A FAILED ATTEMPT AT HUMANIZING TRUMP? IT WORKED ON YOUR PAPER'S REPORTER.

Michelle Cottle of The New York Times has just published an op-ed about Donald Trump's appearance at a Moms for Liberty convention. Her headline reads:

Trump Tried to Humanize Himself. Better Luck Next Time.

Cottle writes:

Before the event, [Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany] Justice shared with me her hopes for the encounter. She wanted Mr. Trump to talk parental rights, of course, but she also wanted folks to see a softer side of him: “He’s a dad. He’s a grandfather. He loves his family. We’ve seen him working with his family in politics and business, right? I hope the American people get to know Donald Trump in a little bit of a different way. He’ll get to express his love for his family. I think that’s going to resonate with American voters.”

In theory, this was a brilliant opportunity for Team Trump, which is desperate to humanize the candidate and get him to talk policy rather than simply slag his political enemies.

In practice, the evening kept veering off course precisely as you’d expect.

That might be true -- but the Times reporter sent to cover the event, Shawn McCreesh, covered the event as if it was an unserious gathering of wine moms, which had the effect of humanizing both Trump and Moms for Liberty, an organization known for instigating book bans while its members harass and threaten teachers and school officials.

McCreesh was Maureen Dowd's assistant for five years, and he uses the flippant, LOL-nothing-matters tone Dowd used when she was a campaign reporter:

It didn’t look like a typical Trump rally.

There were trays of mini-cupcakes and macarons. There were squadrons of helicopter moms buzzed off white wine. The excited women were wandering around the basement of a Marriott in downtown Washington, waiting for former President Donald J. Trump to show.

It was the Joyful Warriors summit thrown by a bunch of agitated parents known as the Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group that was founded during the Covid pandemic.

Just a bunch of silly, "agitated" women "wandering around" half drunk. Nothing for liberal Times readers to worry about here!

And when the Moms show their true far-right colors, they get a mulligan from McCreesh:

The Moms For Liberty can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”)....

Oopsie!

Quoting Justice, McCreesh assures us that Moms for Liberty is just a group of regular old moms:

“These are women that have largely never been political,” Tiffany Justice, the group’s co-founder, said. “They’re people who, in the busiest time of their lives, realized that they needed to get involved in politics.”

"Never been political"? When Moms for Liberty was started, co-founder Bridget Ziegler was married to the chair of the Florida Republican Party. (The Zieglers are still married, but Christian Ziegler was fired and Bridget Ziegler left her position after it was revealed that they regularly sought out women for threesomes, one of whom accused Christian of rape.)

The conversation with Trump at the convention gets political, but McCreesh's assures us that it's just an appeal to strong parental instincts:

“Who would want men playing in women’s sports?” he asked, as the women booed.

There is a reason Mr. Trump mentions the issue of transgender athletes at pretty much every rally he speaks at — it is a powerful, motivating one for many parents, and he knows it.

But is it? McCreesh says this as if it's obviously true, but there's no evidence in polling that the issue of transgender athletes motivates many Americans at all. In the first three months of this year, Gallup asked Americans, "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" The question was open-ended, so all the answers were unprompted. Here's a list of every concern mentioned, from the ones most often mentioned in March to the ones least mentioned:

It's possible some of the 3% of respondents whose replies were listed under the heading "Ethics/Moral/Religious/Family decline," or the 2% who said education was their top issue, specifically mentioned transgender athletes. It's also possible that the 3% of respondents to a May 2024 Fox poll who said "social issues" were their #1 electoral "deal-breaker" specifically cited trans athletes. But it's clearly not the burning issue McCreesh wants us to believe it is.

Trump may not have talked much about his kids or grandkids, but McCreesh assures us that he slandered an Olympic athlete in a very human way -- "happily," in fact, and at the level of sports talk:

Mr. Trump happily rehashed the controversy around the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of Algeria who hit her opponent, Angela Carini of Italy, so hard she sobbed and quit. He mimed a jabbing motion. “The left is not a hard punch, for those of you who are not into pugilistic affairs,” he explained, and the women chuckled at his odd turn of phrase. “She looked like she got hit by a horse.”

Ms. Khelif, who won a gold medal in Paris, endured intense scrutiny over her gender and false accusations by critics that she was transgender.

In fact, Trump slandered Khelif at this convention by saying that she had "transitioned." McCreesh doesn't think that's worth mentioning.

McCreesh writes:

Ms. Justice said she worried about transition surgeries that are paid for in part by the government and asked Mr. Trump what he could possibly do about it as president.

“Well, you can do everything,” he said. “President has such power.” The women clapped.

Left unmentioned: Trump's scurrilous assertion that gender surgery is peformed on students in schools without the consent of either parents or the students themselves.

“But uh the transgender thing is an incredible thing… your kid goes to school & comes home a few days later with an operation the school decides what’s going to happen with your child & you many of these childs 15 years later say “what the hell happened who did this to me?”

🤦🏻‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/BNyNscBgUB

— Jennifer Jenkins Brevard (@JenkinsBrevard) August 31, 2024

This was all about humanizing Trump, and McCreesh tells us that the effort partly succeeded:

Ms. Justice wanted to draw out his softer side. She asked him about fatherhood. He told a story about how his daughter Ivanka Trump (“beautiful girl, beautiful everything”) gave up her clothing company (“you remember the Ivanka line? She was making so much money with that thing — it was so hot”) to go into government, but then got a ton of bad publicity. “It’s much easier to be a Democrat. Let me put it that way,” he said.

“Tell us about your mom a little bit,” said Ms. Justice.

Mr. Trump talked about how much he loved his mother and how she came from Scotland. “Did you know that some of the biggest, smartest, most brilliant leaders come from Scotland, and nobody talks about it?” he asked. “Or, at least their parents came from Scotland.” They laughed some more.

He had the roomful of women charmed.

To be fair, McCreesh thinks Trump undermined this attempt to charm-wash him:

And yet he just couldn’t help himself. Unprompted, he began to recount how he sparred with Megyn Kelly of Fox News during a 2015 Republican primary debate. She had asked him about his long history of making misogynistic remarks, and he insisted it was only the comedian Rosie O’Donnell whom he had insulted in crude terms.

“You remember, right?” he said. “Only Rosie O’Donnell. That was a tough one. Only Rosie O’Donnell.” He did a scold-like impression of Ms. Kelly: “‘You’ve said this and that’ — I won’t use the terms — ‘you’ve called women this and that and that...’”

There was some awkward giggling.

“I said, ‘Only Rosie O’Donnell,’” Mr. Trump reminisced, “and the place went crazy.”

This is sexist and disgusting, but it worked for Trump in the 2016 campaign. He won that battle with Kelly. He treated O'Donnell as a punchline, and his fans laughed. Then he went on to win.

It was a lie, of course, and it's still a lie. Trump has attacked many women -- verbally and physically. McCreesh never mentions that.

The O'Donnell lie reduces Trump's sexism to a one-on-one spat, and a showbiz spat at that. It's not J.D. Vance attacking an entire group of women. It's not even Trump attacking Kamala Harris in sexual and racist terms.

So it's not Trump-hugs-his-grandkids humanization. But it's humanization nonetheless. And intentionally or not, Shawn McCreesh helped.