Tired Trump gets trolled by Team Harris as campaign reaches final fortnight
TOI correspondent from Washington: Two days shy of her 60th birthday, campaign managers for Kamala Harris are talking up the vibrancy of their candidate while trolling MAGA supremo Donald Trump, 78, bailing on interviews in an for the ages, now becoming one of the ages.
The Harris campaign has quickly seized on reports on Friday that an “exhausted” Trump is cancelling interviews, asking, “if he can’t even run a campaign schedule, how can we expect him to be well enough to run the country?” Trump’s media team is clapping back, insisting the reports are “unequivocally false,” and he is “running laps around Kamala Harris on the campaign trail.”
“He has more energy and a harder work ethic than anyone in politics,” his press aide Karoline Leavitt said, insisting that he has done media interviews every day this week.
Indeed, Trump who is widely known to thrive on the oxygen of publicity, has been at campaign events, rallies, and interviews almost every day, but they are mostly in friendly sit-downs and rallies of his supporters. On Friday morning, he appeared on Fox and Friends, his familiar go-to, where he gets simpering attention in a softball setting.
Harris too has been on a tear after initial hesitancy in taking on adversarial situations, looking more energetic than Trump, who has indeed looked burned out over the past 48 hours. She in scheduled to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is typically a marathon sitting lasting two hours and more, over the next few days. Trump too has said he will do America’s most watched podcast in the near future.
Both candidates are now increasingly forsaking traditional and legacy media in favor of new media like podcasts aimed at specialized audiences. Podcasts typically are more intimate and last longer than mainstream media interviews.
Reports that Trump is bailing out of interviews first appeared in the journal Politico, which cited a Trump adviser telling producing of a podcast called Shade Room Trump was “exhausted and refusing [some] interviews” and offering a surrogate instead. He did not look in top form either at a Catholic charity dinner in New York on Thursday night, where he looked listless.
In his Fox and Friends sitdown on Friday morning, Trump, sounding whiny and aggrieved wheeled out familiar lines about how he is a “stable genius” and how will complain to Rupert Murdoch that the channel is giving voice to too many Democrats to lie. “Trump avoids real interviews, goes to safe space, still can’t help but whine, talk about himself, and ignore the needs of the American people,” the Harris campaign trolled him .”Trump is low energy… sad. Too old, too tired, too senile,” another Harris supporter taunted.
At 78, Trump is now the oldest candidate to run for President in the US, and his campaign is now on the defensive on the age issue after it spend months mocking Biden on the age issue. Harris, who turns 60 on Sunday, has long been a vigorous exerciser on most days when she put in cardio workouts.
