"What a stupid question this is!" Donald Trump recently raged at a journalist during a lengthy public meltdown that was billed as a "press conference." The reporter had correctly noted, "You have not had a public campaign event for nearly a week now." This factual observation set Trump off on a diatribe full of lies. "I’m leading by a lot," he insisted. "I am campaigning a lot," he pushed back. In reality, Vice President Kamala Harris is up two points over the former president in national polling. And while she's been hitting the road, even holding multiple rallies in a day, Trump has mostly been hiding out at Mar-a-Lago, only doing one campaign event in the last week in the MAGA-safe space of Montana. As Philip Bump at the Washington Post showed in a recent analysis, "Trump is holding far fewer rallies" and public appearances than he did in both 2016 and 2020.
Last week's hastily assembled press conference was Trump's attempt to fake "campaigning" without actually leaving his house. The Washington Post reported that "When he heard his team had summoned reporters to Florida for a briefing without him, he asked them to arrange for buses to take them to his club so he could hold a news conference." His team needs to do a better job, in that case, of keeping secrets from their boss because that press conference, like most of Trump's public appearances before mainstream news media, was a disaster. As Joe Scarborough noted on MSNBC the morning after, "his people just don't want him to go out and give speeches. I'm sure they didn't want him to go out and give the press conference yesterday, but Donald Trump is still driven by that belief that 'I alone can do it.'"
