Housekeeping: I’m going to take the next couple of days off so Tim will be running the show on Thursday and Friday. See you on Monday.
For all my Philly friends, we’re coming to your fair city May 1 for a live show downtown. We’ll have tickets on sale soon—save the date. And for anyone around D.C. on May 15, Sarah, Tim and I will be doing a show with George Conway at Sixth and I.
—JVL
1. Fraud
On Tuesday Donald Trump talked about Ruby Garcia, a 25-year-old Michigan woman who was murdered (allegedly1) by a man who was in the country illegally. “She lit up that room, and I’ve heard that from so many people,” Trump said at a news conference in Garcia’s hometown. “I spoke to some of her family.”
Of course, Trump hadn’t spoken to her family:
Mavi Garcia, the family spokesperson, said neither Trump nor anybody from his campaign has contacted her or anybody in her immediate family. She said her family is close and she would know if that had happened.
“It was shocking. I kind of stopped watching it. I’d only seen up to that, after I heard a couple of misinformations he said, I just stopped watching it,” Mavi Garcia said. . . .
She said she’s angry that Trump and others have turned her sister’s death into something political.
“It’s always been about illegal immigrants,” she said. “Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”
As Bob Dole once said, where’s the outrage?
Last week, Trump showed up at the wake for a Long Island police officer who was killed during a traffic stop:
Trump called Diller’s killing “such a sad, sad event, such a horrible thing.”
“The police are the greatest people we have. There’s nothing and there’s nobody like them. And this should never happen,” Trump said.
But you know, not all police?
Because a few days earlier, Trump defended a bunch of Trump supporters who are in jail because they assaulted police officers. He called these (alleged) offenders “unbelievable patriots” and promised that he would “do something for them” the first day he’s in office.”
I know I’m preaching to the choir but again: These are people who are in jail for attempting to kill police officers and Trump calls them “patriots” while hinting that he will pardon them once he is president again.
Where is the outrage?
And this is all taking place in the background as Donald Trump, master businessman, revealed that his social media network lost $58.2 million on $4 million dollars of revenue.
Truth Social as a product is an abject failure: No growth. As a business, it’s a joke: $4m in revenue? Trump’s NFT trading cards did more revenue than that.
But Trump’s people believe.
Why is that? I can only think of three possible explanations.