Whenever Kamala Harris makes a public appearance, the right-wing press rushes forward and declares it was a train wreck. So it’s not surprising that her appearance on Fox News yesterday had one commenter wondering if her “meltdown” on Fox News ended her campaign. Um, no.
In another example of news from another planet, someone at Breitbart reported Bret Baier saying that four Harris staffers were waving their arms and demanding the “interview” be ended. The rest of news media had Baier saying four members of Fox News staff were waving at him to wind up the interview because it was going over time. The New York Times was one of those. Also accocrding to the NY Times, Baier was irritated with Harris even before the interview began because of a last-minute schedule shift by the Harris campaign. Yes, Baier was irritated with a Vice President of the United States and major party presidential nominee because he had to adjust his plans to accommodate her. Some humility lessons may be in order for Mr. Baier.
It was widely noted that Baier was acting more as an agent of the Trump campaign than a journalist. It also was widely noted that Harris held her own. He often interrupted Harris and wouldnd’t allow her to respond to his questions. Baier’s bias and gaslighting were so blatant Lawrence O’Donnell was apoplectic.
As much as Baier kept trying to get Harris rattled, she kept her head and came back at him. When he wasn’t talking over her. Margaret Sullivan at The Guardian called Baier’s interview “grievance theater, not political journalism.” And see especially Greg Sargent at The New Republic, Harris’s Harsh Takedown of Fox’s Bret Baier Exposes MAGA’s Biggest Lie. Sargent makes the point that Fox has built a “fictional information coccoon” around Donald Trump. And Baier’s questions were from the fictional world of the coccoon, not the real world. “How much public support would Trump have right now if Fox and other right-wing outlets had not been pumping out sanitizing propaganda about him and his presidency for the last 10 years?” Sargent asks.
Trump, meanwhile, held a surreal “town hall” with an all-women audience. By some coincidence, the audience was made up of entirely of Trump-supporting Republicans. See Donald Trump’s Roomful of Suspiciously Friendly Women by Helen Lewis at The Atlantic.
If I remember rightly from four years ago, Trump's support network flooded the zone with fake polls that showed Trump pulling way ahead. This is a Rove trick on the assumption that some nitwits just want to vote for the winner so if that is perceived at the last minute as Trump, he'll pick up those undecided votes. I don't know that any poll that shows Trump gaining is fake but I'm not wetting my pants either. If we vote, we win.