"Mr. Trump projected sang-froid about it all on Friday. 'I don’t mind anything having to do with Epstein,'"

"But he was talking about it again because of something his wife chose to do. Was he upset that she had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe? 'No,' he said. 'I never get upset.' He said that after he watched Mrs. Trump’s statement, he thought to himself: 'She had a right to talk about it, because the fake news covers her so inaccurately. Would I have done it that way?' the president mused. 'Perhaps not, perhaps, I don’t know.'"

Writes Shawn McCreesh, in "Trump Says First Lady ‘Had a Right’ to Talk About Epstein/President Trump said in an interview that he had known his wife wanted to address rumors about the late sex offender at some point, but that he had not known exactly what she would say" (NYT).

My search of the NYT archive included a term that wasn't in the article: Ungaro. I was looking, as I usually do, for elite media coverage of a story I am seeing in lowlier media, which I generally eschew. In this case, that would be things like "Amanda Ungaro Arrived in the U.S. on Jeffrey Epstein's Plane at 17 — Now She's Going After Melania Trump From Brazil" (Yahoo!news). I guess you can say I'm just seeing one of those things the NYT deems not "fit to print."

Anyway... I enjoy Shawn McCreesh's writing at the NYT. I love the coverage of Trump's enigmatic responses. "I never get upset" — what a perfect answer to the question whether you are upset. It can't be true, but one appreciates the sang-froid.

Great word, sang-froid. Lord Byron used it in Don Juan:

In the mean time, cross-legg'd, with great sang-froid,

     Among the scorching ruins he sat smoking
Tobacco on a little carpet....

"In the tiny town of Castlewood, S.D., where everyone knows the Noems, the prevailing sense was that people can’t help but feel bad for Bryon Noem after a tabloid photo leak."

I'm blogging the NYT article, "In South Dakota, Neighbors Feel Sorry for Kristi Noem’s Husband," written by Shawn McCreesh.

I've avoided blogging this story until now because I too felt sorry for Kristi Noem's husband. What a cruel invasion of a person's privacy! 

“Must be A.I.,” a burly cattle rancher named Kevin Ruesink said as he inspected pictures of his neighbor Bryon Noem that had been published by The Daily Mail on Tuesday morning.... The rancher squinted at them with a mixture of suspicion and pity. “I grew up playing ball with Bryon,” he said. “I’ve never known him to be part of stuff like that. I don’t believe that at all.”... 

In response to multiple requests for an interview, Mr. Noem wrote in a text message on Tuesday: “I will at some point. Today is not the day. I appreciate your heart.” 

While the pictures of Ms. Noem’s husband with what appear to be enormous inflated balloons under his spandex shirt ricocheted across the internet, becoming a political punchline for her many, many enemies, the reaction back on the proverbial ranch was a little more … tenderhearted....

As the yard signs in my neighborhood say: Kindness is everything.

Another newspaper expressed puzzlement over the statement "I appreciate your heart." But the statement was made to the NYT writer Shawn McCreesh, whose article earned that sentiment.

"Just a night earlier, Mr. Trump had posted an A.I.-generated video of his budget chief, Russell T. Vought, dressed as the grim reaper, wielding a scythe..."

"... while A.I. versions of Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance (both draped in black cloaks as well) played percussion set to the Blue Öyster Cult jam '(Don’t Fear) the Reaper.'"

From "The White House Can’t Decide: Is the Shutdown Bad or Good? Is it 'fun' and an 'unprecedented opportunity,' or is it 'madness' that must end? Depends who’s talking" by Shawn McCreesh in the NYT.

"They’re overwhelmingly white and tend to have a certain kind of look. Close cropped haircuts. Windowpane suits. Golf shorts."

"They’re not the type to be telling anyone their pronouns or using the word 'queer.' And they aren’t the least bit offended that the leader of their party continues to stoke a moral panic about transgender people. They’re gay. But they’re still Republicans...."

Writes Shawn McCreesh, in "Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government/On the town with the A-Gays of Washington, who have never been happier to be out, proud and Republican" (NYT)(free-access link).

"In 2015, back when the Republican establishment was still trying to thwart Mr. Trump, [Department of Energy official Charles] Moran said that he and some other gay Republicans he knew became intrigued by the brash New Yorker’s history of saying nice things about gay rights....

Maybe you have enough toys.

I'm trying to read "Trump, on Tariffs, Says ‘Maybe the Children Will Have 2 Dolls Instead of 30’/At the end of a cabinet meeting, the president allowed for the possibility that trade war could disrupt supply chains" (NYT).

This reminds me of what those on the left used to say to us around the theme of global warming: We have too much stuff already. We should think small. Less plastic. Consume less. Lighten your carbon footprint. 

The NYT writer, Shawn McCreesh, is offended that ordinary people are asked to do with less by "the billionaire, crypto-salesman, golf-club-operating, Palm Beach-by-way-of-Fifth Avenue president with the golden office and the golden triplex apartment."

Reminds me of how righties would criticize the experts and celebrities for living in mansions and flying halfway around the world in private jets to hobnob at climate change conventions.

"President Trump wrote on social media on Sunday night that he no longer considered valid the pardons his predecessor granted to members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol..."

"... and a range of other people whom Mr. Trump sees as his political enemies, because they were signed using an autopen device.... But Mr. Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric. Implicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated."

The NYT reports.

The NYT writer — Shawn McCreesh — observes "There is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon, and there is no exception to pardons signed by autopen," but to say that is to look past the question whether there  was a pardon. Even if a pardon can't be undone, how do we know it was ever done? We have a piece of writing, signed by autopen, and maybe it can be shown to have originated within the White House. The power that is in the Constitution is given to "The President," so, interpreting that clause, one might question whether his hand must do the signing... and whether his mind comprehended what he was doing.

But I can't believe courts would entertain challenges like that. It's the ultimate can of worms. Consider the parallel problem in the exercise of power within the judicial branch. We assume that the judicial opinions that emerge from the usual channels are signed/"signed" by the judges whose names appear on them and that the judges minds made the decisions that appear in the words of the text. We may well suspect that law clerks wrote the some of the opinions and even that some of the judges don't understand "their" own opinions. But we accept that they are what they purport to be. Beyond that lies chaos.

ADDED: Here is Trump's post on Truth Social:

"Karoline Leavitt, the new White House press secretary — at 27, the youngest person ever to hold the job — kicked off her first briefing on Tuesday afternoon..."

"... by reminding all the veteran reporters in assembly that they had become more irrelevant than ever. 'Americans’ trust in mass media has fallen to a record low,' she said right off the top. Twisting the knife, she added: 'Millions of Americans — especially young people — have turned from traditional television outlets and newspapers.' The place was packed with network television anchors and rumpled newspaper reporters who had been slinging questions around that cramped room since before Ms. Leavitt learned to walk or talk.... Smiling, ever-so-sweetly, she told the old-timers they’d have to make room for all the flashy new bloggers, influencers, 'content creators' and podcasters she planned to invite to her briefings on a regular basis. It was, she said, high time that the White House 'adapt' to the 'new media landscape.'... Mr. Trump’s top flack wasted no time throwing down the gauntlet in her first performance behind the lectern. She was steely.... She betrayed no fear and little ambivalence and she seemed quite confident speaking on her boss’s behalf...."

NYT White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh gives credit where credit is due, in "White House Press Secretary Makes Steely and Unflinching Debut/Karoline Leavitt used her first briefing in the role to warn veteran reporters that they were increasingly irrelevant" (NYT).

I like the phrase "all the flashy new bloggers."

"Certainly, in the history of narrative, there have been writers celebrated for their ability to be discursive only to cleverly tie together all their themes with a neat bow at the end — William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens..."

"... and Larry David come to mind. But in the case of Mr. Trump, it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell...."

Writes Shawn McCreesh — a Dickensian name — in "Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His 'Weave' Is Oratorical Genius. /Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together" (NYT).

McCreesh quotes Trump: "You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, 'It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.'"

Not only does the article refuse to acknowledge that Trump's rally speeches are genius, it casts doubt on whether Trump has any English professor friends.

The effort to trick Trump into making race the central issue and Trump's countervailing trickery.

This gets a little complicated, but let's begin where I began this morning, reading Shawn McCreesh, at the NYT (I've added the boldface):

Trump’s campaign seemed to have been holding onto some hope that their candidate would refrain from attacking his opponent based on race and gender. It was just last week that Trump’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, was asked at a rally if Republicans ought to be labeling Kamala Harris a "D.E.I. candidate." Cheung said then that "from the campaign’s standpoint, we haven’t done that." Asked if such attacks were "off-limits," Cheung replied: "I don’t know if it’s off-limits, but it’s not something that we’ve done. So, it is not even on our radar." Now, it is certainly on their radar. It was ABC’s Rachel Scott asking the former president if he believed Harris was a "D.E.I. hire" that set him off on his long tangent in which he questioned her ethnicity. Prodded again as to whether he considered Harris a "D.E.I. hire," Trump concluded: "I really don’t know. Could be, could be. There are some."

"Steven Cheung, was asked" — who asked him? It seems that the anti-Trump side is trying to force Trump and his spokespeople to say Kamala Harris was a "DEI hire." It seems that Harris supporters want race to be an issue, and ABC’s Rachel Scott made that happen at Trump's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention.

Let's look at the transcript in some detail and see how Scott achieved her goal. I'm using the automatic transcript generated at this YouTube video of the event, and I've corrected and punctuated it based on the video:

SCOTT: "Republicans on Capitol Hill have labeled vice president Kamala Harris, who is the first black and Asian-American woman to serve as vice president be on a major party ticket, as a DEI hire. Is that acceptable language to you, and will you tell those Republicans and those supporters to stop it?"

TRUMP: "How do you how do you define DEI? Go ahead...."

SCOTT: "Diversity Equity Inclusion."

TRUMP: "Okay, yeah, go ahead. Is that, what, your definition?"

Scott limited herself to saying what the letters stand for.

"Harris’s stint as vice president has often been pretty unremarkable, but it has provided a rich vein of memes, in part because she can be an awkward communicator...."

"It’s part of what fueled critical media coverage of her during the first year of her tenure, and which led the White House to largely sideline her during the first half of the Biden presidency.... As the first female, Black, and South Asian vice president, Harris was always doomed to receive an extraordinary amount of scrutiny and bias — and emphasized her persona as a 'joyful warrior' in part to combat some of those stereotypes. The joyful warrior, it seems, is sometimes a goofy one too. Harris delivers many of these lines in a genuinely funny way, with an affect unlike many politicians (described sometimes as just vibing along).... Plenty of people are... meme-ing their way to a new celebration of Harris — unburdened by what has been."

I'm reading "Why is everyone talking about Kamala Harris and coconut trees? Ironic Kamala Harris meme-ing isn’t so ironic anymore," a Vox article from July 3rd, when KH was just coasting along in the background, shielded by the seeming candidate, Joe Biden. I don't really understand what was ever "ironic" about any of this.

There are various embedded tweets at that link, including, "How are you supposed to exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you AND be, unburdened by what has been at the same time? Waiting for her 3rd great revelation that synthesizes these two." That's a reaction to this:

Four straight minutes of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” It’s incredible. I had no idea she used it this much. pic.twitter.com/TClfC1EyH6

— John Cooper (@thejcoop) June 29, 2024

I can understand her interest in being "unburdened by what has been," but she's stepping into the candidacy without having had to fight off rivals who offered new visions or even needing to present anything of her own.

ADDED: I didn't know people had taken to calling Kamala Harris a "joyful warrior," but this year is a lot like 1968 — President withdraws, VP steps into candidacy, convention in Chicago — and the candidate, Hubert Humphrey was famously called "The Happy Warrior."

ALSO: Gretchen Whitmer has called herself "The Happy Warrior." From a July 9th article in the NYT, "Whitmer Talks Tequila, Pearl Jam and Debates in New Book/The Michigan governor will not talk about running for president. But her new book, 'True Gretch,' is full of details keeping the chatter alive":