The babysitter factor: Democrats have one big question to answer with their convention

Donald Trump doesn’t hold press conferences, he stages press events. And he doesn’t want you there if he can’t control you.  

Shortly after lunch on Wednesday, I checked my email and was told Trump would hold a press conference at his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey on Thursday. I had until 5 p.m. to request credentials. I immediately did so. Before the deadline to request credentials had expired I received, in damn near record time, a notice (highlighted in red, no less) that my request had been denied.

Trump hasn’t the temerity nor the ability to handle reality. Despite his campaign’s heralding of Trump’s willingness to speak with so-called hostile media, he lacks the courage to accept a challenge to answer tough questions. Trump has no answers to real questions and is afraid he’ll be in prison shortly after the November general election.

With that said, and with Trump being as despicable and demented as he is, there is no guarantee he won’t win another trip to the White House. Much like a spoiled child who walks into a room to destroy a Lego village built by others, Trump got halfway through the act during his last administration before being dragged out of the room. Now he wants back in to finish the job. 

To prevent this wanton destruction at the hands of a blithering idiot, Democrats must show unity at their in Chicago next week. If they can, then it may be akin to the teacher grabbing the spoiled kid before he’s able to re-enter the classroom and stomp the Lego village into garbage.

When the Democrats show unity, they are hard to stop. At the 1996 Democratic convention, also in Chicago, Al Gore danced his version of the Macarena in front of thousands at the United Center. It was cringeworthy to watch, but the whole arena danced along with him, and the Democrats won that year. This is not a call for the Democrats to reintroduce the Macarena in 2024, just a reminder that all isn’t necessarily what it appears to be. The Democrats looked silly in 1996 (and let’s be honest: they often look silly) but they looked silly together. In 2016, the Democrats came out of their convention in Philadelphia in a serious state of mind, and seriously fractured. At least some of the so-called Bernie Bros said they either wouldn’t vote at all or would vote for Donald Trump out of anger with the party for choosing Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. During her floor speech, Clinton appealed to Republicans to join the Democrats — noting that if they really supported the Republican Party, they’d vote for her. That only served to further alienate the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  

The Democrats looked silly, but not unified. You know what happened that fall.

The Macarena got everybody dancing together and that, metaphorically speaking, is where the party needs to be after next week. The Democrats right now are still riding a sugar rush after Vice President Kamala Harris took over as the presidential candidate nearly a month ago. Of course, she’s been the recipient of unintentional gifts from Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, in the last few weeks, including but not limited to random rants about abortion and drag queens. At the same time, Trump's have started to go stale and he looks more and more like a delusional dilettante with the demeanor of a dawdling dweeb on downers.

Then there’s that Trump interview.

Trump’s appearance this week with Elon Musk on X (formerly known as Twitter) did neither of those two any favors, outside the existing members of their own cults. It began with a bunch of glitches and ten Trump slurred his way through the interview as if he had a bad lisp. Both men talked about nuclear bombs in an eerily flippant manner (I guess they’ve got bunkers built, just in case). But what was even more frightening was how frank and candid they both were about their disdain for unions and working people.

On Tuesday, the United Auto Workers filed federal labor charges against Trump and Musk for threatening to intimidate workers who go on strike. The pair discussed a potential role for Musk in a second Trump’s administration. Trump called Musk “the cutter,” praising his anti-union stances.

“I look at what you do," Trump said. "You walk in and you just say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike — I won’t mention the name of the company — but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. Every one of you is gone,”

Musk laughed and said, “Yeah.”

UAW president Shawn Fain, a harsh Trump critic who has previously called him a “scab,” singled out Tesla, the largest non-union American automaker, as a target for organizing efforts.  

For those Republicans who can still think independently, there has been talk of Nikki Haley joining the ticket, replacing Vance, or maybe even Trump. Either seems like a pipe dream considering that Trump controls all the levers in the GOP, and recently doubled down on Vance. Trump would never leave the race of his own accord, because winning the presidency still affords him the best chance of avoiding spending his days in an orange jumpsuit staring at blank walls.

That brings us back to Harris and the Democrats. She is the beneficiary of Trump's missteps, but there are plenty of people who are still unsure about her ability to do the job. While the Democratic base is juiced by the energy her campaign has generated, it remains to be seen if she can convince undecided voters in six or seven key states that she’s the leader the country needs. I have no idea why anyone would still be on the fence, even if the Democrats nominated a potato to run against Trump. But such voters do exist. It's both tragic and comical that Harris could win the popular vote overwhelmingly, yet still lose in the Electoral College. That’s a different and longer story, however.

This week, I tuned into was a statement by an undecided voter in Michigan. He is age 60 and Black, and lives in a Detroit suburb with many Arab American residents. Those neighbors of his "don’t like Harris or the Democrats and may not vote,” he explained. “But I ask them this; If you’re going out with your significant other for the night and your choices for babysitter are Harris or Trump, or Walz and Vance, who would you pick? Man, for most of them, it’s not even close.”

There you have it: The babysitter factor. 

The Democrats argue that this election is about saving democracy and the Harris/Walz ticket respects the Constitution while the felony-convicted/crush-with-eyeliner ticket is authoritarian; a wannabe king with his talentless court jester. But maybe it’s about something simpler. After all, we’ve heard this political rhetoric before. Every presidential race in recent memory has evoked those metaphors. They’re as tiresome as watching Trump and Musk grooming each other while telling us that nuclear bombs aren’t so bad. They’re as boring as a Trump rally. They’re as loathsome as Vance’s fictional upbringing and as irritating as Trump and Vance screaming about woke culture. 

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So who are we as a nation?

Arguing policy or political ideology doesn’t work, and plenty of people have gone completely numb to national politics. Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said that all politics was local, and my own grandfather, a circuit court judge, said that all politics boils down to a backyard barbecue. With that in mind, maybe to reach the undecided voter in key states, you ask a very simple question: Who would you trust to watch your children for a night? 

We certainly don’t need to hear any more of Trump’s lies. He has nothing new to say, and what he says is nothing more than verbal diarrhea. Take this gem released by the Trump campaign, attempting to blame Harris for inflation that doesn’t exist and for which she isn’t responsible: 

It has been 24 days and Kamala Harris continues to duck and hide from the media — no interviews and no press conferences since she announced. Since Kamala is not doing any press, she can’t explain why crippling inflation rates have resulted in a 20% increase in prices since she took office. Her campaign is hiding Kamala in the basement because they know she owns every single disastrous policy record of the Biden-Harris administration. Voters are often faced with the question, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ The answer is clearly NO. Instead, Kamala should be asked, ‘Are you proud of the disaster you have created for every American family?’ Judging by her silence, her answer is a resounding YES.

Of course, we could clean this all up if Trump held an actual news conference and not a staged event attended by sheep in a pen. And yes, I’m well aware that Harris hasn’t held a press conference either. As a reporter, I want her to, of course. But I'm sure folks in the Harris campaign are asking themselves: Why should we? As long as Donald Trump keeps on eating his own tail, you might as well let him.

After all, nobody wants him to be a babysitter.