Media Research Center executive Tim Graham was weirdly angry in a June 10 post:
Donald Trump loves to make jokes during his rallies, especially about the press. At Sunday morning’s hot and sunny rally in Las Vegas, Trump joked about losing voters to heatstroke, and the press reaction:
“By the way, isn’t the breeze nice. Do you feel the breeze? I don’t want anybody going on me. We need every voter. I don’t care about you. I just want your vote. I don’t care.” His supporters laughed as he then said, “See now, the press will take that, and they’ll say, ‘He said a horrible thing.'”
Like clockwork, the clickbait hacks at Newsweek (and then the aggregators at MSN.com) posted the headline:
Donald Trump Jokes to Las Vegas Rally Attendees: ‘I Don’t Care About You’
This website is a desiccated shell of its former weekly-magazine self. This headline was actually an improvement from the first one! As the article now admits, they left “jokes” out in the original:
[…]Reporter Natalie Venegas began: “Amid high temperatures at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Las Vegas on Sunday, the former president made a quip about the heat affecting his attendees by stating that he needed their votes, adding, “I don’t care about you.”
They ran a video tweet from Acyn Torabi from the Trump-trashing Meidas Touch squad:
But Graham offers no evidence that Trump was, in fact, making a joke. If the only people who insist that Trump was making a joke are die-hard Trump stans like Graham, is it really a joke? And if it was, what exactly was supposed to be funny about it? Graham’s huffing that “Trump loves to make jokes during his rallies, especially about the press” doesn’t really provide an answer. If Trump’s humor is so insular that it doesn’t translate outside the hardcore MAGA crowd that Graham clearly belongs to, it arguably fails as humor.
But Graham is paid well to defend Trump, so he defends everything about him, nonexistent humor and all, and he demands we treat him as a comedy legend because he has to find a way to excuse and distract from his amorality.