Down in the polls, an ailing Trump finds lavish airtime on conservative media in two-day interview blitz
By Paul Farhi,
Jabin Botsford The Washington Post
Down in the polls and isolated by illness, President Trump retreated to the safe spaces of two Fox networks and Rush Limbaugh’s radio program in a 36-hour burst of media interviews three weeks before Election Day.
The sprawling, somewhat manic phone-in interviews put Trump front and center on the radar of many of his most loyal supporters, via the most conservative-friendly media outlets, but arguably did little to reach the independent and moderate voters Trump will need to close the gap with former vice president Joe Biden.
The method to Trump’s occasional madness — at one point Friday he boasted to Limbaugh that “our nuclear is all tippy top now” in an apparently reference to military weapons systems — seemed to play out as an effort to seize and maintain the media spotlight without spending any of his remaining campaign cash.
In recent days, his reelection campaign has stopped running TV ads in Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Nebraska, though he is still outspending Biden with Facebook ads in those states. The unpaid or “earned” media of his interview blitz, though, generated press coverage, social-media mentions and word of mouth without a dollar invested.
It all seemed to be crescendoing toward the suspenseful promise of a grand stunt — an unprecedented on-camera “medical examination” of the president by a Fox News’ medical contributor during Tucker Carlson’s prime-time program Friday night.
The interviews were friendly, to say the least, often feeling like extended ads for his reelection.
“You have a great record of achievement and accomplishment that is just incredible,” Limbaugh said at one point during a conversation that stretched over nearly two hours Friday afternoon. He later added, “Your arrival on the scene has been providential.”
Trump, who awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom during State of the Union speech in February, returned the favor. “The great Rush,” he said. “You are the great one. I’m honored to talk to you.”
[Isolated in the White House, Trump struggles to project a sense of normalcy after canceled debate]
The lavish time granted to the president — who was still talking Thursday night as Sean Hannity’s closing music played and whom Limbaugh had to cut off after two hours with “I know you’ve got a jam-packed day . . .” — was a window into the anything-goes of partisan speech on many frequencies of the airwaves.
Cable networks aren’t subject to federal equal-time regulations that require broadcasters to give rival candidates airtime when they feature one candidate for office. And although radio stations that carry Limbaugh’s program are subject to some rules, they typically provide an exemption for news interviews such as the host’s questioning of Trump. Fox News said it has offered to interview Biden on multiple occasions but has been turned down by his campaign each time.
With his choice of sympathetic hosts, Trump all but guaranteed he wouldn’t face challenging questions about his health status since being diagnosed with the novel coronavirus and hospitalized for roughly 72 hours this past week. His doctors and the White House have repeatedly withheld details of his treatment and have refused to say when the president last tested negative for the coronavirus, making it difficult to determine how, when and from whom he contracted it. They have stopped giving press briefings to update the president health, apparently at Trump’s direction.
Nor did he face much challenge on any other assertion, however outrageous. At one point, when discussing Iran on Limbaugh’s show, the president said, “If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/trump-wont-waste-his-time-in-virtual-debate/2020/10/08/024c3d97-89a8-4452-ab63-b5fac3e55b36_video.html
During his interview with host Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business channel Thursday morning, Trump implored his attorney general, William P. Barr, to indict and prosecute Biden and former president Barack Obama for allegedly spying on his 2016 campaign. It’s extraordinary for an American president to adopt the rhetoric of authoritarian leaders, yet Bartiromo had no follow-up. Trump has made prosecuting his political enemies a signature of his two most recent campaigns. In 2016, he repeatedly suggested imprisoning Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and still does so at rallies.
At times, he also veered into odd and inexplicable statements. While speaking with Hannity on Thursday night he said: “California is going to have to ration water. You want to know why? Because they send millions of gallons of water out to sea, out to the Pacific. Because they want to take care of certain little tiny fish that aren’t doing very well without water.”
Hannity didn’t ask what he was referring to.
But the interviews did manage to offer some clues to Trump’s health. Although he insisted that he was fully recovered, and even “cured” by an elaborate drug regimen, Trump coughed twice during the Hannity interview, and audibly cleared his throat. His breathing was noticeably heavy while speaking with Limbaugh, though he spoke at length without major interruption or evident difficulty.
Trump told Hannity that he plans to hold a rally Saturday night in Florida and one Sunday in Pennsylvania, despite the potential for spreading his illness while traveling. By Friday afternoon, however, the travel plans seemed to have fallen by the wayside, with the New York Times reporting that the president instead plans to convene a gathering of supporters on the South Lawn of the White House and address them from a balcony.
The president later tweeted that he would hold a rally on Monday in Sanford, Fla., the suburban Orlando city where a 17-year-old African American, Trayvon Martin, was shot by a resident named George Zimmerman in 2012, sparking an extended controversy and trial.
Hours earlier, Trump told Bartiromo he wouldn’t participate in a second presidential debate because of a new format, imposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates, in which the candidates would face off from remote locations because of concerns about the novel coronavirus. With Trump’s refusal to debate, Biden quickly agreed to appear in a town hall event that would be televised by ABC on the same night that the debate was to be held.
Trump’s Friday night “medical examination” will be his first on-camera interview since his hospitalization. It will be conducted by Dr. Marc Siegel, Fox News’s medical contributor who, like Trump, has occasionally downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, saying in March “there’s no reason to believe [the coronavirus is] actually more problematic or deadly than influenza.” It actually is many times more deadly. Siegel’s “examination” of the president will be conducted remotely, much like a telehealth call.
Siegel also claimed on the air in April that his 96-year-old father was cured of covid-19 with hydroxychloroquine, a drug that hasn’t been approved as a general treatment and whose safety and effectiveness have been repeatedly questioned. Trump has also hyped the drug, but has said little about it lately. He is not being treated with it.
