close

Politics - News Analysis

Trump Posts Video to Truth Social Telling Such an Unbelievable Lie It’s Almost Hard to Believe

He thought he just didn't need to show up, but that could have been a huge mistake.

By

Donald Trump couldn’t be bothered to attend last week’s GOP primary debate hosted by Fox News. The televised debate attracted significant viewers, given the far smaller volume of live television people have watched over the last few years.

But unless he actually is as delusional as he plays on TV, Trump could probably have foreseen the potential fallout from looking arrogant enough that he just doesn’t even need to try to win votes. During the 2012 election, it’s easy to recall how gobsmacked Mitt Romney was when he didn’t come away with the win. But Trump has to be accustomed by now to the difference between reality and what he’s trying to portray.

For example, Trump would love for you to believe that his interview with Tucker Carlson was viewed by more people than those who watched the televised debate with all the other candidates. But he knows it’s not the case. He’ll still SAY it, but he knows better. In fact, he released a video saying that more people watched his interview than any other interview in history. In his sick, twisted brain, his interview was watched twice as much as Oprah Winfrey’s famous interview with Michael Jackson. All lies.

And it’s not just that he missed an opportunity to show off his “skills” at the debate, either. It’s also the fact that those who did show up have been able to stay in the news (for something other than legal troubles) and raise money for their campaigns.

Vivek Ramaswamy raised nearly half a million dollars last Wednesday night alone. Nikki Haley moved up to basically a tie with second-place Ron DeSantis. The fact that any candidates have been capitalizing on their appearance at the debate at all means that one way or the other, Donald Trump missed an opportunity.

Team Trump was busy banking on his mugshot, anyway. They merchandized everything they could think of. The right-wing talking heads wasted no time propping him up for that, rather than castigating him for not attending the debate.

Here’s openly racist Jesse Watters talking about how the mugshot broadened Trump’s appeal to black voters, saying that “his” garbageman (apparently a black person) just told him he was buying mugshot merch for everyone he knows this Christmas. None of that happened, of course, but it is a glance into the Trump/Watters mindset: Black people are more amenable to people who have had legal trouble AND more likely to be your garbageman.

Whether Trump will pick up on his error and begin attending debates remains to be seen. It could be that he just doubles down on the strategy of arrogance. Either way, he’s got a long road ahead of him.

Now, let’s get to that lying video, which is truly unreal. It’s hard not to laugh. Trump says, “Wow, my interview with Tucker Carlson has turned out to be the single most watched video and interview in the history of the world, I guess. Such a great honor to have participated. 262 million views and counting. More than doubling the longtime reigning champ, the Oprah Winfrey interview of Michael Jackson. So, I want to congratulate Tucker, and I want to thank everyone. Thank you very much.”

From Newsweek, “Trump’s interview with Carlson has only 21.7 million video views as of Wednesday in all of the older versions of the app. That figure is nowhere near the “most watched” interview of all time. It is also a far cry from the most watched video, as the “Baby Shark Dance” video on YouTube currently has over 13.2 billion views.

In addition, according to X, the video view metric is “triggered when a user watches a video for at least 2 seconds” and sees as little as 50 percent of the video viewer on their screen—making it unclear how many of the 21.7 million may have even watched any substantial portion of the interview.”

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

Comments

Comments are currently closed.

Recent Stories

Trending Stories