Responses and non-answers

Lawrence O’Donnell’s commentary on yesterday’s Trump “General News Conference” is worth watching in full. O’Donnell points out that most of the questions — mostly inaudible, as there was no microphone for the press — were wasted questions, silly, pointless, and that Trump’s responses (most glaringly, to a question about mifepristone) did not constitute answers. And that Kamala Harris’s speech yesterday received little or no airtime from news networks.

Here is a Trump non-answer of my choosing, his response to a reporter who asked for his “constitutional analysis” of Kamala Harris’s replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. The full question is impossible to hear, but I did make out the words “constitutional analysis.” I have made slight corrections to C-SPAN’s transcription (which — guess what? — doesn’t include reporters’ questions):

We have a constitution. It’s a very important document and we live by it. She has no votes and I’m very happy to run against her. I’m not complaining from that standpoint. And I hate to be defending him, but he did not want to leave. He wanted to see if he could win. They said you’re not going to win after the debate. They said you’re not going to win. You can’t win. You’re out. And at first they said it nicely and he wasn’t leaving and then you, you know it, you know it better than anybody. Wait a minute. So, uh, when you think about it, they said at first they were going to go out to another vote, they were going to go through a primary system, a quick primary system, which it would have to be, and then it all disappeared and they just picked a person that was the first out. She was the first loser. Okay. So we call her the first loser. She was the first loser. When, uh, during the primary system, during the Democrat primary system, she was the first one to quit and she quit. She had no votes, no support and she was a bad debater, by the way, very bad debater. And that’s not the thing I’m looking forward to, but she was a bad debater. She did it — obviously a bad job. She never made it to lowa then for some reason. And I know he regrets it. You do too. He picked her and she turned on him too. She was working with the people that wanted him out. But the fact that you can be, get no votes, lose in the primary system, in other words, you had fourteen or fifteen people. She was the first one out. And that you can then be picked to run for president. It seems, seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not.

How’s that for constitutional analysis?