Then there’s this, which I saw all over twitter yesterday:
And this disgusting piece of misogyny:
That’s an illustration of this from the Dear Leader.
This is what we can expect from that pig and his henchmen. Just thought you should know.
And by the way, I truly doubt the suburban moms Trump needs to win in those big midwest states are on board with this crap.
I know Tom is for N. Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper for Veep and he makes good points. If he put the state in play he’s obviously the front runner. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is also mentioned frequently and he’s very good. He’s also from a state that knows from Appalachia and can counter JD Vance’s gross propaganda which I think is useful.
I have no dog in this fight. There are a number of excellent choices. I just thought I’d feature this one since he’s on the short list.
Sunday July 21st was one of those “where were you when you heard” days that you’ll remember for a long time to come. I was online and I saw the news that President Joe Biden was withdrawing from the presidential race come across my social media feed in real time. A friend texted me “You were right, it wasn’t going to happen until the moment it happened.” That’s what I’d been saying for the past couple of weeks when people would get anxious whenever Biden would say that he was absolutely not dropping out. No candidate would ever say “well, I’m thinking of giving up.” They’re all in until they’re not.
Since the night of the debate I was fairly convinced that the Biden candidacy was over. I kept an open mind, thinking maybe he really was just under the weather that night but it had opened the floodgates of concerns that had been out there for a while. The presidency ages everyone who is in it, even the younger ones, and it has clearly taken a toll on the president. I figured the polls would take a while to show a drop and it was obvious that the media’s 24/7 crisis mode was almost certainly going to have an effect. Reports from behind the scenes this weekend say that Biden was shown polling that said he had no chance to win and that’s when he finally pulled the plug.
Everyone I know reported feeling sad when they heard. He’s been an excellent president, far exceeding the expectations of many of us. If time had not caught up with him, as it does with all of us, most Democrats would have been happy to see him continue. But Biden is a tough old bird and he’s a canny political veteran who understood that if he lost the race his legacy would be utterly destroyed. More importantly, he understands the stakes and knows that the country may not survive another Trump term. As much as I’m sure he loathed having to withdraw, in a long life filled with searing personal tragedies, having to drop out of the race for a second term as president doesn’t rank among his worst days.
Wisely, he immediately endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris, as I predicted he would some time ago. Setting aside various logistical complications, Biden needed to take the lead in settling down the chaos and reassure his own loyal voters about the campaign carrying on with his imprimatur. I wasn’t sure if the rest of the Party was going to get with the program but a long string of Harris endorsements from elected officials, state party chairs and delegates throughout the day indicate that there is no appetite for the kind of open primary free-for-all contemplated by some pundits and strategists. (The unspeakably daft proposal for a “blitz-primary” with events featuring Oprah, Taylor Swift, Pastor Rick Warren and Tim McGraw among dozens of others seems very unlikely now, thank goodness.)
There is some talk of W. Va. Sen. Joe Manchin, the diva who ostentatiously left the Democratic Party just a few months ago, throwing his hat into the ring, backed by some disgruntled conservative donors. And perhaps someone else will decide that this is his moment to shine as well. But for now the Democrats appear to be forming a consensus that Harris is their best bet under the circumstances. In fact, judging from the monster fundraising through the Act Blue platform for small donors yesterday, enthusiasm is off the charts.
So what do the Republicans think about all this? Surprisingly, they didn’t seem to see this coming, which is astonishing. The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta who published a long disturbing piece a couple of weeks ago called “Trump is planning for a landslide win” noted in an update on Sunday that they had convinced themselves the window for Biden to drop out had closed and that the election was in the bag. He wrote:
Republicans I spoke with today, some of them still hungover from celebrating what felt to many like a victory-night celebration in Milwaukee, registered shock at the news of Bidenâs departure. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaignâone that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Bidenâagainst a new and unknown challenger. âSo, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race,â a clearly peeved Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. âNow we have to start all over again.â
They seem to have been caught completely flat-footed. Trump was all over his social media platform whining that Republicans should be reimbursed for spending money to run against Biden and running away from debating in September unless the debate will be held on Fox News. The best Sean Hannity could come up with was that Harris wants to take away their plastic straws and is “detested” for laughing:
And Trump’s close adviser Stephen Miller pretty much had a shrieking tantrum on Laura Ingraham’s show about the Democrats allegedly overturning an election. (Yes, his chutzpah knows no bounds.)
It seems that they may not have anticipated that Joe Biden gracefully withdrawing from the race might be seen as an act of selfless patriotism in contrast to their leader Donald Trump, the grasping egomaniac who incited a riot rather than admit that he lost. The contrast couldn’t be more vivid. And while the country has spent the last few weeks contemplating the toll the pressures of the presidency took on Joe Biden as he entered his 8th decade, starting today similar thoughts about Donald Trump are inevitable.
As Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC:
Trump’s remarkable recent run of political good luck came to an end with a crash. The old man in the race now is Donald Trump, 78 years old and only occasionally coherent, with a record as president that is viewed by historians as the worst in history.
The following ad is from 2019 but it is even more potent today. It’s a new race and Trump is now the former president who tried to stage a coup, perpetuated the Big Lie and is a 78 year old convicted felon.
Does Trump have the strength and the stamina to meet the challenge? I wouldn’t bet money on it.
I thought this was satire at first. It’s not:
The problem in the real world is that there isnât a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden. And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesnât really put a lump in our throats.
But thereâs something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in peopleâs throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So hereâs my pitch to the writersâ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.
At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.
You read that right.
I guess Sorkin as lost his touch because that wouldn’t be a lump in the throat it would be a primal scream. Besides, Mitt Romney is 77 years old. Come on.
He’s not the only one. Get a load of the “plan” that’s being circulated for the “mini-primary.”
Uhm. No. We’re not doing this. Biden has endorsed Harris and I believe the party will coalesce around her as well. This fantasy football stuff is nonsense.
Sen. Chris Murphy:
On this historic day, I want to tell you a story about Joe Biden, and what he did behind the scenes to make the historic 2022 gun bill – the first major gun safety legislation in 30 years – a reality.
1/ It starts with a phone call he made to me days after the Uvalde shooting.
2/ After the tragic Uvalde and Buffalo shootings, Biden wanted to give a prime time address to push the Congress to act.
But several of his advisors told him not to waste one of his few prime time speeches on guns. Congress will never pass a gun bill, they told him.
3/ He called me to ask my opinion. In 2013, he and I had sat for hours with the Sandy Hook parents, and parents of kids killed in Hartford and Bridgeport. I knew how personal those families’ pain was to him.
“I want to give this speech, even if a bill is a long shot,” he said.
4/ Days later, he called back and told me he had made up his mind to give the speech – bc he worried if he didn’t, the urgency would dissipate (Congress was on recess that week) and our chance to do something would be lost.
Now, he wanted to go over the details of the address.
5/ He went through the speech with me, line by line, asking what words would spur on or hurt the bipartisan negotiations that had just begun.
Most presidents would send a staffer on this mission. But he was personally invested in getting every line right.
6/ His speech was perfect and deeply impactful. During a week when we could have lost all momentum, Biden’s prime time address helped keep the attention on the issue and pressure on the negotiations.
I’m not sure the historic 2022 gun bill would have passed without that speech.
Franklin Foer wrote a book about Biden recently and spent a lot of time with him. In this piece in the Atlantic he says that Biden’s self-confidence, skill and wisdom led him to have a unexpectedly successful term. (Foer wrote this before those same skills led Biden to make the decision to withdraw, saying they were leading him astray. They didn’t…)
Anyway, this is an excellent short rundown of what will make his legacy historic:
When Biden came to office, pundits liked to cast him as a placeholderâa well-meaning grandpa who would help restore the countryâs equilibrium in the aftermath of Donald Trumpâs madness. In Bidenâs mind, that was just the members of the elite dismissing him, as they always did. Their underestimation stoked his determination to prove himself as one of historyâs great men. He privately boasted that his performance would make him worthy of the presidential pantheon that included Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.
With a one-vote majority in the Senate, he audaciously set out to test the limits of what he could accomplish. The American Rescue Plan, passed in the first months of his presidency, pushed social policy in novel directions. It transferred money directly into bank accounts through the child tax credit, the closest the federal government has come to experimenting with universal basic income. For a brief, glorious moment, the legislation helped cut childhood poverty in half.
But the American Rescue Plan was just the early harvest of an exceptionally verdant legislative season. At a moment when Democrats described moderate Republicans as useless toadies, Biden wooed themâand cobbled together bipartisan majorities to pass an infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act. Like Biden, these bills were dismissed as unexciting. But Biden was trying to restore the American state to its postwar glories. Harkening back to Cold War investments in science, the CHIPS bill spends significant cash on research and development, and the infrastructure bill renovates the transit systems, byways of economic competitiveness.
His signature accomplishment was the Inflation Reduction Act, a dreadfully unexciting name for a hugely significant bill. With its subsidies for clean energy, it will be remembered as the first massive American effort to contain climate change. And perhaps just as significantly, it will be remembered as the moment when the nation reembraced industrial policy. That is, the state began using its resources to guarantee the international dominance of American firms in electric vehicles and alternative energies, the industries of the future.
Thatâs the most surprising part of the Biden presidency. He broke with the economic paradigm that dominated policy in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Whereas those presidents choked when delivering the praise for unions that party politics demanded, Biden walked the picket line and lent presidential prestige to the movement. He reversed several generations of indifference to the problem of monopoly and installed regulators who went after Big Tech ferociously.
His supreme self-confidence allowed him to buck the conventional wisdom of foreign-policy mandarins. Both Barack Obama and Trump wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, but only Biden had the courage to actually follow through on that decisionâalthough his chaotic execution of a move that voters overwhelmingly supported eroded confidence in his presidency. A devoted believer in old-fashioned transatlanticism, he plowed money and arms into the defense of Ukraine, as if the future of Europe depended on it. These were bold decisions that a president with lesser experienceâand a lesser sense of his own acumenâwouldnât have had the gumption to make.
Biden hates abstraction and pretension. But in his best moments, he could think like a grand strategist. I once heard him extemporaneously describe everything he had done to counter China, and it was impressive to behold. He deepened Americaâs entanglement with Australia. He helped mend the long rift between Japan and South Korea, so that they could focus on the shared threat they now faced. He successfully schmoozed Narendra Modi, so that India shifted toward the American sphere of influence. Without receiving much credit, he actually managed the pivot to Asia that Obama first promised.
Over the course of Bidenâs term, when the press dismissed him as a failure, he kept pushing forward. He never shifted blame onto his aidesâand never fired them to cover his own mistakes. He pushed ambitiously, even though he often did so at the risk of his own humiliation.
Before his age became the source of his political demise, it supplied him with wisdom. Before his stubbornness inured him to the inevitable, it carried him to unlikely triumphs. His response to criticism was to always double down on himself.
And in the end those characteristics led him to the right decision.
James Fallows is a great writer and a professional speechwriter. His examination of Trump’s dumpster fire of a speech and the media’s reaction to it is well worth your while. Every journalist and opinion writer needs to read it .
The piece begins like this:
This post has one central point. It is that the press should give âfair and balancedâ attention to what each of the major candidates is revealing about temperament, competence, and cognition, especially in their public performances.
Right now we have these opposing, imbalanced narrative cycles:
âFor Joe Biden, every flub, freeze, slurred word, or physical-or-verbal misstep adds to the case against him. Thereâs an ever-mounting dossier, which can only grow in cumulative importance. âIn another difficult moment for the PresidentâŚ.â âComing after his disastrous debate appearanceâŚâ
âFor Donald Trump, every flub, fantasy, non-sequitur, âSirâ story, or revelation of profound ignorance dulls and blunts the case against him. âThatâs just Trump.â âAre you new here? Never heard a MAGA rally speech before?â âItâs what the crowd is waiting for.â âOh, here comes the âsharkâ again!â Thereâs an ever-thickening layer of habituation, normalization, jadedness, just plain tedium. The first five times Trump tells the Hannibal Lecter story, reporters notice and write about it. The next hundred times, theyâre checking their phones.
Last night a member of the Washington Post editorial board actually put it just this bluntly. Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC and now of Zeteo, asked Shadi Hamid, of the Post, about the many ludicrous and damaging claims in Trumpâs convention speech, which Hamid had waved off as âjust normal Trump.â Hamid chuckled and answered, âI guess what Iâm trying to say is that Trump is Trump, and itâs a low bar, and thatâs what weâve got to work with.â To which Hasan replied, âSome of us are trying to raise the bar.â You can see it here.
Iâm sure that on reflection Shadi Hamid would have made the point more carefully. But his instant reaction distilled the âitâs just Trump!â framing that has prevailed through the 2024 campaign.
The obvious and unequal result: The public registers more and more about Bidenâs âfitnessâ based on his appearances, less and less about Trumpâs.
Then he goes into the speech and it’s devastating. A short excerpt:
First, it was not a âspeech.â
Eight years ago, I stood near the front of the crowd at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, listening to Donald Trump give his first acceptance speech. I thought it was dark, dystopian, and narcissistic. But it was a speech. It had a beginning, a middle section, and a conclusion. It had a theme. (That theme, unfortunately, was âeverything is broken, and I alone can fix it.â) It appeared to have been âwritten,â and Trump appeared mainly to be saying what was set out in the text. The crowd roared when Trump gave the big, planned applause lines.
Thursday nightâs speech started out that way. It had some âwriterlyâ early segmentsâwhich you can always identify in Trumpâs speeches by the way his voice and rhythm change. When heâs sounding out words from âplannedâ text on a teleprompter, the energy goes out of his voice, and his tone is that of a schoolboy struggling through an unfamiliar primer. Sometimes he gives a little aside of meta-commentary appreciation for a nice line heâs just read: âYou know, thatâs so true.â
The written part of this speech contained a âbring us togetherâ line that died on Trumpâs lips even as he said it: âI am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.â And his opening description of the shooting had an unmistakable âhe is risen!â framing. For example, with emphasis added:
Many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was. When I rose [!], surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confused because they thought I was dead. And there was great, great sorrow. I could see that on their faces as I looked out.
They didnât know I was looking out; they thought it was over.
But I could see it and I wanted to do something to let them know I was OK. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, âFight, fight, fight.â
You donât have be a Christian to recognize the Easter-weekend iconography.
Ugh. And then he kissed a helmet.
Fallows says that if he had gone on in this vein it would have marked a new direction for Trump. But it did not. After the first 30 minutes of his “prepared speech” he went into his usual litany of grievances, hate and gibberish.
To return to the theme of age and its toll on candidates: this was different from 2016. Then, Trump held the crowd throughout. Now, he came across as the guy in a bar you couldnât get away from. Has age affected Joe Biden? Yes. And Donald Trump too.
Read the whole thing. He makes many very cogent points that should have been taken by the media on the day after and certainly by now. Unfortunately, they have learned nothing from previous mistakes in coverage. So, we have Biden the ancient loser and Trump the “changed man.”
If you want to see all the highlights, you can see them at @atrupar on twitter. If you just want to read through a succinct recap, here’s a handy one from @artcandee:
Trump is not being cared for by a licensed physician but rather by his former “gentleman of the stool.” (Ronny “Johnson” is no longer a licensed physician.)
Here is a letter that rivals his former Dr. Feelgood who distributed a dictated statement from Trump himself:
He is not a real Dr and It appears he wasn’t one even when he was licensed. He was a pill pusher. It’s a shocking fact that he was ever the White House doctor.
We have not heard from any legitimate doctor about Trump’s “wound.” Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neuro-surgeon, has said that we need to know if there was any neurological damage which could have happened if that was, in fact, a bullet wound. It appears they have no intention of doing that. And it also appears that the press has no intention of pushing for “transparency” on the issue.
I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that they have held Joe Biden to a very different standard. The Parkinson’s “debate” is recent. Remember this one?
Same old, same old with the media.meanwhile, here’s how the Trumpers are dealing with this:
After days of hand wringing and peal-clutching over “bringing down the temperature” this is what the right is running with: “the Democrats tried to kill Trump.” And the media is sitting around gossiping about which TV starts we should choose to pick Biden’s replacement. (I’m not kidding.) They’re in a state of febrile excitement and even if Biden drops out it’s not going to change. better get used to it.
Very much worth seeing if you missed it.
You really cannot overstate just how bizarre he was, and I’ve seen a lot of Trump speeches. I liked David Frump’s description in The Atlantic:
At the climax of the Republican National Convention last night, former President Donald Trumpâs nomination-acceptance speech was a disheveled mess, endless and boring. He spoke for 93 minutes, the longest such speech on record. The runner-up was another Trump speech, in 2016, but that earlier effort had a certain sinister energy to it. This one limped from dull to duller.
Somebody seems to have instructed Trump that he was supposed to have been spiritually transformed by the attempt on his life, so he delivered the opening segment of his address in a dreary monotone, the Trump version of pious solemnity. After that prologue, the speech meandered along bizarre byways to pointless destinations. A few minutes before midnight eastern time, Trump pronounced a heavy âto concludeââand then kept going for another nine minutes. Perhaps it was the disorienting aftereffect of shock, perhaps the numbing side effect of painkillers.
Whatever the explanation, Trump demonstrated in Milwaukee that President Joe Biden is not the only national politician diminished by the years. Trump too is dwindling into himself, even more isolated from such facts about the external world as elapsed time and audience impatience.
Bizarre byways to pointless destinations is right. Also he kissed a helmet in one of the smarmiest displays I’ve ever seen and wore a huge bandage on his ear that we now learn didn’t even require any stitches.
He’s a clown but an especially evil one.I guess half the country just loves evil.
