With Froot Loops by his side, Trump gives another cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs performance (2024)

Flanked by groceries that fittingly included a box of Froot Loops and desperate to stop the momentum of his surging Democratic opponent, former president Donald Trump read, rambled and raged for 50 minutes before taking a single question at an event billed as his second press conference in the past two weeks.

And the rambling didn’t end when the questioning began. Likewise, it’s difficult to determine whether Trump knows where reality ends and the lies begin.

As Trump Bedminster golf club members cheered him on Thursday afternoon, Trump tricked CNN and Fox News into giving him free airtime to insult Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee who now leads Trump in nearly every poll — just three weeks after entering the race.

“Trump has always lacked message discipline but he used to compensate for it with high energy and showmanship that resonated with supporters,” ex-Trump spokesperson Alyssa Farah Griffin tweeted. “Lately Trump is low energy, meandering, and struggling to maintain a thought. Another 90 minute presser that gained him nothing.”

While Trump babbled about energy policies and lied about his economic achievements and the current state of the economy, a box in the right corner of the Fox News screen all but laughed at him — showing a 554.67-point gain in the Dow, which once again has climbed above 40,000.

Eventually, Fox removed the box from the screen. CNN, meanwhile, cut away from the rambling after 30 minutes, before Trump took a single question.

Trump railed against fake news, crooked judges and crooked prosecutors — hours after his lawyers asked a New York judge to postpone his Sept. 18 sentencing on 34 felony counts until after the election.

At one point he asked, “Why would I put myself through it again?” Not to stay out of prison, but “to make America great again,” Trump said as non-media attendees cheered.

While standing next to assorted groceries and misquoting statistics on inflation, Trump — called “unmoored” by a former Republican governor and scolded by his chief rival for the GOP nomination to “quit whining” — tried to keep an election that he led only three weeks ago from slipping through his hands.

It likely didn’t work. While top officials in the GOP have begged Trump to stay on message and speak about only policy, he couldn’t do it.

At one point, clearly agitated, he said, “I’m entitled to personal attacks [on Harris]. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence. ... She called me ‘weird.’”

Later, he added, “They want me to be nice, but they want to put me in jail.” But, he insisted, “I’m immune from everything they charge me with.”

David Axelrod, a former top advisor to President Barack Obama, tweeted: “This is really something. In a press conference called to attack Harris on economics and tie her to Biden, Trump launches into a lengthy harrangue about the court cases against him. It is like watching someone have a nervous breakdown in public. He can’t control himself.”

Here’s a sampling of other things Trump said in his prepared remarks and when questions finally were asked, roughly 50 minutes into the session, with selected and mostly friendly media members:

— Trump said he saw a man on TV who was asked what Harris’ last name was and “nobody knew.” He added, “I don’t even use it because people don’t know who I’m talking about.” Polls indicate that while voters want to know more about Harris, they certainly know her name.

— We’re leading in the polls,” Trump said, even though a stream of polls have indicated he’s behind and falling further behind each day.

— Biden, who captured 81 million votes and beat Trump by more than 7 million votes in 2020, “had a little group of people who had been voting for him,” Trump said.

— Harris “has been unbelievable in terms of badness to some of our great allies. You know who I’m talking about,” Trump said, without mentioning what allies he was talking about.

— While Harris has pledged to go after price-gouging companies caught sticking it to Americans, Trump falsely charged “she wants communist price controls,” then added, “if they worked, I’d go along with them, but they don’t work.”

— He called Harris “far more radical than Bernie Sanders. And she picked a guy [vice presidential nominee Tim Walz] who’s more radical than Bernie Sanders, and he wants tampons in boys’ bathrooms.”

As governor of Minnesota, Walz signed a bill in 2023 that required the state’s schools to stock free menstrual products in restrooms regularly used by students in grades four through 12. The statute was gender neutral and encouraged making the products available to transmasculine (trans boys and male-presenting) students, although that would not necessarily entail stocking them in boys’ bathrooms.

— Harris “wants to abolish coal, oil and natural gas,” Trump said, although the Biden-Harris administration has produced oil at record levels.

— “She wants to close electric plants,” he said, while adding that he’s “a big fan of electricity.”

— Despite leaving office with the worst jobs record since the Great Depression, thanks to his mishandling of the pandemic, Trump insisted, “I left them a surging economy.”

— He lied about mortgage rates being “above 10%” when the rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage on Thursday was 7.105%. Inflation has dipped below 3%, according to stats released this week.

— He claimed there’s a law in California that says you can rob stores as long as you don’t rob more than $950 worth of stuff. There’s no such law.

— He said “beyond the number of 100 percent” of job creation has gone to migrants.

— He said, “I don’t think anyone has endorsed Kamala,” despite Harris capturing dozens of individual political and celebrity endorsem*nts and the endorsem*nts of the nation’s most powerful unions.

— “You’re all going to be thrown into a communist system,” he said. “You will be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care.”

— With Iran closer to manufacturing nuclear weapons, “I’m not looking to be bad to Iran,” he said. “We’re going to be friendly, I hope, with Iran. Maybe. But maybe not. But we’re going to be friendly, I hope. We’re going to be friendly.”

Hours before Trump started talking, the Harris-Walz campaign predicted what would happen:

“Not so fresh off NABJ, Florida and Twitter glitches, Donald Trump intends to deliver another self-obsessed rant full of his own personal grievances to distract from his toxic Project 2025 agenda, unpopular running mate and an increasing detachment from the reality of the voters who will decide this election,” their statement read.

They then poked at Trump’s crazy allegation that photos of overflowing crowds at Harris rallies were generated by artificial intelligence: “These remarks will not be artificial intelligence, but they will certainly lack intelligence,” the Democrats wrote.

They added: “Banning abortion, raising costs on family, confusing basic facts, cutting Social Security and Medicare, blocking border security, and being publicly unstable unfit and unwell, will not help his struggling campaign for president. Tune in for the same old thing.”

When President Joe Biden stepped aside and handed the nomination to Harris, polls immediately turned in her favor, and Trump’s leads in crucial swing states evaporated.

Trump, meanwhile, made headlines with racist attacks on Harris in an interview with Black journalists, rambled through rallies and spewed hundreds of lies in a previous press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

An interview with X owner Elon Musk — that Trump insisted enjoyed the all-time highest audience — was marred by technical problems.

Every poll result published since Harris entered the race has shown her energizing the Democratic base and grabbing a larger share of independents, while making gains in nearly every age group and demographic, but especially among younger and Black voters.

To fight back, Trump’s campaign announced it is adding to its staff, and Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager during his 2016 campaign, will come aboard for the final three months.

Will Lewandowski provide a reset? Former South Carolina governor and GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley told Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier on “Special Report” that Trump should focus on policy and messaging instead of crowd sizes at rallies, Harris’ race, or attacks on her intellect.

“You can’t win on those things. The American people are smart. Treat them like they’re smart,” she said. “It’s not about her. It’s about the American people. Talk to them and let them know you need their vote.”

Former Ohio governor and 2020 GOP presidential candidate John Kasich said, “predicting Trump is like “asking me to predict Donald Trump’s behavior, it would be easier to predict the weather next year, right?”

He added: “Maybe if they sit him down and say, ‘You’re on the road to losing,’ maybe that will change him. ... But, you know, he is unmoored right now. He doesn’t have the discipline.”

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