Trump’s press briefing sounded like a ‘campaign TV commercial’ for 2024: CNN’s Michael Smerconish

President Donald Trump hasn't made a lot of public appearances since the November 3 election, but he briefly reemerged this week and spoke to reporters in the White House without taking questions from them. And according to conservative/libertarian CNN pundit Michael Smerconish, Trump's statements sounded like a 2024 campaign commercial.

The Philadelphia-based Smerconish appeared on the CNN program "Out Front," hosted by Erin Burnett — who noted that Trump's public appearances "are rare these days" and that the president "showed up at the press briefing room for 64 seconds" and talked about the stock market. When Burnett asked for Smerconish's take on Trump's briefing, he responded, "That was a campaign TV commercial in the making. Erin, as soon as I saw it — and he was only there, as you say, for 60 seconds — I said to myself, '30,000 (in the stock market) is a big milestone. I give him credit for that because frankly, we'd be blaming him for that if it tanked. He does not want to trust the media to record that moment. So, he walked into that White House press room with (Vice President) Mike Pence at his side and recorded it for posterity, including potentially, for 2024. You could see that on a campaign reel in four years."

Although Smerconish is right-of-center politically, he has been quite critical of Trump at times and is not one to mindlessly echo the GOP party line. Smerconish angered many people on the right when, during the 2008 presidential election, he announced that he would be voting for Democratic nominee Barack Obama rather than Republican nominee John McCain.

Trump has yet to concede to President-elect Joe Biden and continues to claim, without evidence, that he was the victim of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. But this week, Trump said that he will voluntarily leave the White House on January 20 if the Electoral College confirms Biden in December.