pronunciations at different moments during his remarks. He also claimed that people did not know Harris’s last name: “it’s Harris”, he informed reporters at his presser.

Harris’s campaign, meanwhile, was busy pounding away at their opponent hours before the ex-president even took the microphone.

“TODAY: Donald Trump To Ramble Incoherently and Spread Dangerous Lies in Public, but at Different Home,” the vice president’s campaign declared in a news release ahead of his remarks.

It then presciently advised: “Tune in for the same old thing.”