Following Donald Trump‘s press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Mary Trump issued a warning on Friday about the 2024 election, saying that the speech felt like “2016 all over again.”
On Thursday, the GOP presidential candidate spoke on a range of topics, notably saying that he has agreed to debate Vice President Kamala Harris three times in September. Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s campaign and Harris’ campaign via email for comment.
Trump said the two will face off on September 4 on Fox News, September 10 on ABC, and September 25 on NBC. He added that those dates were mostly buttoned up on his end but that the Harris campaign “has to agree to the terms.”
The Harris campaign had previously accepted the September 10 debate. ABC News then confirmed on Thursday that both candidates were set for the debate stage that day.
The conference also touched on the former president’s views on abortion, immigration, foreign policy, and the economy, among other topics. Trump called his opponent, Harris, incompetent, and critiqued her border policy and immigration stance under the Biden administration.
Trump repeatedly referenced crowd size as a measure of his support, while reporters raised questions about Harris’ growing support over the past two-and-a-half weeks since President Joe Biden exited the race. Donald Trump said the crowd for his speech on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, was bigger than the crowd that watched Martin Luther King Jr.‘s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
Trump went on to say that nobody was killed in the riot at the Capitol. However, several people did die that day, including one of his supporters, Ashli Babbitt.
Mary Trump, a vocal critic of her uncle, took to X, formerly Twitter and her Substack on Friday to share her thoughts on Trump’s press conference and the media coverage of it.
Referencing MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell’s opening monologue on The Last Word on Friday, Mary Trump wrote on X that her uncle’s press conference felt like “2016 all over again.”
“Lawrence O’Donnell is right—yesterday felt like 2016 all over again. And that is not a good thing,” Mary Trump wrote on X.
In O’Donnell’s monologue, the MSNBC host took aim at former President Trump’s speech that was broadcast live to many cable news networks “just like they all did repeatedly in 2016.” O’Donnell added that “some of the networks tried to play catch up with fact-checking after Donald Trump finished speaking, but that of course is way too late and utterly useless.”
In her Substack, Mary Trump pointed out several reasons why it felt like 2016, including not being able to fact check Trump’s speech live. She added that, while she and others attempted to fact-check Trump in real time, “it’s impossible to do that verbally because, given the volume and velocity of his lies, it would mean talking over him the whole time, which would make the livestream an incomprehensible mess.”
In addition, Mary Trump said of her comparison of 2016’s election coverage of her uncle: “I was quite frankly horrified by the billions of dollars in free coverage the media gave Donald Trump. While Hillary Clinton was giving important and substantive policy speeches, network cameras were trained on empty podiums and planes idling on the tarmac waiting for Donald to show up.”
Trump’s speech came as Harris and her pick as vice president, Governor Tim Walz, spoke at the United Auto Workers in Detroit, Michigan. Mary Trump notes that she didn’t cover the event because “we didn’t know it was happening.”
Mary Trump added: “I pay fairly close attention to the news, as do many of my friends and colleagues, so this is yet another media fail. Why was this not reported?”
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