Clearly, there’s not much news for media to cover and explain these days: Just a Supreme Court ruling that temporarily torpedoed President Trump’s tariff strategy. A potential war with Iran over its nuclear weapon ambitions and ICBMs to deliver them. Every member of Congress going on break without funding the Department of Homeland Security.
So, to drum up midwinter readers and online clicks, media have turned to a golden oldie: Who’s running for president this time?
Never mind that the election is 23,736 hours away (989 days). You have a president whose mere name draws everyone’s attention. Democrats and sympathetic media have been unable to cripple his career for 11 years of lies, hoaxes, phony trials, and exaggerations.
What better way to tap into that audience full of enmity and his supporters’ love and fears than to start covering who might possibly, maybe perhaps, who-knows replace him in the White House?
Media would be joyously pitting Marco Rubio against JD Vance by now if Rubio hadn't cleverly said he would not seek to top the ticket if Vance did. Boom. Still, Twitter (aka X) was ablaze with new Rubio '28 fans after his impressive Munich speech. Even Vance chimed in with praise.
Media's "nominees" don’t have to be realistic presidents. Online has become the new water-cooler chatter. There are no consequences anymore for provocative and dishonest media speculation. No one will remember in the end.
Thanks to this dynamic, we already have a developing field of potential Democrat wannabes. There are governors: Illinois’ JB Pritzker is one, although high taxes, debts, and the Chicago Bears moving to a red state don’t help.
Gavin Newsom of the no-longer Golden State, who wants to share his disastrous policies with America. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. He’s Jewish and supports Israel, but he’s a fresh face and has a new book, like Newsom. (Always the giveaway.)
The Senate, where Democrats instinctively turn for presidential tickets, will no doubt produce one or two hopeless hopefuls.
There is, of course, the salad queen, Kamala Harris. She leads in some polls for inexplicable reasons. She’s delighted to be a “potential” candidate. That keeps her speaking fees inflated until she drops out, as she did after milking the possibility of a candidacy in the California governor's race. Oh, look. She, too, has a book out.
Media are so desperate for names to hype as clickbait and potential Trump replacements, the next thing you know, they'll drag Pete Buttigieg out of his well-deserved obscurity as another possibility.
Recently, two newcomers have been added to media’s celebrity wish list: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (I’ll get to her) and Stephen A. Smith. Yes, the dour sportscaster for ESPN.
Smith has never run a business. Has no political resume and no government experience. But he’s well-known, outspoken, rich, often controversial, and black. That’s good enough to reap online traffic now.
Remember Bill O’Reilly on Fox? On NewsNation the other day, he pushed Smith as a disruptor POTUS candidate, which earned both men a splash of valuable publicity. “I think he should run, and I’m being serious now,” said O’Reilly.
Smith played along, as long as he could protect his comfortable quality of life. “Once upon a time,” Smith said, “it was emphatically no. That has quelled to some degree.” He would be the nation’s first black, unmarried-father-of-two-girls president.
There’s a devious journalism trick for news consumers to watch out for. Out of the blue, a reporter could ask someone in public life if they are running for the White House or simply assert that he's heard they are.
That person might be shocked. But anything they say can be made into a story on any given day.
Example: The story would say the senator had denied he is running for president. What he actually said: “What? No, I’m not!” Or that senator refused to deny he is running for president. “Look, I’m here to talk about the tax bill, not 2028.”
That happened to AOC the other day. A Democratic Socialist now in her fourth House term from New York’s 14th district, she flew to the recent Munich Security Conference.
According to media, being seen doing something overseas adds to your bona fides as a serious person. Newsom has gone to Europe twice this winter for the same reason. It's not really working.
Another notorious Californian is trying a different path for publicity in politics: Hurling a stream of obscenities in public.
According to AOC, she went to Germany to deliver an anti-authoritarian, pro-working-class message. A New York Times reporter wrote that AOC “is considered one of the best communicators in politics.”
But whatever she had to say on a socialist wish list was completely overshadowed by what the Times called “slip-ups.”
A slip-up is misplacing Venezuela south of the equator, which AOC did. But her empty answer about the U.S. defending Taiwan was something else. It seemed more like a textbook example from the Kamala Harris Guide to Public Speaking:
Um… You know, I think that, uh…This is such a, uh, you know, I think that this is a, um...
This is, of course, a very long-standing policy of the United States, and I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
And we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation. And for that question to even arise.
AOC said that an unnamed reporter had asked her, “Is Munich the new New Hampshire?” She complained later to the Times reporter that all the ensuing talk about her running for president had obscured her larger message.
“Everyone’s got this story wrong,” she said, “that this is about me running for president. I could give — whatever, about that.”
Of course, by making this explicit complaint to her hometown newspaper in a colorful quote, “one of the best communicators in politics” guaranteed that her name and the words "running for president" were published together.
Maybe that was a coincidence, if you believe they exist in politics.
That’s how this early game of political positioning is played; slip your name into the 2028 discussion as if by accident. Then, through the media’s penchant for feeding off each other and recycling ideas, a couple of those media references will turn you into “a potential 2028 candidate” all over the place.
AOC does have some potential challenges. By historical standards, she is far too short to be a commander-in-chief. The average height of all our nearly four dozen presidents has been 5'11". She is 5'4 ". And then, of course, there's intelligence.
Having said all that, ladies and gentlemen, I want to make it crystal clear here today to you and everyone who might read this, as I stand here before you in this glorious 250th year of our nation's history, that I currently have no plans to seek the highest office in our land.
That would indeed be the greatest honor anyone could ever imagine. The airplane is cool. And I wouldn’t mind the 24-hour kitchen with servants and the Diet Coke desk button so thoughtfully installed by our wise POTUS No. 47.
Of course, you never say never, but….
