Did Kirsten Gillibrand's Interview With Jake Tapper Yesterday End Any Chance She May Have Had For A Place On A National Ticket?

I'm not the only one who's noticed that Trump would have probably been happier as a TV critics than as a failed, illegitimate fake-president. And, sure enough, former White House aide Cliff Sims' new book, Team of Vipers described Trump as he watched TV in his private dining room off the Oval Office: "He consumed TV like the late Roger Ebert must have watched movies... He commented on the sets, the graphics, the wardrobe choices, the lighting, and just about every other visual component of a broadcast. Sure, he liked to hear pundits saying nice things about him or White House officials defending him from attacks, but everything came back to how does it look? With that in mind, the most Trumpian tactic the comms team employed was arguing with TV networks about the 'chyrons,' the words displayed at the bottom of the screen that act as headlines for whatever the commentators are discussing. 'People watch TV on mute,' the President told me, 'so it’s those words, those sometimes beautiful, sometimes nasty little words that matter.' ... When the President would deliver a speech somewhere outside of D.C., the research team would take screenshots of all the chyrons that aired while he was speaking. Then, adding those images to headlines and tweets from influential reporters and pundits, they would race to print out a packet before Trump made it back to the White House. The goal was for Sarah or Hope or me-- or whoever hadn’t traveled with him-- to meet him on the ground floor of the residence and hand him the packet to review mere moments after Marine One landed on the South Lawn."

(By the way, since we're quoting from the not-yet-available Team of Vipers, I noticed that the NY Times previewed it this morning as describing "a nest of back-stabbing and duplicity within the West Wing, a narrative by now familiar from other books and news media reports. But Mr. Sims, who left last year after clashing with Mr. Kelly, is one of the few people to attach his name to descriptions of goings-on at the White House that are not always flattering to Mr. Trump, and many of the scenes are not particularly flattering to anyone, including himself.)

Jake Tapper's State of the Union yesterday was smokin' hot-- between the 2 "I'm sorr" candidates, Tulsi and Kirsten and the sorry excuse for a lawyer, Rudy. The clip above is the interview with Kirsten Gillibrand, someone I've been writing about since 2006 when she first ran for Congress with help from Blue America. The chyrons on Tapper's show look pretty neutral. I even tried to do what Trump think people do-- I watched it with the sound off. The Chyrons didn't change the content or the context of the interview, they just left the meaning less clear, which might actually explain why so many otherwise rational people-- not the racists-- voted for Trump. Let's come back to that interview in a second.

Earlier Sunday, Elise Viebeck, reporting for the Washington Post, wrote that "Gillibrand overhauled her political identity during this period, abandoning the conservative positions that made her popular upstate and embracing or even moving further left than the liberal consensus on guns, immigration, Wall Street and same-sex marriage. As the Democratic Party itself moved left, she staked out positions popular with the party’s swelling base of liberals, a posture most evident when she called for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She has voted against President Trump’s agenda more than any other senator. Gillibrand’s evolution seemed to reach its apex last week when she introduced herself as a candidate for president and a fighter for liberal values. But her shift in views from a decade ago is already raising questions among Democrats and provoking attacks from Republicans eager to define her as a flip-flopper. Experts who have followed Gillibrand’s rise said the impression that she has hair-trigger judgment and an overriding instinct to capi­tal­ize on the political moment could prove more problematic than any one shift on policy." I did my best to explain just that-- and answer the question about what Gillibrand really stands for-- in Chapter II of The Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President. Yesterday I tried it in tweet-form:

I started the clip at almost 3 minutes in so we'd get right to Gillibrand's well-practiced "I'm sorry" shtik. Tapper asks her if-- since she describes Trump's immigration positions as "racist"-- her immigration positions (identical to Trump's until political opportunism encouraged her to do a 180 on them) were also racist. It's a horrifying segment and I almost feel sorry for Gillibrand. Almost. If she didn't want all this ugliness to come up again, she probably shouldn't have run for president. "I know you have very different positions today," said Tapper, after laying out the hideous mess she ran on during her 2008 reelection campaign, which sounded like a campaign from Mississippi, not New York, "let me ask me, if Trump's immigration positions are 'racist,' were they racist when you held some of those positions as well?" She knew what was coming, of course, but she seemed kicked in the stomach by how Tapper phrased it. Brutal!

"They certainly weren't empathetic and they were not kind," she said, trying to soften the enormity, before admitting she is-- or at least was-- a classic sociopath: "and I did not think about suffering in other people's lives." And one thing I did 10 years ago when I became senator and was going to represent twenty million people across our state, I recognized that a lot of places in my state were different and I needed to understand what those constituents needed too."

Pure fucking evil! If she were to be elected president-- God forbid-- would she feel compelled to find out what her new constituents in Alabama and Mississippi and Idaho needed to and then start advocating for lynchings? She's the most horrible candidate running in the primary and there are some really bad candidates in this primary.

"So I went down," patting herself on the back. "I went down to Brooklyn; I met with Nydia Velázquez, who's been a leader in fighting for families for a long time, and I listened. And I realized that things I had said were wrong. I was not caring about others; I was not fighting for other people's kids the way I was fighting for my own and I was wrong to feel that way. And so I just said I'm not going to stand by and do nothing for families that are suffering in my state and in my communities." She shouldn't be running for president. She shouldn't be a U.S. Senator. She should be getting mental health therapy-- perhaps in a group session with Trump and Steve King. Watch the rest of the clip. This is a really sick, unself-aware person, completely messed up with confusion. She said he values haven't changed. What does that even mean in the context of her bullshit story about changing?