The Press Box - The Tim Walz Coach Campaign, the Return of the Trump Exposé, and Charles Barkley’s New-Old Job.

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David kick off the show by discussing the New York Times story, “Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign (0:43).” Then they discuss the following: Three reasons Tim Walz was selected as Kamala Harris’s running mate (09:00). The Harris-Trump debate is set (20:23) Tim Walz’s couch jokes (23:40) Then in the notebook they discuss the following: Noah Eagle’s impressive performance in the men’s and women’s basketball gold medal games (37:34) Another Charles Barkley update (39:24) A discussion about aggregators (43:50) And then in “Only in Journalism” they discuss Deion Sanders’s reaction to an only-in-journalism word (0:00) Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent and host of Somebody's Got to win. Brought to you by The Ringer and Spotify. The 2024 election has been upended with Joe Biden off the ticket and Donald Trump facing a new challenger, Kamala Harris. If you want to hear what the insiders are really saying about the race, join me Tuesdays and Thursdays as I break it all down with lawmakers, journalists, and political strategists. We'll go deeper than the headlines to the anxieties at the highest levels of power. And of course, we'll chew over all. the hot political gossip as we head into this historic election. Be sure to follow, somebody's got to win at Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

David? Yeah. Did you read the new one bombshell per paragraph Donald Trump's story in the New York Times? I did, yes. It's called Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.

It's by two veterans of the Trump bombshell genre, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. And no stringers, by the way. There were the only two bylines on there. There are a lot of times with these Trump stories, these big politics stories, you see four or five buylines on them. This is just the two of them, the two big headers.

There wasn't even a contributed research at the bottom of the column. Mm-hmm. I think I speak for both of us when I say we don't feel a lot of nostalgia for the Trump administration. Sure. But reading this piece, I felt a certain. kind of journalistic nostalgia for reporting on the Trump administration. Oh, yeah.

When you'd wake up and there was a bombshell filled piece every single morning. Back when we had a Trump bump, David, and people were subscribing to media outlets. Yeah. Business was halfway solvent. Well, I'm happy to report that happy days are here again. Because this story stacks up with some of the greatest hits of the genre. There's always a good to be sure paragraph in these stories. And here Haberman and Swan write that of Trump's many, many bad stretches.

This is the, quote, worse since a late 2022 spree in which he mused about terminating parts of the Constitution and dined at Mara Lago with a white supremacist and an outspoken anti-Semite. So everything is relative. You should know this before plunging into this piece. Now the biggest revelation from Haberman and Swan is that Donald Trump has been calling Kamala Harris the B word. Repeatedly, they say, according to sources. But the antidote that really stuck from this story was Trump's response when he was asked, well, what about the Democrats calling you and J.D. Vance weird? Trump replied, oh, that's not about me. They're saying that about J.D.

I don't even know if you had to fact check that one. I mean, that just sounds like Donald Trump. Mm-hmm. To a T. Some other fascinating bits from the article. Donald Trump asked his staff if they knew about Vance's whole childless catlady's bit before they picked him as a running mate. Mm-hmm. There have been some bad polls in Ohio of all places for the Trump campaign.

Yeah. Also that one of Donald Trump's aides sent a bunch of angry, text messages to Miriam Adelson, who we know is both the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and the person running a pro-Trump super PAC. Then it turns out the messages were on behalf of someone who runs a different pro-Trump super PAC who was angry that Miriam Edelson was not giving to his pack. That happened. Also, I find key in these articles, David, is figuring out why Trump is particularly, you.

angry at this moment. Yeah. And here are the authors, right? For the first time in Mr. Trump's political life, his opponent has received more sustained news coverage than he has. Mm-hmm. So there it is. Yeah, it's all you need to know.

You get the sense reading this article about how quickly things are moving in American life right now? Yeah. That assassination attempt that Donald Trump survived, that happened one month ago tomorrow. Wow. One month ago. Mickey Kousse used to talk about this as late and probably still does that events move quickly

and that people either because they read the internet or because of the media age we live in now are able to process things more quickly. Yeah. They're just, you know, in the old days it would be like, I don't know, in the 1980s, you'd have a big political revelation and nothing, the story could not change for three or four days. Yeah. people just didn't have time to be like, okay, no, no, no, that's not the story I'm hearing. We're still on story A.

But now you can hear story A and story B and story C and make sense of it. Yeah. In real time. And if you read that truth social post from a few days ago where Donald Trump was imagining that angry Joe Biden was going to come back at the Democratic convention and demand his nomination back, he seems like the only person who is not processing these events. quickly. It's funny. There's been a lot of talk over the, well,

the years, the Trump years of what it would take to beat him, you know, what it would take to out-trump him. And a lot of times, you know, the assumption was you have to be, if to be willing to say all the things

that he'll say, right? You have to be willing to go for the low blow. You have to be willing to spar with him in public. There's all this different stuff that makes Trump's Trump Trump. But really, it was, it may look, we may look back and say it was just outpacing him, right? It was just like out-trumping Trump in the news cycle, right?

I mean, just like the Trump's whole tactic for all those years about, you know, just dealing with bad press by just getting in front of the cameras and making new bad press, you know, I mean, just by, he really sped up the news cycle to such an incredible degree. People were following around, following, hanging on his every word. Not always for the best, but it was just, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, a practice and distraction and speed and whatever else. And he's finally by, I don't know if you give this credit to the Harris campaign or just the evolution of our news culture. He's being left in the dust a little bit. That's a great point. And it's also one that has some complexity

to it because if you read those true social posts, he's still pumping them out like the crazy tweets he used to pump out. We're just not seeing them as much. No. Which is why they're probably not hijacking the news cycle at the rate that his tweets used to. Some of that is just, you know, the press getting smarter and the public generally getting sort of numb to the whole thing. Yeah. But I don't know. Today, by the way, he's back on Twitter.

It's not just truth social anymore. Although it doesn't quite seem to be Donald Trump who's doing the tweeting. It seems a little bit more like a campaign staffer. But I'll leave the conspiracy theories to the other side. Now, you might ask, David, what did Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan do to run these numerous anecdotes by the Trump campaign and give them a chance to comment on what they were about to report in the New York Times? Probably just called a spokesman and got a wrote denial, right? Right. Oh, no.

Because they write that in an angry phone call to a Times reporter on Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump denied he was making any changes to. his team, that is his campaign team, and also threatened to sue the Times over another story the newspaper had published. Yeah. Just like the old days, Donald Trump is picking up his phone to directly call New York Times reporters. We're back, baby. We're back. Journalistically back for better or for worse.

All right, coming up on the podcast, we are exactly one week away from the Democratic Convention. What does it mean that the Democrats are selling Tim Walls as coach walls? We have a presidential debate on the calendar, David. And why does Kamala Harris need to do interviews? Plus, Steph Curry clinches gold for the USA. My Aggregator Complain and Wait. There's a whole book of Only in Journalism Words.

All that and much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Hello Media Consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Brian Waters. We've spent a week now, David, watching the rollout Tim Walls, Minnesota governor that Kamala Harris picked to be her running mate. Turns out he got the job for three reasons. One as he went on Morning Joe, which truly seems to be the center of the media universe in the 2024 campaign.

Part of it, yeah. Yeah, part of it. Called Trump Advance Weird. Also, we learned from the new. York Times that Walls and his team had been pushing him out to TV shows and podcasters long before the Veep Stakes began. Sometimes it turns out to be a good thing to push your candidate out because they needed TV hits.

Oh, there's that guy. Yeah. He's good. Let's put him on. So that was one reason he got the job. The other was that he's one-on-one interview with Kamala Harris went very well. Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, was apparently asking a lot of lot of questions about what the vice president of the United States position would entail.

Sometimes when a candidate is asking a lot of questions about a job, you start to wonder whether they really want the job. Yeah. He even called Team Harris the next day expressing some reservations saying maybe he wanted to still be governor of Pennsylvania. That's probably a pretty good sign. Yeah. Walls was committed to the bid.

No problem being vice president doing with that entails. The third reason Walls got the job was his biography. Army National Guard. Taught high school social studies. Boy, there's a term that takes you back. Yeah. And Tim Walz was a football coach. He was the de-coordinator at Mancato West High School in Mancato, Minnesota.

Yeah. Team won a state championship in 1999. And boy, David, over the last week has Kamala Harrison. and her team leaned into the figure of coach walls. Yeah. Harris has been calling him coach on the stump. That's an honorific sports writer's use with coaches a lot. There were signs in Vegas over the weekend that said,

Coach! exclamation point. The people in the audience held up when Walls started talking. What kind of symbolic figure is Coach Walls? Oh, that's a good question. First of all, yeah. I mean, once you're a coach, are you always a coach, like an ex-president? You're always, you'll always be referred to as coach.

I guess that's true. I guess that, you know, like in our Texas experience, if you ran into your high school football coach in the supermarket, regardless of how long they'd been retired or moved on to other things, you'd call them coach. Absolutely. Once a coach, always a coach, I guess. Yeah, symbolically, it's, I mean, maybe surprisingly more salient than the military service. And of course, that comes, that has come with its own.

I don't know if baggage is the right word, but its own prickliness in Wall's case, with, you know, Republicans just variously questioning his recounting of his service and J.D. Vance calling and stolen valor and all this kind of stuff. But even setting that aside, being a coach is, being an ex-coach, but I guess a coach for life is just, So it's just so meaningful. It just gets to the heart of who a person is in a certain sort of way that, that, that,

that, you know, even military service doesn't necessarily do. You know, we know a lot of different, everybody's, everybody's encountered a lot of different, a lot of different ex-military people, all positive connotations, but it's not, there's not necessarily a through line in the way that just the good old, good old football coach, you know, kind of conveys to you. I think it's a, it's a, it's a fatherliness, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, a, it's a, a committedness to our national pastime. Apologies to all the other sports out there.

And I just kind of, I mean, folksie is a word that I think has been overused when it comes to Governor Walls because I think it's a little bit hand-wavy, a little bit dismissive, but there is a folksiness that's connected to being a former coach. And yeah, and that's to say nothing of, you know, the organizational skills that are necessary for running a good defense, even on the high school level.

Yes, Coach Walls will whip us into shape. Yeah. Just like he whipped the Mancato West defense into shape. Fulxiness is one word, another only in journalism one I've seen deployed for him is plain spoken. Yeah. Both a Midwestern attribute and a coach attribute, he's going to cut through the BS. the coach is going to tell it like it is. For sure.

Yeah. I mean, the plain spoken in this case is not just a, you know, just a turn of phrase. I mean, with his, with his coinage of the weird,

you know, calling all the Republican platform or the Republican nominee is weird. It's very literal. It's funny. They coaches the Harris campaign's way of also leaning into the regular guy aspect. Mm-hmm. Of Tim Walls.

And, you know, your definition of regular guy may vary pretty widely. But I love this quote from the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. She told this to the New York Times. Sometimes you see politicians who put on a car heart t-shirt in order to try to show rural America that they care about them. But Walls doesn't have to do that. He has plenty of car heart in his closet and plaid and everything else. Yeah. Not just one car heart t-shirt, David.

plenty of Carhart merchandise. I actually think you see outsider politicians more in the Carhart jacket. I think putting the Carhart T-shirt is another level of commitment. If not, if for nothing else, and because politicians are rarely seen in T-shirts.

But yeah, no, no. I mean, I said it before about saying him in a T-shirt. He's, he's a sort of guy that is not going to look out of place when he puts on the galoshes, you know, and, and, and surveys a national disaster scene. You know, that's much more comfortable than him, it seems, than the suit and tie look.

Although, you know, as a former high school professor, he's not averse to wearing a tie either. You and I lived a version of the Friday Night Lights, Texas High School football experience. The legendary Pascoe Panthers football team, yes. I loved a lot of the coaches at old Pascal High, but I never thought of coaches as regular people exactly. You thought that they were better than regular people, that they existed on a higher platform? That they were wackier than regular people. Yeah.

There was a special kind of, I don't know, intensity. You know, there was something admirable about wanting to coach, because especially at the high school level, especially at Baskell High, it was not always a super gratifying job. Sure. But it also required you to be a little bit crazy. Yeah. Kind of a caricature. Mm-hmm.

Even in the, you know, even in high school. You, I mean, listen, when you think about as a parent of a football player, you know, not one of us, but if you think back to the sort of parents we surround, we were surrounded by in those days, it's, you do have an interesting relationship with a football coach, especially, I'm sure, a successful football coach, which again, we weren't really. privy to that sort of experience. But you know, you kind of like think about Friday Night Lights. You like you want a coach that's willing to bend the rules, right? You want a coach that's willing to do whatever it takes to win. And there's always some invisible lines

between, you know, your expectations of him and then how it pertains to your flesh and blood, your child, you know? I mean, you want, but you want someone who's going to bring the best out of your child, is going to win for the city, I mean, went for the town, when for the school, went for whatever. And, you know,

you don't always ask a lot of questions along the way. do like how coach has become the one cultural safe space in America? You mentioned Walz's Army National Guard Service. As soon as we heard about that, the swift boats were in the water. Oh, yeah. But when he was introduced as a football coach, it was, thank you, sir, for your service. Wouldn't want to say anything that could possibly discredit the work you did on the sidelines.

At Mankato West High School, who wouldn't dream was true. you remember the basketball coach the varsity basketball coach at old pascal high oh man i didn't you played on the team i didn't play what was what was his name before the swift butter's came out i played on the freshman and jv teams and immediately exiled myself to the newspaper so yeah just put that out there his name was floyd earwood oh yeah coach earwood yeah of course coach yearwood and whenever one of us which is to say me would run a drill the wrong way or generally look lost during practice he would in his best texas accent go boy you look like a blind dog in a meat house god i love coach your wood uh that's great my i was actually talking about uh my one day of

football experience to um to my son earlier this week i moved to texas as you well know literally the day before high school started. It was like staying in somebody's guest house while my family got settled and everything. And I had 24 hours to get my bearings, didn't know what was going on. And just walked in, you know, and like got my schedule from the counselor and just proceeded to go to classes.

And, you know, it was overwhelming in a lot of ways. But probably the most overwhelming part was when I was, I walked into football and I was like, this has got to be a mistake. And I, And apparently, and even with a bad football program, the default in Texas is that like that will be your freshman PE credit. You are on the football team and it is a class during the school day.

And I, yeah, I didn't wait until the end of sophomore year. I held it out of there and into, I think, cross country as quickly as I could just to avoid whatever, whatever calamity. I hadn't watched a football game prior to this, right? I certainly did not want to be a part of one. So I got out of there as quickly as I could. But that's the level of commitment, not just at the school, not just on the team, but that the society has, right?

And the Texas culture has. If you're a freshman, you got to get those. Forget PE class. You are taking football. You were a part of the football program and lifestyle immediately. They wanted to see if this out of town or had any juice in him. I guess that would have been apt. Yeah.

Towns were reserved for cross-country in the drama department. Speaking of drama, David, we've got a debate on the schedule, or I guess back on the schedule. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are going to have their very first face-off on September 10th. Trump had sort of tried to wiggle his way out of that and asked for a different debate on Fox News. Harris said no. Trump then said, okay, I will debate you on ABC. It's going to be September 10th. That is the Tuesday after the.

opening weekend of NFL season. Yeah. So what a content window we will see open up on Thursday with the NFL opener. Mm-hmm. And then end on Tuesday with Harris Trump. Perhaps the biggest case of whiplash since the Iowa caucuses happened the day after the Chiefs 49ers Super Bowl. Yeah.

At least the first one. I know you and I try to discourage people from writing that American politics is like professional wrestling. Fortunately, I have some new data points for anybody looking to write that particular think piece. There was a USA chant at the first Harris Walls rally in Philadelphia. Yes. And Democrats are really happy?

Mm-hmm. They're like, wait a second. We got the USA chant. Yep. Not just for Republican rallies? This rules. Also, somebody tweeted, and I don't know if this has been confirmed,

that Trump is using pyro. And his rallies now? Oh, he is? Yeah. It's just so professional wrestling, it hurts. Yeah. Parents keep your kids away from those pyro cannons. So scare the hell out of them.

Now, you need three examples for a think piece. So number three would be Jesse Ventura is now a very loud supporter of Kamala Harris. Yeah, he popped up a Monday Night Rock week or two ago. And there were a lot of people in the wrestling world that were already floating the notion that maybe he should appear at the Democratic convention because not just. just because he's a pro wrestling counter programming to Hulk Hogan's appearance there, but because he notoriously tried to unionize pro wrestling, or try to unionize the WWF locker room back in the 80s until

supposedly, according to Venture himself, Hogan, Hulk Hogan himself ratted that ratted him out to Vince McMahon, the WWF owner, Vince McMahon, and who put a cabosh on the move to unionize. So that would be, so it's a pro-union message in addition to being a Jesse Ventura of message. Somebody who actually has politics, you know, a politics background, not just the shirt tearing background.

Someday I want to appear on the Masked Man show and argue that Jesse Ventura was in fact the best color commentator in WWE history. It's a weird form of sacrilege to say that, but it's not as crazy as it sounds. To me, it's like arguing that Wilt was better than Michael Jordan.

It may not be right, but it's an argument that's worth hearing. Yeah. I almost look at it in flip side. It's like it may not be wrong, but it is an argument that's going to make a lot of people mad. Coming to the mass man show when David wants to piss off numerous listeners, I want to ask you about this.

Couch jokes? We heard Tim Walls come out with a couch joke in his very first appearance as Harris is running mate. Yeah. And there were a couple of tweets from outside resistance universe that said, hey, you know, if

this were a Republican, getting on the stump every day and making jokes about something that's just completely fictitious. Yeah. Would we be, would the media be so okay with this happening over and over again?

I think I saw one of Nevada's Congress people making the same joke before the Harris Trump rally there over the weekend. What do we think about couch jokes? Well, there's two things. One, a joke like that only really has salience, only really has power when it feels like it reflects something more central about the person you're making the joke about, right? As you like to say, go on. Now, you know, I don't think anyone believes in the substance of it.

But I think it's just a sort of extension of the weird line of argument, right? It's just like, this just see, this guy, there's just something wrong with him. And I think that it weirdly has a hold over people because it seems like it fits, even though we know that it in fact is not based in reality. Now, maybe we just don't know enough about J.D. Vance as a culture. Maybe this joke and this sort of meme and this general stigma stuck onto him so quickly because he was not known and, you know, sort of cannibalized his public persona. I don't think that's true.

but if you want to say you shouldn't be making the jokes because for some reason I guess you could put a pin in that. Maybe he will emerge as someone who we think very differently of the jokes will no longer hold and we can retroactively regret having made them. I mean I guess

that argument does not seem totally nuts to me. But I don't know. I think for all the people who are drawing parallels between doing the what if Republican said this thing I mean, show me the comparison. I don't remember Trump making

like just odd jokes about people that were just based in the meme world. Right? I mean, he's unkind to people. And it says things that are completely fictitious like about JFK's assassination and other things. Yeah. So you're saying he doesn't make meme, he doesn't make meme jokes. That's where we're drawing the line for Trump.

I mean, did people make, did people have a problem with Trump's nicknames for people? I mean, it just seemed like there, there was some of like this seems like unnecessary but i don't remember i mean i don't have any like liberal friends who are like i wish you wouldn't talk like that you know i mean i listen i just feel i just feel like listen you can make the case that like you know either a trump would do the same thing and so you know finally democrats are fighting back and i think there's i think that's coherent but also i just feel like i don't know i i just i think it's incredibly i think it's not

incredibly. I think it's fairly humorous and I find it really impossible to get worked up over it. I don't think I'd be, I mean, maybe I would be more worked up if it was aimed at somebody I liked more than, more than J.D. Vance. But I just think, I don't know. I find it really hard to get offended by that sort of like very mild joke. He also, I mean, not for nothing, didn't get up there and explain to the audience what the joke meant, right? It's still a little bit of an inside joke. yeah i'm not sure my mom understands the couch joke nor do you feel the need to explain it to her no um i did like how you try to put this all in political terms the substance of the couch jokes rather than the general appearance of couch impropriety yeah very good uh david one thing

Kamala Harris has not done since she has been the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party is grand an interview. People have begun to mention it. Both reporters and Republicans, Trump gave a whole wacky press conference last week, partly to highlight the fact that Harris wasn't talking to reporters. And then as soon as you saw this begin to bubble up a little bit, Harris started taking some questions from reporters on the tarmac. Or in the bowels of whatever arena she was.

was speaking in. Mm-hmm. I think Trump's, well, his press conference was wild and not sure it was particularly well advised. But I think the point in that it highlighted Harris's lack of a similar press conference up to that point was a good one. I think by and large, since Harris took over the Democratic ticket, Trump has picked every wrong battle, right?

Just arguing over just the debate to start. things off. The stupid thing about crowd sizes and AI images of crowd sizes and whatever else. I mean, they're like every everything he said at NABJ in that entire interview. Every battle he's picked has been the wrong one. This, that one I think is actually is actually a good one. You know, like if he was out there more frequently, you know, and saying, um, and she was not. I think frankly, it's one of the biggest mistakes she can make. I don't know that it matters how so much what she says, or if she, you know, get something quote unquote wrong. I think especially coming out of the, as a part of the Biden administration, the perception that you're ducking the press is going to be

so much more damning for her than it would be for any other candidate. And it's not perception, right? This is, this is not, this is a bad look. She's not giving interviews. Yeah. She's, she's just not giving interviews. And look, I totally understand her political instinct at this point because it's like, Look, I've had this absolutely extremely successful political rollout ever since Biden dropped out of the race. Then I picked Tim Walls and we got this great week of earned media. Now I got one more week to go and then the Democratic convention starts. So I'm seeing how far I can push this down the road. Yeah.

Plus, she's a new candidate. So like issue positions that are unique to her and may be different. from the issue positions of the Biden administration. Yeah. That stuff does take a while to figure out, but it's also one of those things like you don't want to be, you may not want to be asked about all those things right now. I totally understand it from her perspective, but she's not doing interviews. And I almost feel like the principle here that everybody should do interviews is so obvious.

You and I should focus on making the case for people who want Kamala Harris to win the election and convince them why she should do interviews. because there are a lot of people, right? You know, people, and again, this is a completely normal thing. Like, hey, there's 90-ish days left in this campaign. I don't want her to have a bad day because of a journalistic principle that she would be observing. Yeah. And I guess my arguments, and please add your own and feel free to dispute any of these is,

I think a lot of times political partisans assume that journalists are antagonistic to their cause. Sure. they are trying to hurt their cause. Well, that's not always clear, right? They said that about Joe Biden. Why are you worried about Joe Biden's age? Why are you worried about Joe Biden not doing interviews? And it turned out that that actually helped the Democratic ticket.

Yeah. Joe Biden has a bad debate. He does a really so-so interview with Lester Holt, and then all of a sudden he's off the ticket, and now things look better for Democrat. So it doesn't necessarily mean that bad things are going to happen to your side because he do interviews. Yeah.

The other thing about journalists is, I think the journalists, one thing you can say about them is that they want to do interviews because they want to hold public figures to account and they want information. And they think that about all politicians. Donald Trump and ABJ for that whole debate about platform, it turned out to be an incredibly revealing interview. They want information from Kamala Harris. And I think Democrats, even though supporting her, even those to say like,

I don't care what she believes in. I don't want Donald Trump to be president again. again, a totally rational point of view, would want information about what she is going to do as president. Yeah. Whether it's, you know, what is your policy about ending the war in Gaza and bringing the hostages home? What is your policy about abortion? Things you can actually do on day one about guaranteeing abortion rights. And, I mean, this is fairly obvious, but the more interviews you do, the less weight that they come with, right?

when you'll be better at doing interviews because you're out there doing interviews too. You don't have every reporter who gets the chance to put a mic in front of you just looking for, just trying to make you answer for all of the other journalists you haven't spoken to. And frankly, it'll make you a better campaigner and probably a better, you know, president if it goes that way. You know, I mean, it's, this is, it should, the longer, the more you resist, the more of a problem you're making for yourself. Remember that Max Taney story in Semaphore about how she had learned this lesson as vice president?

Every interview was very freighted, including her own interview with Lester Holt that was about immigration. Yeah. And so she said, okay, I'm just starting doing more interviews. Yeah. And then if, you know, there's an answer or something goes, hey, why I had one interview, well, guess what? I've done three more. It's the Trump philosophy you talked about earlier, except with interviews. Oh, here's another interview.

Yeah. So you're not so worried about interview number one. last thing I wanted to run by you in the political sphere Donald Trump confusing political asylum with insane asylum Has this ever been I mean Has anyone ever asked him this? Then one brought it up in the press conference, did they? I don't think so

This is one of those things that's been quietly gathering steam on Twitter People sort of listening To him on the stump and wondering aloud Let's start with Donald Trump talking about the issue of immigration And throwing out a media piss test at the same time. But I look forward to the debates because I think we have to set the record straight. Why is it that millions of people were allowed to come into our country from prisons,

from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums, even insane as that. That's a mental institution on steroids. That's what it is. A mental institution on steroids. So there was that. And then there was Donald Trump repeatedly referencing Hannibal Lecter on the stump, whom he called the late great Hannibal Lecter. As a couple of people have pointed out, a Hannibal Lecter is actually alive in the Thomas

Harris Cannon. Do you see that interview in Deadline? It was with Dominic Patton where he broke the news to Anthony Hopkins that Donald Trump was talking about Hannibal Lecter as if he were a real person? No, I did not see that. And Anthony Hopkins replied, as if he is. real? Completely shy. This is just what not. It's a perfect Trump story because, again, it's just

completely believable that these terms would either have been confused in his mind or just have become one in kind of a linguistic way that he could not untangle anymore. Yeah. But as you point out, I don't know that he's ever going to get asked about this or that anyone would ever admit this were the case. Yeah. So we just hear him constantly talking about insane asylums or mental institutions, as he called them on steroids. Yeah.

And Hannibal Lecter, who was apparently alive and well. Anthony Hopkins continues to deadline. I didn't know that. Hannibal, that's a long time ago that movie. God, that was over 30 years ago. I'm shocked and appalled what you've told me about Trump. The man who gave us one of the more memorable versions of Hannibal Lecter weighing in on American politics. All right, coming up in 30 seconds, David, what Steph Curry and Charles Barkley did for the sport of basketball over the weekend.

But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious. All of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always, always, always. gratefully received. Speaking of Tim Wals and his regular guy quality, well, David, a lot of people on Twitter have been trying to describe that quality, that dad joke dispensing quality,

as precisely as they could. Would you like to hear some of the funniest attempts? Oh, please. All right, here we go. Number one, Tim Wals has the energy of a dad who just gave the family's answer on family feud and is really proud of the guess. Tim Walls says, I hated it to every single waitress who comes to take his empty plate away.

Tim Walls leaves the restroom wringing his wet hands and says, You guys ready to rock and roll? And finally, Tim Walls will have the highest office ever held by a sitcom neighbor who gives advice in the third act. Tim Walls reminds you of a couple of Red State Natives who now host a media podcast. Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, the notebook dump. Let's talk about the Olympics. Let's put a cork in the Olympics because the U.S. finished off. The men's game effectively ended with one of the greatest three-pointers you'll ever see.

Here are Noah Eagle and Dwayne Wade on the call for NBC. Dr. Curry dancing on Baton over the double team. Davis with a rebound. Up ahead for Booker, exclamation points. He's a bad boy. Nice, night. That, oh, felt very college football announcer. Oh, yeah.

But was entirely appropriate to the moment. Mm-hmm. Which just seems so crazy that that shot was going to go in when it came out of Curry's hands. Oh, my God, yes. So that was the men's game. This was the ending of the women's gold medal game. France needed a three to tie, and here's no eagle again. Kalia copper has been Kalia gold today.

No timeouts here. Johannes up ahead. It's Williams. That was a two. Banked in. A two ball. And the United States is going to claim gold for the eighth consecutive Olympics. What a finish.

Williams with her foot on the line. Some really exciting basketball. But man, this sure turned into an advertisement for the Noah Eagle era of NBC did it. not. It really did. It really, really did. What fantastic work by him. Oh, my God. We have a Charles Barkley update, David. Oh, I honestly do not know about this. So this is great. Well, so everything Charles Barkley said about his career up to this point was bullshit. But this is the real story. Now, we, that was all, and thankfully, we treated all those proclamations very, very skeptically in the press. We didn't give Charles Barkley a forum to change his mind 19 times.

but now he has finally come to a conclusion. This was Tuesday, August 6th. Charles Barkley is staying at Turner and not just next year, which will be the last year of their deal showing basketball under the expiring rights deal. But beyond that, Andrew Marchand of the Athletics says Barclay

has a 10-year, 210 million-dollar contract that started in 2022. So he's making $21 million a year. that is the Troy A. Pat McAfee, soon to be Stephen A. Smith tier of broadcasting. He's going to do Inside the NBA next year. And then, again, depending on how you treat this update, he is going to continue being a sports announcer for post-NBA turn. Now they have the NCAA tournament, which the Inside Gang does. they're going to have a couple of games of the college football playoff,

and have hockey and baseball. And there's a notion that maybe they take inside the NBA and kind of rebrand it as just a sports pregame show, or a sports show, late night show pregame show something and just do it. There's also a non-zero chance that all this legal wrangling Turner's doing at the NBA right now could end with them getting a tiny, tiny package of games. from the NBA just to kind of go away, which case you could have inside the NBA doing the NBA going forward

if in some small and sort of, you know, out of the way, way. But that's what this is. $21 million a year not to call NBA basketball. Yeah, I mean, there's also the data point that, you know, listeners to ring her podcast, the town will know that, that Time Warner Discovery is also in carriage talks with some of the cable providers. And I think putting up a good front as an ongoing source of important sports content, I think is very important to those negotiations.

So just as it seemed like Charles Barkley sort of changed his tune when it was important for Time Warner Discovery to be seen as being serious about NBA rights, kind of out of nowhere. Now I think there might be something else at play here, too, in terms of putting up a good front. But yeah, that's Charles Barkley for you. I mean, even, I don't even want to give extra weight to his words, but come on. I mean, there's a million outs to this, even if you wanted to maintain a shred of, you know, honesty. 100%. I mean, I think, is there any safer bet than betting that Charles Barkley will be a free agent?

again. No. Or we'll be threatening to be a free agent again in the next couple of years. I don't think so. I mean, it feels like we could do this next year. If Turner does 100% lose the NBA, that he could be back out there again and they've gone through all these,

some of these carriage fee negotiations you're talking about. I mean, the thing about losing him and the one thing I, the one way this makes any kind of sense is that if he leaves Turner sports as a brand, just loses its identity. Yeah. You know, it's obviously going to be diminished going forward. But if you have Charles Barkley, then you have arguably the best thing about Turner Sports.

Yeah. So could you justify keeping him at that crazy salary on those grounds alone? Mm-hmm. But when you are, again, to, you know, whether it's cable operators, whoever it is, he was like, we have Charles Berkeley. We may have to have the thing that Charles Berkeley is famous for announcing. but we still have Charles Park. Yeah.

Got to complain about aggregators, David. You have a personal complaint? I have a personal complaint. Go on. These are not the typical NBA NFL aggregators that people like to get mad at because they chop up a Bill Simmons podcast and pull out something that Bill didn't really say.

Yeah. No, David, these are fellow journalists. Going through Twitter over the last couple of days, and I won't even name the person because this is a generalized complaint, but I see a person who is a reporter in the media political space and they have screenshoted a newspaper story. In fact, taking two screenshots of the juiciest parts of a newspaper story. And they tweet it out.

Yeah. And there's no link in the tweet to the newspaper story. There is no mention of who wrote the newspaper story. and there's also no mention of where the story appeared. Now, wait a second. If we're going to aggregate something on Twitter, and we are journalists, shouldn't at least one of those things be present? Yeah.

I mean, and I'm sure I'm not perfect at this because I often, you know, you'd see something from one quote or something and you want to put it up there. I totally understand. I'm sure I've done this a million times. but if you are a journalist and you have one eye on what is happening to this business, surely you have got to do more than that. Yeah. Surely you have got to understand the economic havoc that is going to be reeked on all of us,

the further economic havoc. If you don't link to the stories and give people a chance to actually read them. Yeah. On some place other than Twitter, much less subscribe to the publication. Yep. It's like a really thin line between bad aggregator and then just like stealing. Yeah. I mean, what is it if you are not just like, yeah, here's a cool screenshot.

I'll see that from random accounts. They're like, look at this funny. Hey, look at this George Clooney profile I found. Here's a great paragraph. I'm like, you know, somebody wrote that and somebody published that. You could perhaps direct people while you are carving out a little piece of it. But if you're a journalist, surely you know the difference here. Yeah.

Between aggregating and let us call it beyond aggregating. All right, only in journalism, David. Mm-hmm. This is a special feature here on the press box where we should highlight words you never hear in human speech, but constantly read in news articles. Yep. For instance, our friend Dennis Farks points us to a press conference with Dion Sanders, when we are contractually obligated to call Coach Prime. Well, he's been a coach once. He's always a coach.

He's always a coach, much like Tim Walz. He was speaking at Colorado's Fall Media Day and listened to what happened when a reporter hit Coach Prime with a time-honored only in journalism word. Hey, Coach, Arnie Stapleton from Associated Press. You've bolstered your offensive line here in this second season. What does bolstered me? You beefed it up?

Because, you know, I don't know all that. bolstered stuff. I never used that in the sentence in my life. All right. You beefed up your offensive line in the South season. How do you sort of microwave chemistry? Improved. How about improved? Let's say that we've improved. Dionne Sanders is being very difficult in that press conference. In fact, would not take questions from certain journalists.

I don't approve of that. But in this case, he heard an only in journalism word and he was just directing the reporter toward a more straightforward verb. Yeah. We didn't bolster the offensive line. We didn't beef up the offensive line, also only in journalism. We improved it.

Yeah. We improved it. Now, David, it turns out that we are not the only ones who have the narrow and fairly demented hobby of looking for such words. Because I got a tweet from a listener, Zachary Marconi. And saw this.

of the Brattle Bookshop in Boston. He found a book called Uncommon Words Often Used in Print Journalism by Jorge Lema Patino. And the page of the book that he screenshoted for us listed buttress. Wow. As one such words, which is kind of like bolstering your offensive line. Mm-hmm. Now, Zachary was kind enough to send the book to me.

I was going to ask, you got your hand? hands on the book. Well, it's in the mail. Okay. From the Brattle Bookshop in Boston, which, by the way, I can't wait to visit now. You know, I'm looking for our next press box public event. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Interesting choice.

We've already supplied us with material for the podcast. I mean, it feels like that's the least we could do is to have some of our closest friends at the bookshop, provided that everybody there is okay with it. Anyway, the book is on the way, and I will have this in my possession the next time you and I speak. Nice. Speaking of next time, I'm going to be in Chicago. Yep.

Next Monday for the Democratic Convention. We're having a little meet and greet Sunday, August 18th, 3 o'clock at the Crushed by Giants Brewing Company. We'd love to see anybody interested in the press box there. You don't need to RSVP. You don't need a ticket. Just come bring anybody you want. And I want to shout out the genius of David Shoemaker here, the artistic genius.

this because I emailed you, David, and said, hey, I had this idea that at this event in Chicago, I want to be able to give listeners of the press box a press box campaign button that looks like those old school campaign buttons they used to give out at contested conventions of your. Yeah. And I sent you a few pictures of buttons I've lately been buying at garage sales and flea markets and the like. I want to say 30 minutes, maybe an hour later. here comes David's incredibly perfect design press box campaign button.

Just like, here you go. I made it. And it looks unbelievable. Careful listeners of this podcast will note that I've already changed our Twitter avatar over at the press box pod to the campaign button. So you can get a little peek at it. Anyway, if you come to the press box meeting greet in Chicago, I will have a button for you. I will also be distributed,

excuse me, David, to journalists at the DNC. Oof. Because that's, that is part of the audience. That is. Another journalist says, hey, press box 2024, that's a ticket I'd like to support.

Oh, Spotify. Or wherever you get your podcast. Think we'll have some extra buttons too. So anybody who makes a particularly notable contribution to this podcast. Headline, Twitter joke, general, great idea. I just might send you one in the mail.

Trust me, Zachary Marconi is going to get his press box 2024 campaign button, which many people are calling the Chotchky of this campaign site. Many, many people, yes. Many, many people are signed. All right, it's time for David Chumaker,

guess this is a strain pun headline. Yeah. Our last headline, whenever it was that we did it, about Snoop Dog carrying the Olympic torch was Snoop Dog keeps it lit. Today's headline comes to us from Steve Criskey. It's from ESPN, David. It's about that U.S. men's basketball team that won gold in the Olympics.

Two things I want to put in your mind. They beat France in the final. And gold, as you'll remember from our days at Pascal High, has a certain two-letter abbreviation in the periodic table. what was ESPN's strained pun headline? A.U, right? Am I current? Okay.

Is it something that's awesome? Or A.U? We beat France in the final. Oh, au contraire? Uh-huh. A revoir. A revoir. A revoir.

That's very strange, but I admire it. He is David Chewbaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Plexia magic. by Brian Waters. Coming up Thursday, a guest host making his first appearance on the press box, the ringers Hollywood bureau chief

Alan Siegel. Yeah. Our pal, the master of the pop culture oral history. We're going to do a check-in maybe on sports docs, including hard knocks and receiver, maybe getting to some swift boating history. Since that's come up with the campaign

of Tim Walls, Sunday we will meet in Chicago and Monday. I'm going to be drinking coffee like a veteran. Politico reporter as David and I give you more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.