An “exhausted” and decompensating convicted felon former President Trump has backed out of yet another non-MAGA media appearance – the third this week and the fourth this month – this time with the Shade Room, a site/podcast that Politico Playbook describes as drawing “an audience that is largely young and Black” and which Vice President Kamala Harris had appeared on last week.

Per Playbook, the teams had been in talks, “but as no interview materialized, Shade Room staff began feeling that feet were being dragged inside Trump’s campaign. No date was ever set, we’re told, but the intention was to try and work toward a sit-down. In a conversation earlier this week, when describing why an interview hadn’t come together just yet, a Trump adviser told The Shade Room producers that Trump was ‘exhausted and refusing [some] interviews but that could change’ at any time, according to two people familiar with the conversations.” Copied that verbatim given the trickiness of the text, but the message seems abundantly clear – that Trump’s handlers are doing their best to shield him from scrutiny in the home stretch of this existential campaign.

Trump spokesfreak Karoline “Blondi” Leavitt told Playbook that any notion of her Orange Fuhrer is hiding is “BS. President Trump has never backed down from any interview. This is a man who held a CNN town hall in the middle of the Republican primary, for goodness’ sake.”