Election Countdown, 176 Days to Go: ‘Hot dogs. Let's talk about hot dogs.’

Let's talk about how our candidates talk.

The greatest eater of them all, Joey Chestnut, on his way to another victory in the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, on Coney Island in 2022. We learned this weekend that Donald Trump is a hot dog fan, and learned some other things as well. (Kena Betancur/Getty Images.)

This post will conclude with some compliments and positive examples. A happy ending, if you will. But we’ll build to that from more troubled realms. Items #1 and #2 will be cautionary, and after that the skies will brighten.

1) ‘How will this play’ vs. ‘how will this work.’

I’ve frequently mentioned (eg here) the Great Divide between these two questions in the way journalists approach reality.

—When reporters ask How will this play? they are putting themselves in the place of campaign consultants. What will a decision or statement mean for the midterms? In which districts will it help or hurt?

—But when they ask How will this work? they are putting themselves in the place of citizens—as taxpayers, as employers or employees, as parents of young children or children of old parents, as people affected by war and peace. It’s harder but more important.

How does this difference show up, in practice? Three days ago there was an amazingly stark real-world illustration. This was on the Friday news-roundup section of the PBS Newshour. It featured Jonathan Capehart, a regular in this role, and Matt Lewis, a fill-in for this slot’s regular, David Brooks. Their questioner was the Newshour host Amna Nawaz.¹ You can see the whole thing, video and transcript, here.

Nawaz’s question was: What about Joe Biden’s announcement that he would suspend certain arms shipments to Israel if Benjamin Netanyahu ordered an assault on Rafah?

—Capehart understood the question to be about how this would work: What it would mean for Israel, for people in Gaza, for the US, for strife in the region. He went in detail into longer-term goals for US policy, into cease-fire prospects, and so on. His first words were, “with all of these things, we cannot look at them in isolation,” which he used to set up the context.

—Lewis apparently understood the question to be purely about how this would play. His answer was entirely about what the decision would mean for Biden politically: “I think Biden has a problem right now, and it is a political problem. It is axiomatic in politics that if you try to please everybody, you will end up pleasing nobody.” He made clear that he meant “pleasing nobody” in terms of election-year politics, not in terms of the differing parties to the war-and-peace dispute. He went on for several paragraphs, every bit of it about how this would play for Biden between now and November 5.

Politics, and policy, both matter. But what’s the value of reporters sharing their guesses on how things will play? “There are people out there who were open to voting for Joe Biden,” Lewis concluded. “And I think they're less likely today than they were a week ago.” Fine. But we could hear this from some guy in a bar.

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2) And speaking of a guy in a bar …

Among Donald Trump’s virtues is that he does not drink. That is useful to remember in considering his current speaking style. On Saturday night Deb and I sat through the nearly two-hour entirety of his rally performance at Wildwood, on the Jersey shore, as televised by Fox. The whole thing is archived here, courtesy of Right Side Broadcasting.

To me this version of Trump sounded genuinely different from the crowd-pleasing showman who rode televised rallies to success (and big audiences for the cable outlets) in 2015 and 2016. Maybe it’s just that his material is now so familiar and tired. Maybe it’s that Trump has nearly exhausted the “what will he say next??” Evel Knievel-style suspense and excitement of his live shows. Maybe it’s that he goes on at such length. Whatever: the result is less “outrageous” than … boring.

It could also be that there is something more visibly wrong with him. In his interview last month with Eric Cortellessa of Time, Trump came across as extreme and under-informed, but more or less coherent sentence-by-sentence. In New Jersey two nights ago, he came across as the kind of person you’d move away from in an airport or at a bar. The kind of person you’d assume to be drunk if you didn’t know he teetotaled, or you’d think was in other ways disturbed.

I have not made a single political prediction since dismissing Trump’s chances in 2015. But I find it hard to picture the voter who—if not already a member of the MAGA minority—will get a fresh look at today’s Trump and think: Yeah, I’d like the next few years of news to be all about this! Jerry Brown told me years ago that shrewd politicians know that the public doesn’t always want to hear from them. Less is more. This is not Trump’s approach.

A reader has suggested to me that news outlets would perform a crucial public service by archiving full, raw transcripts of how Trump talks now. I’ve come to agree with writers like McKay Coppins and Susan Glasser who say that exposure to the New Trump is important, to see how different it is.

Here are just a few samples of what Trump said this weekend. As far as I can see, they went unmentioned in mainstream stories about the event. (“That’s just Trump.”)

• Trump claimed at the start of the speech that “over 100,000 people” were there. “You can’t even see the end of the crowd.” Fox had earlier placed the attendance at “thousands” and, briefly, at “tens of thousands.” A huge crowd for a beach event would have been around 30,000.

• More than an hour into his talk, Trump said: “You guys! Not a single person has left.” Photos from that time showed that most of the crowd had long since bailed. (The screenshot below is from a Xitter video by Zac Anderson, showing the thinning crowd.)

  

• He riffed at length about hot dogs. Some parts of the speech included “policy points” and details; these Trump was obviously reading, reluctant-schoolboy style, from a prompter. But whenever a point struck him as interesting he would light up and freewheel into an aside like this one.

  
  The hotdog section was a fair sample of his improvisations. This is my best effort at a cleaned-up transcription. What’s below was all part of the same continuous passage, with nothing cut out:

  Hotdogs, let's talk about hotdogs. I just had one actually. I just had one. It was very good. I hope it was. You know it was very good.
  
  Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, never eat before you perform. I said I'm not performing. I'm a politician. If you can believe it, I hate to be called a politician. I like ‘I'm a businessman’ much better. But I guess I'm a politician.
  
  Because we did great in 2016. We did much better in 2020 A lot better. We had millions more of votes. So I guess, and this time, and I will say this, this spirit that we have this time blows both of them away. You know why?
  
  Because you still like me. But you saw what the alternative is. The alternative. It's just, the alternative is not a good thing.
  
  But I just had the best hot dog, so I said, Frank, I'm sorry.
  
  Now Pavarotti was a good friend. [Out of the blue,] He didn't have that same. He ate all the time. He didn't care.
  
  But I just had a hot dog and it was very good. So the price of hot dogs is up 22%, chicken’s up 32%. Hamburgers are up 37%. That's why I had the hot dog. It went up the least.
  
  Eggs are up 50%, gasoline’s up 50%. Bacon is up 79% Bacon! That's why I don't have bacon anymore. So expensive. Not one thing is cheaper.
  
  There's not one thing anywhere, there's not one item that's cheaper. Energy is way up. That's what caused the problem.

• The whole speech was like this. And I’m not even getting into the parts about Hannibal Lecter. Again, think if you encountered a person like this on the street. Also, remember the front-page coverage Joe Biden got for saying “President of Mexico” rather than “President of Egypt.”

• OK, here is one other part. It’s about how Joe Biden is no longer up to the job. I’m presenting it as one long paragraph, verbatim, because that is how it came across:

  “He [Biden] doesn’t know what the hell he is saying. Don't forget, he can't put two sentences together. He can't find the stairs off the stage. Let's see this stage when I'm finished. I got stairs there. I got stairs there. I got a nice ramp there. I got stairs. If it got really dangerous, I could jump off the front. You ever seen him when he's finished? He finishes the speech which usually lasts about a minute and a half. And he always goes like this [looking around] and then he doesn't know where he goes. But you know we have great people. Secret Service, they always run up on the stage and they lead him off the stage. But he wants to let our tax cuts expire. And I don't do that anyway. You know I don't imitate him anymore. Because I called my wife, our great First Lady, and I said: First Lady [he actually said this], we had a big speech. By the way, not as many people as this! This is like big record stuff on television. Even from the haters. They said this may be the biggest rally they've ever seen, a political rally.”

We’ve all heard things like this. In bars. In public parks. In institutional care. We move away from people talking this way. Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell, JD Vance, the GOP as a whole think this person should be back in charge.

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3) Now, on the brighter side…

I spend a lot of time complaining about political coverage in the New York Times. So let me give compliments where they are due.²