What did we learn from the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election? Anodyne questions: Why do we want to see more fighters?
Obviously he’s said iterations of this so many times that it fades into the back of the mind. But I just read the new book by Politico’s Meridith McGraw on Trump’s post-presidency, and one of the takeaways is just how much the aftermath of losing the 2020 election and Jan. 6 shaped the last few years for Trump. The book details his interest in the audits of votes, his calls to the 2022 Republican candidates about how they needed to emphasize his claims, his interest in defeating candidates who’d voted for his impeachment in the House to prove the point of his influence. And that aftermath shaped the people who have been around him and the way the party’s changed.
We ran in 2016 and it was amazing, and we won, because we ran a lot of love in this room. In 2020 we ran and did better, so people like to hear it. “Oh, he’s a conspiracy theorist” — we got millions and millions more votes, we did much better, it wasn’t even a contest. I told one of the papers what the difference was. The second time we did much better than the first. There were a lot of things that happened. We know what those things are, so what difference — because now, in like 48 days or whatever it might be, we’re going to do something that will be, I don’t think it’s going to shock the world actually, I think the world is going to be prepared already. In Europe, they want it to happen. Even though they would not prefer dealing with me in terms of the economics, they still want it to happen, because the whole world is blowing up, and they know it is not going to happen if I’m president here. If we did well, and I did well, I wouldn’t think of doing this again, since I know what happened.
One thing that people may have heard a thousand times before was Trump responding to a fairly anodyne question at Tuesday night’s event. “We’ve never needed a fighter more and we’ve never had someone more qualified to step in and lead our country than you,” Sanders told him at the outset of the event after a discussion of the apparent second assassination attempt. Why do you want to be the president, and why do you continue to fight even though they are attacking you?
One of the clips that a lot of people saw, was a description of her children reminding her of what is important and also keeping her humble, as well as the criticism that she doesn’t have anything keeping her humble. This was actually the second town hall to open with children as a topic: In Gabbard’s case, she spoke about her own desire and inability to have children and the importance of I.V.F.
For the last few weeks, the Trump campaign has been trying out a town-hall format in which a friend of theirs asks Donald Trump questions and then they also turn to two voters for questions. The hosts have included Tulsi Gabbard in La Crosse, Wis., last month and Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas in Flint, Mich., on Tuesday night. The format is watchable and voter questions have been primarily about the high cost of living but the events have really gone a lot of places.
