[ad_1]
After last week’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, I traveled to rural Morgantown, PA. Governors Doug Burgum and Kristi Noem, of North and South Dakota, respectively, were headlining a “Team Trump Agenda 47 Policy Tour” at the Morgantown Event Center (AKA: a room at the local Holiday Inn).
The press release didn’t offer much more than that.
Morgantown is about an hour west of Philadelphia, and 20 minutes south of Reading, in south-central Berks County. Voting records show Berks County has been a reliably Republican area for decades, though it tipped once for Barack Obama in 2008. Berks County, and neighboring Lancaster County, are Amish country. There’s an Amish market so large on the border between the two that you have to watch your step when trekking through the parking lot lest you dig your heels into a stray horse turd.
Why the Trump campaign was wasting resources shoring up their base in this area seemed bizarre — until I met up with a colleague.
“There’s this guy, Scott Pressler,” my colleague said. “He’s been going into the Amish communities and trying to get them to vote for Trump.”
I had seen Pressler speak at Turning Point USA’s conference in Detroit earlier this year, and hardly remembered him.
“But the Amish don’t vote,” I said. “They’re Amish.”
All the more reason to get as close to the beating heart of this thing, I thought.
“Agenda 47” is Trump’s official policy platform. It’s not Project 2025, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a rebrand. Agenda 47 is Trump’s New Coke: It fell flat upon release, and we all forgot about its failure, but then they brought it back and nobody seems to care.
If you visit the Agenda 47 portion of Trump’s website, you’ll find about 50 videos of Trump yelling into a head-on camera from Mar-a-Lago. Most of the videos were recorded back in 2022, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seemed like a threat to Trump’s chances in the 2024 Republican primary. The policies themselves are vague, especially when compared with the remarkably similar proposals laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — which has absolutely nothing to do with the Trump campaign, Trump swears. He said so on social media, and then his campaign put out a press release that even quotes his social media post.
Because of Trump’s tendency to ramble on wild tangents during his 90 minute rally speeches, the public has heard very little about Agenda 47. The Agenda 47 Policy Tours seem to be the campaign’s way of doing the actual politicking for him.
I had to sneak into the Morgantown event after the Trump campaign denied my press credentials (again). They’ve been denying press credentials to many print, video and photojournalists for months without explanation.
Why the White House Correspondence Association isn’t sending snobby, bitchy letters to the Trump campaign about a lack of access, or standing up for the First Amendment rights of small journalists and businesses like myself and Wonkette, is a mystery. Since I don’t have an expense account like the New York Times and in fact sleep in my truck, I’m not expecting a response from the Trump campaign, or the WHCA.
But I digress.
A number of journalists simply sign up as “guests” for Trump events because they immediately confirm your attendance. And despite 15 years of experience as an honest journalist, I’ve never attended any political campaign’s event as a member of the public.
While waiting in line, the mostly white and geriatric crowd passed the time by clutching their pearls and swapping conspiracy theories. Most centered on the debate. One woman kept calling the debate a “disgrace,” and was sure Harris wore a Bluetooth earpiece that was feeding her answers. One man took issue with moderators fact-checking Trump, saying, “They kept interrupting him, and telling him it was wrong, and I went back and checked it, and it was right!”
Another woman bemoaned the fact that her grandson, a public school student, would be watching the debate in class. This prompted another elderly woman to say that her grandson’s private Catholic school had barred all discussion of the debate.
The most elaborate story was about July’s global airport outage. One couple was convinced Joe Biden somehow ordered almost all the airports on earth to shut down because he was very mad after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Presumably, leaving people stranded in Milwaukee was his revenge.
Volunteers with clipboards walked up and down the line making sure attendees were registered to vote. They advised the crowd to request mail-in/absentee ballots, and submit them at their local precincts on Election Day rather than mailing them. This, according to a dark haired woman with a clipboard, would eliminate any chance of “cheating” by Democrats.
Nobody seemed aware that, according to the state of Pennsylvania, “October 29, 2024 is the last day to vote in person by mail ballot in the November 5, 2024 election.”
Once they began letting people inside, I was dumbfounded that nobody seemed to be getting searched. I had just breezed right in, grabbed a seat in the back of the room by the press filing tables, and tried to blend in.
Two of my credentialed colleagues later told me that they were searched thoroughly by security. It should be noted that none of us could remember if this search was carried out by a private security company staffing the event, or the US Secret Service.
Because the Trump campaign seems to let as many people into their events as possible, the press filing tables in the back of the room were quickly ransacked for extra chairs. The filing tables were shoved into one another until the production crew decided to strike them in favor of more audience seating. Fifteen minutes later, the crew bumped out space behind the press riser for standing room. A crew member told a colleague that there were 315 people inside, but I don’t think that’s remotely accurate.
“We’re out of chairs in the whole building,” the crew member working the sound board announced with glee. He added that there were “four-times” as many people as expected.
“So much for security,” the cantankerous old man next to me grumbled as they packed in about 50 more people behind the press riser.
A reporter with CBS was interviewing the man behind me and getting an earful of right-wing tropes. According to my notes, they were barking tropes about the need for voter ID laws to stop election fraud. Pennsylvania actually has a voter ID law if it’s your first time voting at a precinct.
When Burgum and Noem took the stage, they were introduced as the “Chief Executive Officers of North and South Dakota.” The whole thing struck me as less of a policy forum and more like job interviews for Burgum and Noem, who are both facing term limits.
They spoke vaguely about tax reform, and opening up federal lands for “energy production.” They commented on the demise of the Keystone XL pipeline without actually saying “Keystone XL pipeline,” “Canada,” “tar sands,” “oil leaks,” “aquifer,” “strip mining,” “boreal forest,” “eminent domain,” or “tribal land.” Noem said the pipeline’s political failure makes the US “more reliant on foreign energy sources,” even though it was never clear if the oil from the Canadian Tar Sands traveling through the pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico would ever reach US consumers.
Neither mentioned that, according to the US Energy Information Agency, “The United States has been an annual net total energy exporter since 2019,” and that in 2023, “Total U.S. energy exports in 2023 were the highest on record,” largely due to liquified natural gas.
The two said that the US needed a new oil pipeline called the “US Energy Pipeline.” Noem then joked that Canada “got all the oil, we got Mt. Rushmore.”
The whole thing kind of went off the rails from there. Burgum and Noem complained about the border, cop retirements skewing crime statistics, and overdose deaths. Noem complained about intersex rodeos (or maybe gay rodeos, or maybe trans people in rodeos?). Later, they told a room full of farmers that China owned the US food supply, with Burgum adding, “When they control our food, they control us.”
Near the end, Noem and Burgum encouraged people to vote. Burgum then offered a truly bizarre word salad that I’ve since confirmed with a colleague’s transcript:
Burgum: You’ve got to vote, you got to make sure your friends and family and the people you talk to vote. And we also have to have some difficult conversations and I know sometimes because if every Republican in America votes for president Trump, he still loses. Because there aren’t, there aren’t, 51 percent of America’s not Republicans. We need every Trump supporter. We need Republican[s] and we need independents. Independents are going to make their decisions. If they’re not, if they’re not a Democrat, they may not be ideological. They’re going to make their decision in many cases around the economy.
But we weren’t done yet.
Burgum and Noem invited the few credentialed reporters up for a scrum. According to my notes, the credentialed press pool at the event consisted of two photographers, a local paper, CBS, two foreign outlets, and a crew with English or Australian accents who said they were from Virgin News.
Audience members were invited onto the stage to create a background for the cameras. While this isn’t unusual, it still struck me as a bit odd. Regardless, their responses weren’t fairly noteworthy. CBS asked about the potential for a second debate between Trump and Harris, and if Harris got under Trump’s skin.
And then the Virgin crew asked about Taylor Swift, who endorsed Harris after the debate. Swift hails from West Reading, PA, “about 15 miles up the road,” the reporter said.
Burgum seemed caught off guard and miffed. Burgum, in essence, responded by calling Swift a whore, saying that Swift writes a lot of songs about breaking up, sneering, “She’s an excellent judge of character.”
It’s true though. She is. She’s never married or even dated a single Trump.
[ad_2]
Original Source Link
