Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician turned GOP congressman, regularly touts his military bona fides.
“As a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral with nearly three decades of military service I understand the commitment and sacrifices made by servicemen and servicewomen to serve our country,” the two-term Texas representative writes on his congressional website, posted to a page listing his work on veterans issues.
But Jackson is no longer a retired admiral. The Navy demoted him in July 2022 following a damaging Pentagon inspector general’s report thatsubstantiated allegations about his inappropriate behavior as a White House physician,a previously unreported decision confirmed by a current defense official and a former U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive personnel move.
Jackson is now a retired Navy captain, those people said — a demotion that carries significant financial burden in addition to the social stigma of stripped rank in military circles.
He still refers to himself as an admiral and didn’t reveal in his Trump bootlicking memoir that he was demoted.
A Navy official confirmed that the service took unspecified action against Jackson in the wake of the 2021 inspector general’s report, which found that Jackson berated subordinates in the White House medical unit, “made sexual and denigrating statements” about a female subordinate, consumed alcohol inappropriately with subordinates and consumed the sleep drug Ambien while on duty as the president’s physician. At the time of the report, Jackson was classified by the Navy as a rear admiral (lower half), a one-star admiral that is distinct from the two-star rear admiral position.
We also now know that he was passing out narcotics and other drugs like they were candy during the Trump administration. And that includes Fentanyl which nobody can figure a use for in the White House.
Apparently, Jackson was an inveterate ass kisser. Obama loved him too, apparently:
Former colleagues, political officials and Jackson himself have all described his strategy of providing complimentary, round-the-clock care to numerous White House officials and even their friends and family. The Pentagon’s most recent investigation found that many of the patients who received complimentary care from the White House medical team were not eligible for it.
But in the White House,Jackson’s approach won him favor within two presidential administrations. Obama, who personally chose Jackson as hisphysician in 2013, considered him a friend and promoted him to a one-star admiral in October 2016.
Jackson also endeared himself to Trump, particularly after a January 2018 news conference in which the White House physician extolled Trump’s health — joking to reporters that the then-71-year-old president could “live to be 200 years old” if he only ate healthier. Jackson added that Trump performed exceedingly well during a cognitive exam, a test that Jackson scheduled to rebut growing questions about the president’s fitness for office.
He retired right around the time of the investigation and ran for Congress where he currently serves as an incoherent Biden critic regularly accusing him of being mentally incompetent.
Trump just loved the guy and for the usual reason. He licked his boots so beautifully.
Speaking at the August 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference — days after the Navy privately demoted Jackson — Trump alsoextolled his former physician.
“He was an admiral, a doctor and now he’s a congressman, and I said, which is the best if you had your choice? And he sort of indicated doctor because he loved looking at my body, it was so strong,” Trump joked before pivoting to the reason for his affection for Jackson. “He said I’m the healthiest president that’s ever lived. … I said, I like this guy.
By the way, Jackson is heavily rumored, and from the evidence not without reason, to be a very heavy drinker.
Hey Ronny, screaming at and threatening a law enforcement officer is never a good idea especially when you’ve been drinking. Can’t wait until they release the video of you in handcuffs. https://t.co/h9BmXNCqaS
Everyone has lots of advice for Joe Biden about the State of the Union speech tonight. I suspect it will be like most of them — forgettable. The wing nuts can make it a little bit more memorable by acting like juvenile delinquents and maybe Biden can get off a few memorable lines. Generally, these things just engender a lot of breathless anticipation only to land with a whimper not a bang.
However, we are in the middle of the most high stakes presidential campaign in my lifetime so it would be very good if Biden did well tonight and begin to change the trajectory of this race. There are as many ideas about what he should do about that as there are talking heads. But I like this from Brian Beutler:
I like to point out that Donald Trump is a shitty person along multiple axes, and I believe his shittiness, which makes him unlikable, is his biggest political liability.
There are others liberals who believe complaining about corruption and poor character falls flat if it seems disconnected from regular workaday concerns. Donald Trump accepted millions of dollars in payments from China while he was president? Well what do I care, so long as he doesn’t make things worse for me, personally?
It’s not a crazy idea, but I don’t think appealing to selfishness is strictly necessary in Trump’s case. Most people hate crooks and liars, and Trump is more crooked and dishonest than any American politician in 250 years. That’s why most people hate him! And, roughly speaking, the people who like him either aren’t aware that he’s a crook and a liar or have chosen to forgive him—not because he did anything especially good for Americans, but because he makes liberals so upset.
However! I don’t object to connecting dots between Trump’s corruption and the direct harm he’s done and threatens to do to Americans—particularly when the dots are easy to connect. And if that’ll persuade Democrats to make a greater issue of his corruption, there’s no better case-in-point than his decision to leave 330 million Americans vulnerable to a pandemic disease he knew to be airborne and deadly because he feared that leveling with us would be bad for him personally.
CLASH IN THE PANDEMIC
When Ronald Reagan coined the canonical question in American presidential politics—Are you better off than you were four years ago?—he was challenging an incumbent. But the rhetorical pitch works just as well the other way around, when an incumbent seeking re-election has made the country he inherited better off than it was.
We kicked the Reagan question around on this week’s Politix podcast, with an eye toward being as generous as possible to Trump. Whatever his failings and failures, coronavirus could not help but disrupt any presidency, and not every harm the coronavirus caused was Trump’s fault per se. But things got as bad as they did because of Trump, and Biden proved very quickly when he took office that we’d have been better off if he’d been president in late 2019 and early 2020.
If Biden wants to remind people of this in the service of asking “are you better off…,” he and Democrats will have to play catchup. The pandemic has receded in the public’s mind, and on the closely related issue of handling the economy, Trump (who presided over depression levels of unemployment) enjoys a double-digit advantage over Biden.
But it shouldn’t be that hard. Remember this?
Unemployment, as we measure it, was going to go up sharply after COVID escaped China, and many people were going to die. But many more people died, or were thrust abruptly into unemployment, because Trump chose not to take COVID seriously. And he chose not to take COVID seriously because he was worried about his political and personal fortunes:
-He didn’t want the stock market to crash;
-Relatedly, he didn’t want his poll numbers to sink;
If he’d begun preparing the country in November or December or January or even February:
-People would’ve begun to take precautions earlier, so fewer would have died or become disabled.
-Mass testing would’ve limited both infections and job losses.
-Congress would’ve had more time to craft thoughtful legislation, potentially limiting job losses further.
Instead, calamity.
Trump really did screw all of us over. Every American’s life was made significantly worse by his venality. But plenty of people, enough perhaps to return him to power, have decided in retrospect that he didn’t do such a bad job—and, thus, that Biden hasn’t been a more responsible steward of the economy than Trump was.
BEHIND THE COUNTERARGUMENT
There’s a school of analysis that ascribes this shift in opinion to rational thinking and historical proximity. Pandemic life under Biden was still not great. People soured on him for it. And when they realized Biden wasn’t an immaculate COVID savior, perhaps they decided they’d been too hard on Trump.
Again, not a crazy idea, but one that strains credulity. We’re asked to believe Trump staged a political comeback because memories are short, but that Biden is behind because memories (of inflation or school closures or whatever else) are long.
Even apart from its logical shortcomings, I just don’t buy this conception of public opinion.
It’s simpler to view the mulligan Trump’s enjoying as the consequence of an information fight Democrats lost, because they never really joined. Trump refused to admit error; he simply insists ad nauseam that he built the strongest economy in the world (fact check: he coasted on Obama’s economy for three years, but it was legitimately strong) and was only thwarted by the “China virus.” Message: 2020 doesn’t count, not my fault. (Fact check: Donald Trump was president in 2020.)
Biden, by contrast, largely dropped the issue. Perhaps he’ll revive it in this four-year anniversary window—he does have a big speech coming up after all. But sometime in 2021 or early 2022, Democrats stopped seeing political value in mentioning the pandemic at all. They buried their coronavirus after-action investigation in a sleepy house subcommittee, which released its final report in December 2022. After the midterms.
With that kind of energy, the only thing that might help Biden narrow the economy-trust gap with Trump will be the passage of time. But even if that works, it’ll only work on one channel. People might begrudgingly acknowledge that Biden really has been a good steward of the economy, but they won’t start to believe Trump was a poor steward if Democrats don’t tell them he was.
A counterargument is the only way to get people to refocus their residual pandemic anger on Trump instead of Biden. To the extent people really do hold a grudge against Biden for inflation, he has two main options: He can chalk it up, in dry policy terms, to the inherent herky jerky of reopening the global economy. Or he can remind voters that Trump bequeathed him a world in shambles and it took some time to fix things.
To some extent Biden was politically damaged by the economic consequences of COVID more than Trump was, even though he’s clearly more blameless.
Indeed, most democratically elected leaders who presided through the reopening and attendant inflation are deeply unpopular. Biden mitigated and then whipped inflation more effectively than they did, and he’s (thus?) a bit less unpopular. But the thing that makes him unique—his special advantage over all of them—is that none of them took the reins from a derelict like Trump.
I’m hearing that the inside advice is to ignore the past and talk about the future. How … depressing. Yes, they need to talk about the future, every politician has to do that. But Trump has convinced a whole lot of people, and not just Republicans, that his administration was the golden age of America until the pandemic came along and that was totally not his fault (and anyway Biden was worse.) They truly believe this now despite mountain of evidence that his economy was only moderately successful (and riding on the Obama recovery) while Biden was left with a massive crisis and has brought the country back from the brink. That is the reality that people don’t know anymore because all they hear is “Trump’s economy was the best the world has ever known” and “Biden is old and inflation is bad.”
Here’s a little reality check:
Trump talked a lot about bring manufacturing back to America.
But under Biden, manufacturing investment has grown faster than any time in recent history. And it's not even close.
During Trump's presidency, manufacturing spending grew by 5%. Under Biden it has grown by 279%. pic.twitter.com/qHSKmZcLCp
"President Biden's America"… where net imports continue to drop and domestic oil production has reached a record 13.3 million barrels per day. You couldn't have slapped yourself in the face harder, Senator. https://t.co/WefskQErxEpic.twitter.com/48XST065j2
Trump seems to be doubling down on "scary brown people are terrorizing our cities". Meanwhile, here's what the FBI says (2023 using Q3 numbers) pic.twitter.com/OjuVLSvfAx
Those are just a few of the statistics that put the lie to the idea that Trump’s administration was historically successful before the pandemic came along and ruined it all. It wasn’t and Biden has exceeded his numbers on every measure even if you take out the pandemic.
And none of that accounts for the monumental shitshow that his administration actually was with the crime, the drama, the chaos and the overwhelming embarrassment on the world stage. And then there was that little matter of having a five year old’s temper tantrum when he lost the election and staging an attempted coup.
It is true that all leaders around the world are suffering from the pandemic hangover being laid at their feet. But Biden is running against the most notorious sore loser in world history who is also a criminal and a traitor and yes, a very shitty person. One of the worst. And in order to make that case apparently you have to remind people of what he did because it was so awful many people have chosen to forget it.
You can’t make the case for Morning In America by pretending we didn’t go through one of the darkest nights in our history.
President Joe Biden won’t mention a certain multiply indicted someone during tonight’s State of the Union address, but TFG will be the the elephant in the room.
Tonight, you will likely hear President Biden run through his impressive list of accomplishments — the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and so forth. If you read this newsletter, you have heard Biden talk about these things countless times. You know all about it. Well good for you, but you are in the minority.
Biden will use tonight’s address to accomplish multiple things. One of his main goals will be to replay for Americans his greatest hits: wage gains, low unemployment, and factory construction generated, in part, by onshoring industry that had left the U.S. As Pfeiffer suggests, it’s lengthy, and most Americans have no idea what Biden’s accomplished since beating Trump in 2020.
Because the GOP message machine is working overtime to make sure Americans don’t. More on that later.
As important, Biden needs to make no mistakes. That’s a tall order, and one reason the address may be shorter this year. The press will be watching like hawks for stumbles. Biden is old. Have you heard? Even with viewership down for the SOTU, it is still likely to be Biden’s biggest audience of the year. The White House wants snappy clips for the news, not gaffes.
One way Biden will try to quiet the “he’s too old” narrative will be by bringing some heat tonight. The Washington Post reports that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders since last fall has urged Biden to take on the disconnect between how well the economy is faring (great) versus public perception that it’s not:
In the roughly hour-long meeting, Sanders urged Biden to affirm the public’s frustration over the economy and focus on identifying the political opposition to enacting the president’s agenda — such as big businesses and pharmaceutical firms — rather than convince the public they should be pleased with current circumstances. Sanders also quoted to Biden a line from a 1937 address by Roosevelt, still two years from the end of the Great Depression: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Sanders has personally reiterated the message multiple times since then, including in another meeting at the White House with top officials last week, the people said.
Another way Biden will try to tamp down “he’s too old” on the anniversary of the police riot at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala. 59 years ago, will be by bringing some heat and some Dark Brandon energy to the address. Let the GOP jeer. They’ll do it anyway.
Recall last year’s speech, the Post adds in another story:
Biden’s delivery must be snappy and strong with notes of defiance and wit, they say. One Democratic aide said this speech is more important than any poll that has been released recently.
Democrats hope he has another speech like last year’s, when he accused Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare. That led to outbursts by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and others who yelled “liar” and “you lie.”
Biden then declared, “We all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare are off the books now, right?”
Democrats erupted in applause and laughter.
“People want to sort of see how the president is doing,” said Michael Waldman, a Bill Clinton speech writer. “They want to see if he has vigor and command and is a happy warrior.” So do I.
For their part, Republicans are trying to retcon the Trump years, as we saw on Wednesday in clips from Rep Elise Stafanik’s (R-N.Y.) and Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.).
Four years ago today Donald Trump was explaining that this new virus going around was no big deal because people on Fox News were telling him that a lot of people die from the flu. https://t.co/jfvPDJb3whhttps://t.co/oVWH0uSfKo
"Trump was president from 2017 to 2021—not 2020. I promise you, I was there," says @chrislhayes. "Republicans want you to chop an entire year off of the end of Trump's term as if he just gets a political mulligan for the catastrophe that was the end of his presidency." pic.twitter.com/45Y3dl9Lkl
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) March 7, 2024
Biden’s job is not just to remind voters what he’s accomplished, but to rub Republicans’ noses in the mess (and violent insurrection) Trump left in his wake.
I’ll be watching to see if Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a Trump boot-licker, will actually utter the words, “I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the president of the United States.”
BREAKING: Donald Trump just said he doesn’t need Nikki Haley voters to win. Donald Trump doesn’t respect us. It’s obvious. We don’t respect him either. His authoritarian tendencies are why we will be supporting Joe Biden. pic.twitter.com/p4fGxHahJA
— Nikki Haley Supporters for Biden (@haleyvoters4joe) March 6, 2024
A super PAC that urged non-Republicans to cast primary votes for Nikki Haley is pivoting to November, urging Haley’s voters to support President Joe Biden. Starting today, Primary Pivot will become Haley Voters for Biden, and urge anyone who supported Haley in a swing state to stick with the president in November.
“This is an effort from people who have actually supported Nikki Haley to try to guide as many of them as possible toward the candidate that respects democracy, even if they may disagree with him politically,” said Primary Pivot co-founder Robert Schwartz.
In a statement, Primary Pivot said it would focus on Haley voters in states where they could be counted — nearly 300,000 in Michigan, and nearly 250,000 in North Carolina. The super PAC, which started by urging New Hampshire Democrats to temporarily switch their registrations, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to activate potential Haley voters in South Carolina and Super Tuesday states.
It wasn’t enough to deliver a win, outside of Vermont, where Haley picked up votes from non-Republicans in the state’s open primary. Schwartz hoped that Trump’s reaction to that — a Truth Social post denouncing “the fact that Democrats, for reasons unknown, are allowed to vote in Vermont” — would fuel the new campaign.
“We wanted to start this effort as soon as possible to lock in that kind of resentment toward the way Trump and MAGA have treated Haley voters,” he said.
Haley’s decision to quit the race, but not endorse Trump, was encouraging for the Biden campaign, especially as Trump continues to denigrate her. “There is a place for them in my campaign,” the president said in a statement on Wednesday, suggesting common ground on protecting democracy, encouraging civility, and maintaining America’s NATO commitments.
Plenty of her voters went to the polls to protest Trump, unhappily confident that the former president was going to beat Haley anyway. But Schwartz really wanted Haley to win, seeing Trump as a unique threat and Haley as a rallying point for a united front to stop him.
That was Plan A, and it didn’t work. Plan B starts with the Haley voters who told exit pollsters that they did not want to support the GOP nominee if their candidate lost. On Tuesday, that was 48% of Haley’s supporters in California, 62% in North Carolina, and 76% in Virginia.
“Voting for Haley today meant I can vote twice in 2024 against Trump,” Bill Kristol posted on X, describing the vote as a “temporary re-embrace of my ex-party.”
Covering Haley last month, I met a decent number of voters who took Primary Pivot’s advice — or agreed with it but weren’t actually contacted by the PAC. Some Haley voters, said Schwartz, were Democrats who didn’t really need a new push from them. But some were Republicans who needed to be convinced to switch sides this year, which was Schwartz’s new mission.
“We’ll be able to get their voter files, their location in these states, their education level, their income level — whether they live in the suburbs, their voting history, all of that,” he said. “We’re going to micro-target these people as much as possible.”
Some of Haley’s voters were Democrats, for sure. But some were not. We’ll have to see if any of them can be persuaded. But I have to think that at least few don’t find Trump calling Haley “Birdbrain” and saying he doesn’t need their votes is going to go over very well.
I don’t think TV ads work the way they used to but it can’t hurt to try a simple message and repeat it over and over again. Repetition is key:
An estimated $2.7 billion is expected to be spent just on presidential campaign advertising this cycle. Pro-Biden super PACs Future Forward and American Bridge already have committed to a blizzard of ads, with $250 million and $200 million in spending respectively, as Democrats prepare an onslaught of ads to turn voters’ attention away from Biden’s age and remind them of Trump’s chaotic first term. In a memo released Wednesday morning, the Biden campaign said that groups allied with it had committed to spending more than $700 million to help defeat Trump.
And with the president’s team eager to turn 2024 into a choice election for voters, plans are in place for the campaign itself to ramp up contrast ad-spending this spring. A person familiar with Biden’s campaign strategy but not authorized to speak about it publicly said it will come earlier than when then-President Barack Obama’s allies began turning up the heat on Republican rival Mitt Romney in 2012.
“Super Tuesday was always circled on our calendars because there’s a segment of persuadable voters who don’t believe that this was going to be a rematch,” said Bradley Beychok, co-founder of American Bridge, one of the pro-Biden super PACs. “This is going to be a ‘what’s behind door number two?’ election and door number two is a second Trump term, and that’s terrifying. Voters need to remember how chaotic the first Trump presidency was.”
“This,” he added, “is going to be a war until November.”
Money isn’t everything but it isn’t nothing either. The Democrats have more than the Republicans so far and even if Trump catches up, there will be more than enough. They need to spend it wisely. I hope they can get their message together and get everyone on the same page to pound it home.
“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States,” McConnell said in a statement to The Washington Post. “It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support. During his presidency, we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people including tax reform that supercharged our economy and a generational change of our federal judiciary — most importantly, the Supreme Court. I look forward to the opportunity of switching from playing defense against the terrible policies the Biden administration has pursued to a sustained offense geared towards making a real difference in improving the lives of the American people.”
McConnell — who has announced he will step down from his leadership role in November — is one of the most influential Washington Republicans to back Trump, and the endorsement was a remarkable, if expected, move from the Kentucky Republican. He has held out in recent weeks as other Republicans have lined up to back Trump, including many who wanted a different nominee, and his endorsement means that almost every powerful cog in the Republican apparatus is directly behind the former president.
McConnell has privately derided Trump, publicly attacked him for his role in fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and has not spoken with Trump for several years. People close to McConnell privately said after Trump’s presidency that the powerful Kentucky Republican did not plan to speak Trump’s name again.
“There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the event of that day,” he said after Jan. 6. He added that Trump “didn’t get away with anything yet” in a speech on the floor of the Senate that explained his decision not to convict Trump on impeachment charges.
Trump has mocked McConnell’s wife as “Coco Chao” because of her Asian American heritage and frequently derided McConnell as the “Broken Down Crow,” or in more pejorative terms. He has told advisers that he wanted to replace McConnell as the leader of Republicans in the Senate if he were elected, but McConnell has already said he will step down. During remarks to donors at his Mar-a-Lago Club in 2021, he infamously called McConnell a “dumb son of a b—-.”
No biggie. It’s all just good natured joshing between friends.
McConnell knows that Trump tried to overthrow the election in 2020 and he thinks he should be president again. Nothing more needs to be said.
Sometimes I feel as if they’re just trying to make me think I’m crazy. I never in a million years would have thought that Republicans would cut the funding for the FBI but here we are.
I think the most astonishing thing about this is that they’ve done it strictly for the purpose of defending that cretin Donald Trump. It’s not that they’ve truly decided that the police need to be hemmed in or that the FBI is too big and powerful. They just want to exact revenge on behalf of their Dear Leader. If he wins they’ll pack it with toadies and give them everything they ever wanted to go after their enemies.
