BLUES: Donald J. Trump gave a poisonous speech!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2024

Here's what one blue army found: This past Saturday, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump delivered a remarkable keynote address at the annual CPAC political gathering.

C-Span's videotape can be seen here. Warning! The tape is almost two hours long—and it seems to be the videotape of last year's CPAC address! 

More on that below. Regarding Trump's actual CPAC speech from this actual year, here's the start of the report, headline included:

Trump calls himself a ‘proud political dissident’ in CPAC speech

Former President Donald Trump cast November’s presidential election as “judgment day” and declared himself a “proud political dissident” during a speech before conservative activists outside of Washington Saturday as he again cloaked his campaign in religious imagery.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference ahead of his win in the South Carolina Republican primary, Trump painted an apocalyptic vision of the future if President Joe Biden wins a second term as the two prepare for an expected rematch election.

“For hardworking Americans, Nov. 5 will be our new liberation day. But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be judgment day,” he said to loud applause.

Trust us! From our own blue tribe's political perspective, things went way downhill from there. Unless we've been looking at the address Trump gave last year!

At any rate:

Based on that full AP report, Trump's speech this past weekend was stunning. Let us also say this:

Assuming that C-Span has aired the tape of the actual speech, this is the actual way the candidate started last Saturday's speech. Even if this was the start of last year's speech, this tiny bit of text establishes a well-known basic fact:

I want to start by thanking Matt and Mercedes Schlapp and everyone at the American Conservative Union—thank you, Matt—for hosting this wonderful event. It really has been something over the years..."

That's the way Trump began the speech—the speech which seems to date to last year. He started that speech by thanking Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union—but also by thanking Mercedes Schlapp, the gentleman's well-known wife.

As everyone knows, this annual conference "was founded in 1974 by the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom." As of last year, Matt Schlapp was still riding high as kingpin of the gathering.

As far as we know, Schlapp was still in charge of the conference this year, but he and the conference itself had fallen on harder times. In this report from last Thursday, Politico's Ben Truss summed it up like this:

The event had once been perhaps the premier conference for American conservatives. But its stature has gradually declined in recent years as it has come to be seen as a mere adjunct of Trumpism and, as its head, Matt Schlapp, has fended off allegations of sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement.

As far as we know, Schlapp was still in charge of CPAC this year. But the last year has been a bit messy.

At any rate, Trump seems to have given a fire-breathing CPAC speech this year. Here's more of the AP's report on last Saturday's address:

Last year, Trump used his speech at CPAC to tell his supporters that his 2024 campaign would be one of “retribution.”

“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he said then.

This time, he cast himself as a savior standing between his supporters and near-anarchy as he spoke of “hoards of illegal aliens stampeding across our borders,” warned the country’s social safety net and education system would “buckle and collapse,” and claimed that, “the gangs will be invading your territory.”

“These are the stakes of this election: Our country is being destroyed and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” he declared, casting Biden’s leadership as “an express train barreling toward servitude and to ruin.”

”A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom, it’s your passport out of tyranny and it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell. And in many ways, we’re living in hell right now,” he said, adding that: “the unprecedented success of the United States of America will be my ultimate and absolute revenge.”

The AP went on from there to perform some basic fact-checking. But on that very Saturday night, as blue tribe pundits gathered together on our blue tribe's "cable news" channel, we blue tribe viewers were handed a somewhat peculiar takeaway concerning Saturday's CPAC address.

For the record, Lawrence O'Donnell seemed to think that the CPAC speech had been delivered on Friday. That minor error isn't the problem with what O'Donnell now said, as his gang of allies happily chuckled and agreed with his pronouncements.

Below, you see part of what O'Donnell said at 7:15 this past Saturday night. As he starts, he's talking about Trump's recently concluded victory speech in South Carolina. From there, he makes a peculiar claim about Trump's earlier CPAC address: 

O'DONNELL (2/24/24): When Donald Trump was doing his initial thanks [in South Carolina], it was to his family. 

If you want to roll the tape, you will see him reading from notes, beginning with the word "Melania," which he got wrong yesterday [sic].

He called her "Mercedes" yesterday [sic] in his speech. So yes, there's a presidential candidate who doesn't get his wife's name right. But you won't find out about that among the headline writers and political coverage

STEPHANIE RUHLE (with snark): Lawrence, perhaps it would be easier to get her name right if she were standing next to him at the podium. But alas, she is not.

At this point, Chris Hayes threw to Rachel Maddow for further comment. To watch O'Donnell's fuller statement, you can start by clicking here.

Mercifully, O'Donnell's multipart flight into fantasy was temporarily done. Question:

Did Donald J. Trump really call his wife "Mercedes" during Saturday's CPAC address? We're going to guess that the answer is no, but let us direct you to this:

At that link, you will read a takedown from Newsweek about this claim—about the claim which swept certain precincts of blue tribe social media in the hours before O'Donnell spoke.

Newsweek made the obvious observation. Almost surely, Trump was referring to the rather well-known Mercedes Schlapp in the comment to which O'Donnell now referred. 

As Newsweek notes, you probably know you've gone off the rails when Keith Olbermann attacks an attack on Donald J. Trump, as Olbermann would later do in this tweet:

OLBERMANN (2/24/24): Trump spews out astonishing evidence of his dementia, brain trauma, and possible substance abuse on an hourly basis. There is NO reason to add to this list easily disproven nonsense. He did NOT call his wife "Mercedes" at CPAC. 

He's unmistakably referring to Mercedes Schlapp.

At least that's what Olbermann said. For the record, "easily disproven [blue tribe] nonsense" tends to help Donald J. Trump.

If you watch the videotape from blue tribe cable in which O'Donnell makes his angry claims, you'll see a bunch of blue tribe tribunes chuckling and enjoying themselves as O'Donnell apparently misstates this point and makes other apparent blunders. We'll further explore this silly trivia as the week proceeds.

For today, let's review:

On Saturday, Candidate Trump gave a remarkable speech at the annual CPAC event. By 7:15 that night, the best our blue tribe pundits could do was to chuckle and enjoy themselves as one of their number made a trivial claim which is almost surely inaccurate.

Fellow citizens, please! Mercedes Schlapp has long been a big deal and a major presence at CPAC!

Beyond that, she served "as White House Director of Strategic Communications in the Trump administration," then worked "on the Trump 2020 re-election campaign as senior advisor for strategic communications." 

You'd think those facts would have occurred to any blue tribe pundit before he ran onto national TV and repeated a highly improbable (and trivial) claim. That said, let's continue our review:

C-Span seems to have posted last year's speech by Donald J. Trump as if it was this year's speech. Everybody makes mistakes, but that one should be corrected.

Early last week, O'Donnell offered a detailed, very smart critique of the suggestion that the Democratic Party could simply replace Joe Biden as its nominee at the party's August convention. Things went straight downhill from there, leading to the amalgam of apparent blunders he authored last Saturday night to approving clucks from his helpmates.

As we've noted in recent weeks, red tribe "cable news" is routinely a virtual parody of actual journalism. The blue tribe tape to which we've linked isn't gigantically better.

These are the fruits of the current "segregation by viewpoint" which afflicts so much of our nation's journalism. Our own blue pundits were joking and laughing and enjoying themselves, but the various things they were saying were utterly trivial and were almost surely wrong.

The red tribe's armies are in the field, conducting their siege of the Biden White House. At the same time, our own blue tribe pundits are conducting a siege of Candidate Trump.

The Achaeans armies fought outside the walls of Troy for ten years until their siege was at last successful. This week, we'll start to review the type of warfare being conducted, this very year, by the armies of our own blue tribe.

As we do, we'll ask you to take The Citizen's Challenge:

Can you conceive of the possibility that corporate employees who vote your way can, on the rare occasion and in the small way, be unhelpful or even just wrong?

Can you conceive of that possibility? Can such vaunted blue tribe stars be unhelpful, be wrong?

Tomorrow: A shout-out to her beloved colleagues and to her beloved viewers