With 71 days until the election, Donald Trump spent Sunday morning ranting on his Truth Social platform about a days-old appearance on Fox News that ended with the network cutting the former president off mid-sentence, while he criticized Kamala Harris’ speech at the Democratic National Convention.
“Bret Baier of Fox News called me, I didn’t call him, just prior to the Kamala Convention speech, and asked me if I would like to critique her after she is finished,” the Republican presidential nominee claimed on Sunday. “I agreed to do so!”
Trump dialed into the network on Thursday night and spoke with anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum for 10 minutes. The Fox News hosts attempted to interject repeatedly, ultimately hurrying Trump off the line in favor of Greg Gutfeld’s late-night show. The GOP candidate then called in to Newsmax to keep his rant going.
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“The Fake News, like often ‘gilted’ Maureen Dowd of the failing New York Times, wrote incorrectly that I was making the calls. WRONG!!!” Trump continued in his post. “I don’t have to make calls to go on TV, or anything else — They call me! It’s called Ratings, I guess, and I’m the “Ratings Machine!”
Harris’ speech at the DNC outperformed Trump’s Republican National Convention monologue by 22%, with millions more tuning in to listen to the vice president, which Dowd called a “real dagger” in the former president’s heart in her August 25 op-ed. She also mocked his “scream-of-consciousness” call to Fox.
Trump’s outburst comes as Harris leads him by 3.6 percentage points in an average of national polls. One particularly striking new poll result found Harris leading Trump by seven points nationally, 50 to 43 percent, according to a survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University.
It also comes after the Washington Post reported that his campaign aides have struggled to keep him focused on the campaign instead of golfing almost every day, as he typically prefers to do in August.
As Trump’s former White House spokesperson Alyssa Farah Griffin put it, “From spending days off the campaign trail golfing to coming up with frankly weak nicknames like ‘Kamabala,’ it feels like he’s lost his mojo.”
