Trump said all kinds of zany things in his "Meet the Press" interview with host Kristen Welker, which for mental health reasons I chose not to watch. A solid hour, or whatever its length, of psychotic ravings by a broken-down demagogue who also recently warned that President Biden is taking us into "World War Two" is not the way to nurture one's sanity. Especially when we're looking at another 14 months of his demented drivel — at a minimum. We must pace ourselves.
From his assertion that 15 million immigrants are "flooding our cities, flooding the countryside" this year (there were 2.7 million last year) to "We had the greatest economy in history" — "this beautiful thing" — but "We had to let some money come out" to, of course, "There is so much evidence that the [2020] election was rigged," Trump was in typical form: totally full of it.
But one of his loony gems from nowhere struck me as particularly Trumpian: "Things are not going right now very well for the consumer. Bacon is up five times."
Having contaminated the nation with an hour of Trump on an otherwise pleasant Sunday morn, NBC News felt (I guess) a responsibility to correct at least some of his deranged bullshit with a fact-checking article. As for the Bacon Watch: "In U.S. cities on average, the cost of sliced bacon is up by about 12% from the end of his term in office."
Such is what we can expect for another 14 months. But there's something else we can expect, unfortunately. Ms. Welker replaced the often ineffably clueless Chuck Todd, and Ms. Welker's response to Trump's 500%, plus various other nonsense was ... "There are a lot of factors that have contributed to that."
Whoa! The proper response was something along the lines of, "Horseshit. And if you try to filibuster me and persist in rattling off more of this sillyass crapola I'm going to cut this interview really short."
What, prithee, was the point of replacing Todd with Welker if we're only going to be served more of Todd's weak tea?
Jonathan Last of The Bulwark observed this morning that Trump's "nonsense shouldn’t have been left to the after-action fact check because Welker should have debunked it in real time. She didn’t." Last suggested the way to interview him is the way Jonathan Swan did during "the worst of COVID."
I don't know Welker's salary for doing "Meet the Press." No doubt it's somewhere in the millions. Is that not sufficient for us to expect preparation?