The role of a moderator is often in dispute, and David Chalian, CNN’s political director, said that Thursday’s live debate “is not the ideal arena for live fact-checking.” Instead, Ms. Bash and Mr. Tapper would focus on “facilitating the debate between these candidates, not being a participant in that debate,” he said, noting that CNN analysts would assess the veracity of the candidates’ comments immediately after the telecast.
Most people will tune out after the debate because the panel conversation is always tedious for anyone but the most addicted political junkies. The result will be that Biden has to correct the record and will spend most of his time doing that (and probably getting his mic cut because of the sheer volume of lies) and won’t be able to get his own message out effectively — or the lies will stand uncorrected.
It appears that CNN is simply planning to enable a freak show instead of doing its job as journalists. I hope the Biden campaign is fully prepared for that.
CNN knows Trump is playing games:
Trump is scared of President Biden. So cringe. Trump is humiliating himself. Sort of like pathetically begging for votes.
First clip, Trump says he will lose debate on purpose
Next, says President Biden will be a worthy debater
There was a time when the Republicans were constantly in a state of apoplexy over the deficit and the national debt (even though they always raise it more than Democrats do when they are in charge.)
As you can see, it wasn’t just COVID…
The winner of November’s election faces a gloomy fiscal outlook, with rapidly rising debt levels at a time when interest rates are already high and demographic pressure on retirement programs is rising.
Both candidates bear a share of the responsibility, as each added trillions to that tally while in office.
But Trump’s contribution was significantly higher, according to the fiscal watchdogs at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, thanks to both tax cuts and spending deals struck in his four years in the White House.
By the numbers: Trump added $8.4 trillion in borrowing over a ten-year window, CRFB finds in a report out this morning.
Biden’s figure clocks in at $4.3 trillion with seven months remaining in his term.
If you exclude COVID relief spending from the tally, the numbers are $4.8 trillion for Trump and $2.2 trillion for Biden.
For Trump, the biggest non-COVID drivers of higher public debt were his signature tax cuts enacted in 2017 (causing $1.9 trillion in additional borrowing) and bipartisan spending packages (which added $2.1 trillion).
For Biden, major non-COVID factors include 2022 and 2023 spending bills ($1.4 trillion), student debt relief ($620 billion), and legislation to support health care for veterans ($520 billion).
The article goes on to say “both sides” are more or less equally to blame, blah,blah, blah…. But the reality is that there is only one party that obsesses over “the deficit” when a Democrat is in charge and spends like drunken sailors when Republicans are in the White House. And it isn’t the Democrats.
I’m sure it won’t matter in this election because it’s very inconvenient for them due to Trump’s tax cutting spree which they want to continue if he wins. But they should at least be questioned about this whenever the media gets the chance.
The Heritage Foundation has outsourced the new MAGA SS to an operative in Kentucky who is putting together target list of enemy bureaucrats for crazies:
From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House.
Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online.
“We need to understand who these people are and what they do,” said Jones, a former Capitol Hill aide to Republican senators.
The concept of compiling and publicizing a list of government employees shows the lengths Trump’s allies are willing to go to ensure nothing or no one will block his plans in a potential second term. Jones’ Project Sovereignty 2025 comes as Heritage’s Project 2025 lays the groundwork, with policies, proposals and personnel ready for a possible new White House.
Isn’t that great? Just don’t call them fascist because that would be very rude.
The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is a nonprofit launched by the far-right Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which refers to itself as a “government oversight and research organization” that uses “aggressive research and investigations to advance conservative messaging, rapid response, and Congressional investigations.”
However, much of AAF’s work is actually focused on discounting and discrediting President Biden and his executive nominees through opposition research and negative, often factually inaccurate narratives. The organization uses the X handle @ExposingBiden to push its point of view. During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, for instance, AAF “put forward [the narrative] that she had supported lighter sentences for people who had been involved with child pornography,” according to journalist Maggie Severns.
In July 2023, AAF also produced Proxy Wars: Glass Lewis, a report claiming that the proxy advisory company Glass Lewis has an “overwhelmingly liberal” bias that has fueled the “implementation of ESG policies at major corporations.”
AAF’s anti-ESG research support was also cited in the March 2023 Consumers’ Research report titled Defeating the ESG Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.
In February 2023, AAF joined other major anti-ESG groups in signing a group letter calling on U.S. senators to “stop Biden’s ideological embezzling of Americans’ retirement accounts.” The following month, it signed onto an Advancing American Freedomletter thanking senators who opposed President Biden’s “woke 401(k)” rule.
AAF is led by Tom Jones, a former legislative director for Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and was head of opposition research for Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Wall Street Journal, AAF has received funding from Leonard Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust, but the Center for Media and Democracy has not been able to document this.
AAF is being investigated by the IRS for violating its tax-exempt status, Politicoreported in March 2024.
Of course it is.
This isn’t Trump, folks. This is the GOP establishment marshaling its forces to turn the US Government into an arm of the party. That’s what authoritarian regimes do. Even if Trump goes away, this party apparatus won’t. And the next guy — say, J.D. Vance who seems to really get the program will use it for their purposes.
The earliest general election presidential debate ever is coming up this week and it’s all anyone can talk about. And there’s actually a good reason for that for a change. This debate could be an important moment in an extremely high stakes campaign that’s ridiculously close and may very well stay that way all the way up until election day. Both campaigns are eager to try to shake things up and this is the first opportunity.
For much of the primary season, polling showed that some people were just not convinced that this re-run was actually going to happen. It seemed impossible to believe that the disgraced ex-president Donald Trump would become the nominee and that Joe Biden would not step aside for a younger successor. But here we are. And frankly it was where we were always going to be unless something happened to one or both of them. There was clearly no desire among the many Democratic presidential hopefuls waiting in the wings to primary the incumbent and the MAGA usurpers like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flamed out in the primaries while the establishment alternatives like Nikki Haley couldn’t get past Trump’s rabid base.
So, we’re going to party like it’s 2020 all over again (except without the thousands of people succumbing to a deadly virus as the rest of us watched in horror as the president said to drink bleach and “slow the testing down, please.”)
The NY Times reported that as, as usual, Trump doesn’t like to prepare with mock debates or reading briefing books so some people are informally showing up to chat about policy with him. I recall that in both 2016 and 2020, the scuttlebutt was that debate coaches like Chris Christie couldn’t get him to focus and inevitably Trump and his cronies would end up sitting around shooting the breeze so I’d guess that’s probably the case this time as well.
According to Jonathan Karl’s book “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show”, in the 2020 prep meetings Rudy Giuliani was obsessed with Hunter Biden to the point that one attendee said, “Rudy was being a disruptive force. No matter what we were talking about, all he wanted to do was talk about Hunter.” When Christie, playing Biden, retorted that “You have real nerve talking about relatives taking advantage of political power…Your family traded the influence they have in the White House to make tens of millions of dollars,” Trump got furious and told him, “I’m not going to sit here and put up with this shit … move on.” If he was that sensitive about his family, I’d guess no one is going to bring up his legal problems this time.
Trump gave a speech and held a rally over the weekend and at one of his pre-planned “spontaneous” restaurant stops he said that he considered that to be debate prep so it sounds like he feels that he’s ready to go. He asked the crowd at the rally if he should be “tough and nasty” toward Biden or “be nice and calm and let him speak?” The crowd predictably indicated the former and Trump agreed.
He gave them a little taste of just how nasty he could be. He said that Biden had gone to a log cabin to study but “he’s sleeping now” and then claimed that just before the debate “he’ll get a shot in the ass” and come out “all jacked up.”
Trump on the debates: So, a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the ass. They want to strengthen him up. So he comes out. He'll come out. Okay. I say he'll come out all jacked up, right? pic.twitter.com/5p1tKxmwsX
That disgusting little prediction was slightly better than his earlier lie that Biden will be “pumped up” on cocaine because they found “hundreds of thousands of dollars worth” of it in the White House a month ago. (Just when you think he can’t sink any lower he always does.)
President Biden, meanwhile, is up at Camp David preparing for the debate. He’s no doubt doing what normal candidates do, studying policy papers, practicing with mock debates, running possible lines of attack. It’s clear they’re taking this very seriously and for good reason. It’s vitally important that the American people see the two candidates one on one.
The campaign has a big plan for the debate. Thousands of watch parties are being organized around the country with surrogates fanning out with the message they hope to convey. NBC reported that they have sent out a memo with the three main topics they hope to emphasize in the debate: reproductive rights, the threat to democracy and the economy. The memo states, “President Biden, who is fighting for the American people, and Donald Trump, who will walk on stage as a convicted felon fighting for himself” echoing their theme about Biden being for the people while Trump is only for Trump.
The assumption among the pundits and analysts that the debate is most important for Biden so that he can prove that he’s up for the job. Yes, he’s been president for three and a half years and has an excellent record of success which would normally be a clue but the fact that he looks old seems to override the reality of actual results. After months of the Republicans and the media portraying him as barely alive, at this point Biden’s main job is to not fall down or start drooling. (This explains Trump and his minions’ recent insistence that Biden is a hardcore speed freak.)
Trump, on the other hand, has to show that he isn’t the whining, self-serving, malicious and increasingly incoherent creep we all see at his rallies. It’s hard to imagine that he can do that but who knows? Maybe he’ll get a “shot in the ass” of some kind of tranquilizer and the debate will end up being between a jacked up Biden and a zoned out Trump.
Much of this will be determined by the moderators questions and how they handle the rules of the debate. The candidates’ mics will be cut off when they run out of time which will keep Trump from talking and yelling non-stop as he did last time. There’s no audience so the MAGA cult can turn it into a Trump rally and they will not be allowed to consult with their staff during the break for reasons which aren’t obvious to me. All of this will be an improvement over the usual spectacle we’ve come to expect.
But none of that will matter if the answers are not followed up and the lies aren’t corrected. The debate is on CNN so the two moderators have one of the best fact checkers in the business, Daniel Dale, who we must hope will be in their ears to correct Trump’s litany of lies. That will no doubt make the whole exercise awkward for them but there is no choice.
This debate is the real kickoff to the most important election any American alive has ever experienced. It’s surreal, it’s frightening and it’s oddly dull, all at once. But barring something unexpected, the advantage goes to Biden. After all, the most important thing is that he isn’t Trump, the sorest loser in human history. I’m betting that when people see them both together it won’t be hard to remember why he just keeps losing over and over again.
Trump had another one of those “episodes” this weekend:
Trump is MENTALLY UNFIT and it’s getting worse “The worst is your hair. I have this beautiful, luxuriant hair… They put on restricters where there’s so much water you don’t know what to do with it. It’s called rain.” This makes absolutely no sense. pic.twitter.com/1IROKna25m
“No water in your faucets. You ever try buying a new home and you turn on. You want to wash your hair or you wanna wash your hands. You turn on the water and it goes drip, drip the soap. You can’t get it off your hand. So you keep it running for about 10 times longer. You trying, the worst is your hair. I have this beautiful luxuriant hair and I put stuff on. I put it in lather. I like lots of lather because I like it to come out extremely dry because it seems to be slightly thicker that way. And I lather up and then you turn on this crazy shower and the thing drip, drip and you say I’m gonna be here for 45 minutes. What? There’s so much water. You don’t know what to do with it. You know, it’s called rain. It rains a lot in certain places. But, now their idea, you know, did you see the other day? They just, I opened it up and they closed it again. I opened it, they close it, washing machines to wash your dishes. There is a problem. They don’t want you to have any water. They want no water…”
He substituted words twice in that speech. There was that “washing machines to wash your dishes” and the even more bizarre “refuttal”
Trump: And my stupid people when I wanted to refute it, they said, sir, don't dignify it with a refuttal. Refutal or refuttal. What the hell word would that be? Refuttal. Watch, they’ll say he didn’t know refuttal or refutal but they don't know either pic.twitter.com/88N8k2ngBL
Imagine what would be happening right now if Biden had come out today and said three times that someone should look into "the oranges" of the special counsel investigation. Trump escapes press scrutiny because no one in his cult is bothered by his decline pic.twitter.com/xgc9ViAk2q
I don’t remember him doing this in 2016. He would ramble on but I don’t recall the strange word substitutions or the incoherent stream of consciousness rants. We’ve heard him whine about the showers and the low flow toilets before but the way he’s telling the story now is very disjointed and weird. It’s like the shark and boat battery thing.
I don’t know if it’s cognitive decline, dementia or just so much stress and distraction that he can’t think straight but something’s off. And it’s happening more often.
Historian Jon Meacham told ABC’s “This Week” that the rules Joe Biden has won for this Thursday’s presidential debate means he has “childproofed” the debate for the child challenging him.
That’s naive, of course. The child has signaled his plan to tag Biden with every violent crime committed by an undocumented immigrant. If Biden is defending that accusation, he’s losing. He has to reject the premise and “out” what Trump is really doing.
God bless Jon Meacham for focusing on the stakes of the first debate (and the election), and making clear that Trump is the problem.
The swipe he takes at ‘bothsides’ punditry came moments after Frank Luntz made an asinine comment (see next tweet).pic.twitter.com/PmnWdTBozQ
Trump means to collectively punish 11 million undocumented migrants with mass roundup at the hands of the military, and to deport the lot using isolated isolated migrant crimes as a pretext. Perhaps pointing out Trump’s penchant for demonization and collective punishment of human beings he’s branded “vermin” is a more evocative counter. The subtext speaks for itself.
Trump has suggested tossing migrants into gladiatorial combat for the entertainment value:
The remarks are part of Trump’s broader pattern of using dehumanizing language when discussing immigrants, which during this election cycle has included broadly portraying migrants as violent criminals and saying that they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Biden might ask Trump what happened to shooting them in the legs and moats filled with alligators.
Brian Beutler joins Greg Sargent’s “Daily Blast” podcast this morning and notes that targeting most any other group for mass deportation would be beyond the pale as far as media reporting and public reaction goes. Pointing out that Trump advocates for that and where that impulse leads might draw “severe” backlash.
Trump took much less drastic moves against immigrants in his first administration and drew that backlash. Imagine the police or the military rolling up to a neighbor’s home and dragging them out. (Keep your phone handy and charged.) Even if some Trumpers would celebrate, it would create a media firestorm against Trump and Trumpism and a global black eye for the land of the free.
How the press covers (or doesn’t) “the Trump-MAGA demonization of migrants,” Sargent writes, should be “a major scandal in its own right.”
Beutler adds regarding Republican bad faith arguments:
Media organizations have the resources that they need to reveal what’s true about Americans. Are they are they really as nativist, protectionist, xenophobic as Republicans seem to think they are, as Donald Trump seems to think they are, as many even liberal pundits think they are? Or do they actually, when you present them with the raw idea of what Republicans are proposing, will they recoil? And I think that we will find that the headline, the top line numbers suggesting there’s support for mass deportations, will reveal a real soft underbelly. There’s not actually a mass movement for for that kind of cruelty.
Even racists recoil at being called racists. They have no issue with their feelings toward the “Other.” But the brand still carries a stigma even in the age of Trump. Everyone, even the vilest among us, wants to be seen as the good guy. Unmasking the xenophobes’ game for what it is could make the country take a long, hard look in the mirror.
Power is a drug. An addictive one, potentially. Like other medications, it can heal, soothe, and harm if misused. From the first time a two-year-old says, “I want to do it myself,” or starts acting out or running away from parents to taste some personal freedom, they are expressing a human need for autonomy, for control.
Power is so visceral that it’s why I resist the impulse simply to brand as racism the reactionary views and actions of people who feel threatened by changing demographics and cultural norms. It’s not that racial animus is not a component. It’s that skin color is too convenient a shorthand for sizing up a crowd and knowing who’s who in the pecking order. IIRC (someone will correct me), one of Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s lesser known “laws,” allowed one to identify the most important person in a ballroom because they’d be found at a certain grid point at t+n minutes from the start of the event. And knowing that would be of interest why? Power.
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has a short film at The New York Times about the crackdown on abortion access across the country since the Dobbs decision. “These folks who are in power, they have no interest in solutions,” declares the under-narrative running beneath the video. “It’s really just about control.”
People with it want to hang onto it. People addicted to it may not even know it until what little power they have is threatened by independent women (forever the prime target in slasher films), by immigrants, by people of color, and by religious, sexual, or lifestyle nonconformity. And, brother, is MAGA America threatened.
Stephanie McCrummen, a staff writer at The Atlantic, looks at MAGA, the Next Generation. Attending a Trump rally in Racine, Wisconsin, she found young adults who were in elementary school when Trump was first elected. They’ve been steeped in MAGA culture.
The right views culture as something to control, a war for dominance to win. The need for chest-thumping, flag-bedecked displays of patriotism comes not as much from love of country as a demand for control. Trump’s adoption of “Make America Great Again” was always about restoration of control to those threatened by sharing it with people they considered lessers. Just as the Redeemer movement post-Reconstruction was about re-securing white domination to the South after emancipation.
Where once, religious conservatives felt they represented a special set of values, Christian ones, American ones, that entitled them to rule dominate the culture as their birthright, now all that has been discarded. Consider the slogans McCrummen saw on display.
An older man in an I’M VOTING FOR THE FELON tee shirt listened to her conversation with an 18-year-old.
“It’s so good to see you girls,” said a white-haired woman wearing a FUCK BIDEN hat.
Recruiting the young into movements is how they build, McCrummen writes. “[L]ights, screens, music, and the emotional appeal of righteous belonging” is part of the program:
That kind of production has remained the essence of Trump rallies such as the one in Racine. And it has been the year-round specialty of Turning Point USA, the right-wing youth organization whose recent “People’s Convention” in Detroit was a carnival of swirling lights and booming music, with sponsors including the Association of Mature American Citizens—the MAGA version of the AARP. That event drew a crowd of young attendees who cheered 70-year-old Steve Bannon as he yelled “Victory or death!,” and 78-year-old Trump as he spoke of “the largest deportation operation in American history,” and two young men in sunglasses who walked onstage and unfurled a red flag that read WHITE BOY SUMMER, a white-supremacist slogan.
Jordan Lazier, 19, had come with his grandparents. His first presidential vote would be for Trump.
“I remember when he was elected, I just liked him,” he said, recalling how his mother felt similarly. “I just knew he was better than Hillary; I couldn’t tell you how.”
“You’re a smart kid,” his grandmother said. “Don’t forget about the evil versus good.”
“Good versus evil,” Jordan repeated, looking at her. “I know about satanic stuff most Democrats are into. Republicans talk about worshipping Jesus Christ, and Democrats worship the government.”
“We listen to a lot of prophets, and we understand Bohemian Grove,” his grandmother said, referring to some bleak corner of the QAnon conspiracy.
Behind her, a veteran rallygoer was explaining something called the Rattle Trap conspiracy to a newcomer who was saying, “There’s so much out there I don’t know about.”
Conspiracy theories are all about insider knowledge and false sense of power brings to the powerless. Once, Jesus gave them that sense. Not now.
Rep. Ronny Jackson announces on Maria Bartiromo's show that he's writing a letter to the White House demanding that Biden submit to a drug test for performance enhancing drugs before the debate pic.twitter.com/eRD02jXKSc
“I’m going to be demanding on behalf of many millions of concerned Americans right now that he submit to a drug test before and after this debate, specifically looking for performance enhancing drugs, because we see we’ve seen recently that in his state of the Union address, that there was a Joe Biden that came out that was not, similar at all to what we see on a day to day basis for the last three and a half years. And there’s just really no way to explain that, other than he was on something that could give any medications.
I feel like this is probably what’s going on over this week at Camp David. You know, he’s going to be at Camp David for a full week before the debate. Part of that is probably experimenting with, you know, just getting the doses just right, because, you know, they have to treat his cognition.”
Here’s a copy of one piece of evidence in the scathing Inspector General’s report on Jackson’s tenure as White House physician which led to him being busted down from admiral to captain for handing out just those drugs along with ketamine, fentanyl and morphine (among other reckless behaviors.)
Ronny Jackson accuses Biden of using Provigil. Every Accusation is an Admission. pic.twitter.com/zYHBHjI6YQ
— Robert J Ellingsworth 🆓Parody. (@BY1959) June 23, 2024
A long-awaited inspector general’s report released last month faulted previous White House medical teams for widely dispensing sedatives and stimulants, failing to maintain records on potentdrugs including fentanyl, providing care to potentially hundreds of ineligible White House staff and contractors, and flouting otherfederal regulations.
“We concluded that all phases of the White House Medical Unit’s pharmacy operations had severe and systemic problems,” the report concluded, adding that the challenges threatened the unit’s primary mission — to keep the president and vice president healthy and safe.
The inspector general’s report sparked significant public alarm. But a Washington Post review found problems with the unit’s conduct were even more pronounced than the Pentagon’s latest findings, according to administration documents and interviews with former White House staffers and medical unit members, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations and internal procedures.
Four former members of the White House Medical Unit confirmed that in both the Trump and Obama White Houses,the team passed out sedatives such as Ambien and stimulants such as Provigil without proper prescriptions, provided complimentary medical equipment and imaging to ineligible staffers, and used aliases in electronic health records to disguise the patients’ identities and deliver free care in cases where the recipients wouldn’t be eligible.
Former staffers said those practices were shaped by Ronny Jackson, an emergency medicine physician who led the team under President BarackObama, continued to exert control over it as President Donald Trump’s personal doctor, and ultimately spent nearly 14 years in the White House. Now a Republican congressman, Jackson used his proximity to both presidents to build influence by dispensing medical care and drugs without proper procedures, the staffers said — conduct that earned him nicknames such as “Candyman” or “Dr. Feelgood,” according to a whistleblower complaint to Congress in 2018.
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 representative from Texas says on his congressional website in a message 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 a significant financial burden in addition to the social stigma of stripped rank in military circles.
That inappropriate behavior included sexual harassment and drinking on the job.
As with Trump, Jackson’s absurd analysis is actually projection. Someone in the Trump White House was using Provigil and Adderal and it wasn’t Joe Biden. I think we might have a good idea who it was.
It’s hard to know whether the low point of Trump’s two speeches over the weekend was saying that Biden is “jacked up” on cocaine or this:
Former President Donald Trump suggested in two speeches Saturday that migrants coming to the U.S. should have their own fighting league, remarking that they’re “nasty, mean” and “tough people” who could beat the country’s top fighters.
Speaking first to a crowd of conservative Christians at a Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering in Washington, D.C., Trump said he shared the idea with Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
“I said, ‘Dana I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league fighters,” Trump said, “and then you have the champion of your league — these are the greatest fighters in the world — fight the champion of the migrants.’” The suggestion drew laughter and applause from the crowd, a response that continued as he spoke more about the concept.
“I think the migrant guy might win,” Trump said, adding that White “didn’t like that idea too much.”
“But actually, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever had,” he continued.
Trump later repeated the idea during a rally Saturday evening in Philadelphia.
