If any voters had forgotten that Donald J. Trump was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, he spent roughly 45 minutes reminding them on Friday, eight weeks before Election Day.
At a lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, Mr. Trump, flanked by seven of his lawyers, laid out years-old allegations from the women in detail as he denied that they were telling the truth. He had just attended a federal appeals court hearing related to a civil case in which he was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming a New York writer, E. Jean Carroll, decades earlier. Mr. Trump was not required to attend the hearing, but decided he wanted to.
When the hearing was over, he went to his eponymous building for what the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign called a “press conference.” But he ended it without taking questions, and the session — during which Mr. Trump criticized his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, for avoiding reporters — was more like a venting exercise over his frustrations about his legal travails.
"Some of you should be ashamed of yourselves,” he told reporters. “Thank you very much everybody.”
Jesus Christ who ends a speech that way, let alone a presidential nominee. The press deserves all the shit they get for giving him the attention he craves.
I like the term I first read today, “sanewashing.”
Journalistic neutrality standards are good things when reporting on ambiguity, but you can’t give equal deference to both delusional and sane individuals.