Pennsylvania is known as the “Unavoidable State” because it’s a large state that connects a significant portion of the United States. It’s “fine” but completely and truly unavoidable for me.
Unavoidable because everyone says I need to win here to get into the White House. And unavoidable because I’m basically a hostage here — my team says I’m stuck here for the next week working on debate prep.
We are going to do back to back mock debates with podiums and people playing Trump and the moderators — basically non-stop — until Tuesday. Joe had those, too, before the debate he had against Trump in June — but the team says mine need to start earlier in the day and include a lot fewer naps breaks.
After my rally Monday I learned a few fun facts about Pittsburgh:
1. It used to be called the “Steel City” because it’s famous for producing steel. They’ve now changed it to “Steal City” because if you leave your car unattended for more than five minutes it’s gonna be stolen. Not as bad as my state — California — where a car is stolen every 2 minutes and 30 seconds — but still pretty bad. As I try to tout my record of lowered crime, I better forget to mention that stat and nickname.
2. People shorten Pittsburgh to “The Burgh.” Some call it “the Dirty Burgh” and some others call it a Democratic mess, with rising crime and kids that can’t read.
3. It’s also called “The Paris of the Appalachians” — I’ve been to Paris; this is no Paris. I haven’t been the Rio Grande portion of the border yet though, I’m not sure what the point of that would be.
4. One of my favorite nicknames for the city is “Hell with the Lid Off” — I’m not actually sure how it got that one but… hilariously accurate.
This visit to Pittsburgh…we might not kick all the customers out of a Pittsburgh restaurant to bring in actors to fill the place for a completely fake, scripted “impromptu” stop at a local restaurant. We might not, but we also might. We got flack for that, but it seems like a reasonable thing to do…My team says they have enough of a hard time editing me to look good, they don’t need the extra work of editing out hecklers screaming “get out demon” or whatever those red hat wearing guys yell. Why do we have free speech again?
Ugh. I’ll write more later. Raccoon Face says I gotta go back to the podium. I told them to get Alec Baldwin or one of the Baldwins to play Trump — that would have made this week a lot more fun.
Kinda hard to be brat here but I trying.