Donald Trump held his first post-debate press conference on Friday at his Los Angeles–area golf club, but he didn’t have much of anything to announce. Instead, he mostly read a prepared speech repeating dozens of criticisms of Kamala Harris, complained about the moderators of the debate, and reiterated racist attacks on migrants residing in Springfield, Ohio, and elsewhere — though he notably abstained from further promoting baseless cat-and-dog-eating conspiracy theories about the community. He also took questions from reporters — about his extremist campaign companion Laura Loomer, the downturn in Trump Media stock, and several other topics. Below, our running account of what happened as it happened.
So in conclusion, Trump showed up almost 90 minutes late, repeated some old lies and attacks, and spewed more racist claims about Springfield, Ohio (without repeating the stuff about eating dogs and cats). If Trump is going to keep disrupting my Friday lunch break, I’m going to need him to come up with some fresh unhinged diatribes.
At the end of the press conference, amid a long tangent about everything he would do for California, he launched another series of attacks at Gavin Newsom (who also isn’t running for president) — including a threat to withhold federal help on wildfire:
Trump says he could have stopped Musk from leaving California, insisting:
Nobody even calls him to try and get him to stay. I would have been on him. I would have said, “Let’s have lunch. Let’s have dinner, and then let’s have breakfast the following morning.”
If they had an “honest vote counter,” natch. No Republican presidential candidate has won the state since 1988, but Trump thinks the only reason he isn’t carrying the Golden State is “fraudulent” universal voting by mail (which was implemented in 2020).
“If I ran with an honest vote counter in California, I would win California,” he said. “But the votes are not counted honestly. It’s a very dishonest system that you have in California.”
A reporter asked him about the company’s market troubles following this week’s debate:
After Trump insisted he wasn’t ditching his stock, shares of Trump Media shot up more than 25 percent.
The former president explicitly promised to order mass deportations in towns in Ohio and Colorado that have been the center of viral racist lies about immigrants. “We’re going to get these people out. We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country and we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora,” he said.
He waved off questions about the far-right extremist who has been accompanying him on the campaign trail. He called her a “supporter.”
“She’s been a supporter of mine. She speaks very positively of the campaign. I don’t control Laura, she has to say what she wants. She’s a free spirit.”
“She is a strong person, she has strong opinions.”
Trump also said he wasn’t aware of her conspiracy theories:
At the beginning of the question-and-answer section, Trump disputed a reporter’s statement that many of his Republican colleagues thought he gave a lackluster performance at Tuesday’s debate.
“Most of my Republican allies have said that I was great at the debate,” he said. “You’re just like a lot of other people at Fox.”
He declared that “any Jewish person that votes for Kamala is crazy,” noting that “she wouldn’t go to visit the prime minster of Israel in Congress because she had a sorority party.”
Trump claims the real reason is that Harris “hates Israel,” then adds, “I say Israel will not exist in two years if she is elected president.”
How do we know Trump is right about this? He says his predictions usually come to pass, citing the existence of hats that say “Trump Was Right About Everything.”
He’s repeating his claims that Biden exiting the 2024 race was an “overthrow of the president of the United States” and a “coup,” and claiming that Biden didn’t want to drop out, but “they” threatened to “execute the 25th Amendment” to take him out (there is no reporting that backs this up).
Then Trump asserts that Biden hates Harris, but not as much as his original archnemesis. ”I think he hates her almost as much as he hates me,” he says. “I think he hates me a little bit more.”
Complains Trump about the debate moderator:
This foolish fool, makes this statement to me, that the FBI made this statement. The FBI defrauded everybody because they used statistics not including some of the worse cities. So I think they probably wanted to defend me from a guy who is not smart, who has good hair but is not as good as he was five years ago.
He promoted the debunked pet-eating internet rumor at Tuesday’s debate, and Trump again mentioned Springfield, Ohio, in his presser — but did not mention the pets this time. He is now claiming that 32,000 undocumented Haitian migrants have arrived in the town (up from 20,000 in his previous remarks), “destroying their way of life.”
Trump’s words come as the Springfield residents have had their lives upended by a barrage of threats against City Hall and local schools, sparking evacuations and canceled school days.
He said he got elected in 2016 on the border issue — but he did such a good job, “really, there was nothing to do in 2020.” He claims his staff wouldn’t even let him talk about the border because he solved the issue so thoroughly that no one cared about it anymore. Poor Trump!
He said the border, under his administration, “was 100 percent beautiful, that includes fentanyl and drugs, it was fixed.”
Now he’s complaining that the debate moderators treated him unfairly. He rattled off some of his usual media anchor targets, then said he “lost a lot of respect” for David Muir. “He came at me with things,” Trump said. “I was right about the crime states going up.”
Though Trump is focusing a large portion of his remarks on his claims that Harris and Newsom have ruined San Francisco, he was inadvertently singing a different tune just a few weeks ago. At an event in Arizona in August, Trump said of the famed city, “Fifteen years ago, it was the best city in the country, one of the best cities in the world, and now you can’t do anything,” per SFGATE.
But 15 years ago, Harris was actually serving as San Francisco’s district attorney. As for Newsom? He was the San Francisco mayor at the time.
Impossible to transcribe in real time, particularly when most of it is unlikely to be credible. Trump’s overarching monotone point appears to be that Kamala Harris is pro-crime, anti-America, anti-California, and so forth. Also, C-Span briefly lost the feed:
Here we go! “I’m here today with a very simple message for the American people: We cannot allow comrade Kamala Harris to do what she did to the state of California to the United States.” Trump says the issues with California are all “man-made, or woman-made, destruction.” Appreciate that his red-baiting is so PC. He also called the governor “Gavin Newscum.”
I waited more than 90 minutes, and he’s just talking about how they have “lots of weddings, lots of events” at this golf club. To be fair, I was unaware that Trump had a club in L.A., so maybe he does need to do some promotion.
Eighty-four minutes late.
The campaign said this presser would start at noon. C-Span alone, maybe having learned its lesson from previous delays, said it would start at 12:45 p.m. ET. Now we’re beginning to wonder if it will be 12 p.m. Pacific Time. We’ll keep liveblogging. The backdrop has become a lonely, desolate place:
The random background guy is gone. Fare thee well, background guy.
Does this mean Trump is showing up soon? We have no idea:
Other people keep appearing in the livestream, which adds some excitement:
This guy:
But then he left the first guy alone again.
From the look of the sky behind this guy, pretty overcast, and from the slight movement of his suit, a little breezy:
This guy might know, but he’s not saying:
As is this guy:
If Donald Trump the political candidate is known for anything, it’s not punctuality. It’s noon right now, and the only person on-camera is this guy:
