Racist talk during the meeting mars Trump’s message, but he scores on Joe Rogan’s podcast

It was a revealing moment for Donald Trump.

“When I say ‘the enemy from within’ the other side goes crazy,” he said on Sunday.

He’s right about that. I brought up the subject in our Trump Tower interview last weekend, saying that line seemed ominous, and his response — that Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff are indeed enemies, not just adversaries — was picked up across the media universe.

But driving the other side of the notes is a Trump specialty. When he told the rally at Madison Square Garden that the media is “the real enemy, the enemy of the people,” there were loud cheers from a party that already despises and distrusts the press.

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A small digression: the argument that Trump shouldn’t have been at the Garden because the Nazis held a rally there in 1939 is ridiculous. FDR held an event there two years later and Democrats have held nominating conventions there. It’s where I’ve seen many Knicks games and a George Harrison concert. And Billy Joel has been selling out the arena for years.)

Trump knows how to rile up the media and reignite the debate about whether they should cover up his more exaggerated rhetoric or just normalize it.

In our Mar-a-Lago interview a few months ago, the former president acknowledged to me that he sometimes deliberately uses inflammatory language to boost reporting. Remember, even negative reporting helps him dominate the headlines.

And if you think media companies won’t be intimidated by him, just look at the disingenuous decisions of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrrick Soon-Shiong to kill Kamala Harris is leaning in favor of a position of non-approval that clearly helps Trump. Two columnists, including Michelle Norris, have resigned from the Post, three top editors have left the Times and thousands of subscriptions at both newspapers have been canceled.

Trump’s speech at the Garden was almost completely overshadowed by what preceded it. A comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, called Puerto Rico “a floating pile of trash.” He joked about Jewish people being cheap, and that he and a black friend were “cutting watermelons.”

“These Latinos love to make babies too. Just know that they do,” Hinchcliffe said. ‘There is no question of retreating. They don’t. They’re coming in, just like they did to our country.”

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It got to the point where Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Fox yesterday morning, “Look, it was a comedian who made a joke in bad taste. That joke obviously does not reflect the views of President Trump or our campaign.”

The Trump camp quickly announced that it had not vetted what Hinchcliffe was going to say. If that were true, it was a big mistake.

But it wasn’t just the comedian. Conservative New York radio host Sid Rosenberg talked about ‘f****** illegals’ during the meeting, and also called Hillary Clinton a ‘sick bastard’ and a ‘Jew hater’. A friend of Trump called Kamala Harris “the antichrist.”

Now Trump didn’t say any of this, but he also made no attempt to distance himself by saying, for example, that he disagreed with everything that had been said.

A news item from the New York Times story was the headline “Trump at the Garden: A Final Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny, and Racism.”

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And that gave Kamala Harris an opening. She said the meeting “highlighted a point I was making… He is focused and basically fixated on his grievances, and on himself, and on the divisions of our country.”

Meanwhile, Trump scored an absolute coup with a three-hour sitdown with Joe Rogan.

Sure, he rambled occasionally and talked about whales and aliens. But the podcast was viewed 33 million times, with an audience made up of mostly men, and mostly young men. That’s far more than a candidate could achieve by appearing on several top cable news programs.

Many believe the sitdown helped humanize Trump, with Rogan telling him he gets endless publicity for saying “weird s***.” It was clearly a sympathetic conversation, and Rogan said the media is “the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.”

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Harris was also in talks to create Rogan’s Spotify podcast, and he said she was welcome there, but if he wanted her, she would tape the show today. To save face, she then announced that she was having scheduling problems. Instead, Harris did Brene Brown’s production, which clearly appeals to women. The vice president needs to improve its gender gap among men.

With one week until the elections, every message and misstep counts. And every day you play defense is a missed opportunity.