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Joltin’ Joe Delivers

Published by digby on March 8, 2024

Biden’s speech was just what the doctor ordered

Everyone was expecting a historic train wreck of a State of the Union last night and they got it. But it wasn’t the one they thought it would be. Biden’s address was powerful and dynamic and no doubt put a lot of timorous Democrats’ worries to rest (at least for a day or so.) It was Trump’s highly touted response that failed dramatically.

Biden came out swinging and knocked the Republicans so far back on their heels that they had to completely abandon the image of him they’ve been building since 2020 — that he’s so old and feeble that he can’t even feed himself — and instead whimper like a bunch of little old ladies that he offensively aggressive. And they whined mightily that Biden was too “political” apparently forgetting that in his last State of the Union speech, Donald Trump bestowed the Medal of Freedom on far-right, hate radio star Rush Limbaugh calling him “a special man, beloved by millions of Americans” and thanking him for “decades of devotion to our country.”

Biden gave a barn burner of a speech that wasn’t boring, which is highly unusual for any president but especially unusual for a president many people have been convinced has one foot in the grave. As it turned out, what actually died last night was Trump’s Truth Social media platform on which Trump had flamboyantly promised to do “play by play” of Biden’s address. The site went down for many people all over the country before Biden even reached the podium leaving us with only these important insights:

We were all waiting on tenterhooks for over an hour to read what he had to say about Biden’s choice of socks until the site came back up to reveal that Trump had pretty much just been ranting about Biden coughing and warning people not to shake his hand because it has germs. And he also lied and lied and lied about his own record, obviously unnerved by Biden’s very pointed criticism, especially in the very strong opening section of the speech, when the audience is biggest and most attentive, in which Biden strongly contrasted his record against his predecessor.

Starting off with foreign policy he made a compelling case for support for Ukraine and went after Trump (without ever using his name) for his Putin toadying, particularly the asinine comment that he’d tell him “do whatever the hell you want” to any NATO country that doesn’t “pay its bills.” He said , “a former American President actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. It’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. It’s unacceptable.” Republicans all sat glumly silent, obviously terrified to cross their Dear Leader, as he railed on Truth Social, “he said I bowed down to the Russian Leader. He gave them everything, including Ukraine. I took away Nord Stream 2, he gave it to them! He was a Puppet for Putin and Xi, and virtually every other Leader!” It appears that criticism hit a nerve, maybe because it’s true.

The president admonished the Republicans to their faces for January 6th as well saying “my predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6. I will not do that. This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies. And here’s the simplest truth. You can’t love your country only when you win.” Speaker Mike Johnson, sitting behind the president on the podium looked as if someone had just rubbed a grapefruit in his face.

And he took on the conservative Supreme Court Justices, some of whom were sitting in front of him as he excoriated the assaults on reproductive rights. He reminded them of the passage in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade which said “women are not without electoral or political power” and then added, “you’re about to find out.” He asked the Republicans in the chamber, “My God, what freedoms will you take away next?” and he blamed Donald Trump,right upfront, pointing out that Trump brags about overturning Roe.

And much to my happy surprise, he went after Trump for his greatest failure, and one of our country’s worst tragedies, which for some reason people have flushed down the memory hole — the horrible response to the pandemic and the carnage he left in his wake:

“Remember the fear. Record job losses. Remember the spike in crime. And the murder rate. A raging virus that would take more than 1 million American lives and leave millions of loved ones behind. A mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness. A president, my predecessor, who failed the most basic duty. Any President owes the American people the duty to care. That is unforgivable.”

He did not care. He was worried about “his numbers” going up.

That opening salvo was impressive and Biden didn’t lose any steam for the rest of the speech as he laid out the differences between his agenda and his opponent’s, talked about his accomplishments and plans for the future. He announced a new plan for humanitarian aid to Gaza and while he reiterated his support for Israel he also said, “To the leadership of Israel I say this.  Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority. As we look to the future, the only real solution is a two-state solution.” If you want to know the prospects for any Republican president agreeing with that, all you have to do is look at the sour look on every one of their faces as they sat on their hands when he said that.  

It wasn’t all aggressive rhetoric, he also went off script and confidently jousted with the Republicans on various topics (although he unfortunately used the ugly term “illegals” in a back and forth with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.) He even managed to trap the GOP in the same trap he laid last year on cutting Social Security, this time on corporate tax cuts:

It was one of his best speeches and delivered with a vigor that puts Donald Trump’s recent rambling low energy rallies to shame.

If you were a person who only saw the headlines of the major papers or watched Fox News over the past year or so, you didn’t recognize the president last night, that “elderly man with good intentions and a bad memory” as Special Prosecutor Robert Hur so snidely put it. It was Joe Biden, the same guy that 81 million people voted for three and half years ago. He’s fine. Now maybe we can start talking about something other than his age?

Salon

Here’s the ad the Biden campaign just dropped:

“No reason to elect” Republicans

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 8, 2024

More Reaction To Biden’s SOTU

Photo by Adam Schultz / Biden for President (2020, via Flickr; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED).

Simon “Mr. Hopium” Rosenberg is usually upbeat about Democrats’ prospects, but after last night, he’s more upbeat than usual:

The core arguments Republicans make against Biden furthered evaporated last night. The economy is strong not weak. Inflation is down not rising. Crime and murder rates are plummeting not raging. All forms of domestic energy production are setting records and we are more energy independent today than in decades – there is no war on energy. Democrats are trying to bring order to the border, Republicans want to keep it chaotic. The “Biden crime family” narrative turns out to be a Russian operation laundered by traitorous Republicans. And now we saw a President strong, vigorous, powerful not old and frail. They have nothing. They have no argument. There is no reason to elect them. All that is left for them now is the madness of the orange man, more degraded, extreme and dangerous, a serial criminal and betrayer of the country, an historic embarrassment for America, and for the once proud party of Lincoln and Reagan.

Anand Giridharadas at The Ink sees signs that Democrats are beginning to get it when it comes to pitching their aspirations for the country. Drop the abstractions and get real:

He focused relentlessly on costs and quality of life. This is perhaps a hint of a bigger shift in the making for Democrats. You’re seeing a party that is realizing that people sometimes find big, sweeping policy ambition abstract-sounding and expensive-sounding, especially when they are stressed, even when those policies would drastically improve their lives. It’s just political reality. Smart Democrats are learning to move away from promoting policies in terms of giant new programs and instead to promote them as improvements to basic quality of life, reductions in cost, medicine for your stress. This is human-scale policy making, built on an anthropological understanding of the pain points in people’s lives, and framed through relieving those pain points rather than selling big programs.

More importantly, Biden positioned himself as a defender of freedom, using the word over a dozen times, sometimes in warning:

Many of you in this Chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom. 

My God, what freedoms will you take away next? 

“Saving Democracy So That We Can Do Cool Shit”

Republicans think of freedom in terms of “freedom from.” Democrats are reclaiming that universal value, and finally championing “freedom for.” Democracy can be an abstraction as well, if not tied into people’s everyday lives. Biden tied the two together, Giridharadas continues:

More than before, he answered the question of: saving democracy for WHAT?

Don’t get me wrong: saving democracy is important. Some of my best friends work to save democracy. But for some Americans, it can feel abstract and secondary to more pressing concerns. Last night, Biden broke the tradeoff between democracy-first and kitchen-table-first approaches. He integrated them into a story of Saving Democracy So That We Can Do Cool Shit — create things, build things, solve diseases, manufacture again, and so on. Democracy is an end in itself. It’s also a really great means.

A quarter of the way through the 21st century, Republicans’ idea of progress is anti-progress. They are determined to roll the clock back to the middle of the 20th. Giridharadas reminds Democrats of the importance of painting the beautiful tomorrow. Biden gets that.

The president wove a biography of the American soul. He identified three enduring American traits. One: the longing, the thirst, for liberation, to be free and ever freer. Two: the love of underdogs and comeback kids. Three: the hunger to build, to create, the move forward, to do stuff. He braided these deep American tendencies into a story of a country whose freedom is imperiled, but has shown that it can bounce back from darkness, reinvent itself, choose light, and now has a chance to save and more fully realize democracy, not just for its own sake, but to do stuff, create, invent, make.

MAGA Republicans are retromingents. I always liked that description.

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Biden Lays Out The Stakes

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 8, 2024

Forcefully takes on Republicans in SOTU

President Joe Biden Thursday night did not slip on his Aviators and, as Dark Brandon, stare down Republicans in the House chamber. But Biden did all but in his State of the Union address, even calling out Supreme Court justices to their faces for overturning Roe.

Biden needed to bring the heat to put the lie to Republican smears that he is a doddering fool. As Col. Pickering said of Prof. Henry Higgins, indeed he did.

This was “Fiery Biden” (Washington Post). And “In-Your-Face Biden” (New York Times).

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell followed along in the text and counted the Biden ad libs: more than in any SOTU he’d seen. Biden was not only not doddering, but nimble enough to engage Republican hecklers (including Georgia’s clownish Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) again and again (Washington Post):

At several points, Biden went back and forth with lawmakers — something that used to be a rarity. But in each moment, Biden looked to capitalize on the interruptions, using the heckling to pivot into Democratic talking points.

Biden began his address with reference to the U.S. on the brink of entering World War II:

Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. 

President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment.   

Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world. 

Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation. 

Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. 

“What’s at stake in the upcoming election is the continuity of America’s precarious experiment in democracy,” Dan Rather insisted in November. “Not the odds, but the stakes,” Jay Rosen put it more succinctly. Biden Thursday night laid out the stakes.

Biden never mentioned TFG by name, but made his case by referencing the offenses of “my predecessor” repeatedly and right out of the gate (Washington Post):

Unlike a traditional State of the Union address consisting of a laundry list of policy goals, Biden started assailing Trump less than four minutes into his speech, blasting him for suggesting that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that did not spend enough on defense.

“Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” Biden said. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time.”

The first 15 minutes of Biden’s speech were so important, Brian Beutler writes, as “it’s essential that the public not forget his disastrous presidency or the danger he poses to freedom in the U.S. and around the world. And to the extent voters have forgotten they need to be reminded.”

Biden reminded them before viewers tuned out, Beutler adds:

At the top of the speech, when viewership is highest and reporters form first impressions, he delivered a damning recitation of Trump’s record, the Republican agenda, their joint assault on reproductive rights, and their ongoing effort to sabotage the U.S. and the world order.

  • He lambasted Trump for egging on Vladimir Putin as he attempts to conquer Ukraine and threatens the rest of Europe. “My predecessor, a former Republican President, tells Putin, ‘Do whatever the hell you want.’ A former American President actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. It’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. It’s unacceptable.”
  • He confronted Trump, and Republicans in the room, with their own betrayals of the United States. “My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6. I will not do that…. Remember your oath of office to defend against all threats foreign and domestic.”

Biden did not just take on critics, but reminded Americans not paying attention of his accomplishments, “The American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told,” the president said. “So let’s tell the story here, tell it here and now. America’s comeback is building a future of American possibilities.”

I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now our economy is the envy of the world! 

15 million new jobs in just three years – that’s a record! 

Unemployment at 50-year lows. 

A record 16 million Americans are starting small businesses and each one is an act of hope. 

With historic job growth and small business growth for Black, Hispanic, and Asian-Americans. 

800,000 new manufacturing jobs in America and counting. 

More people have health insurance today than ever before. 

The racial wealth gap is the smallest it’s been in 20 years. 

Wages keep going up and inflation keeps coming down! 

Inflation has dropped from 9% to 3% – the lowest in the world! 

And trending lower. 

And now instead of importing foreign products and exporting American jobs, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs – right here in America where they belong! 

An early reaction poll was favorable. We’ll see if that holds.

Yesterday morning, I wondered whether Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson of Louisiana would introduce President Biden with the customary, “I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the president of the United States.” (MAGA blasphemy, of course, to acknowledge Biden is president.) In fact, Johnson did not introduce Biden at all. Even in 2020, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up Donald Trump’s speech at the end, she introduced “the president of the United States” without the privilege and honor verbiage. Did Biden do him a favor or was Johnson just that unprepared and cowed by Trump?

Biden ended his speech by calling out Trumpism for its retrograde vision of America and by referencing what age has taught him:

The very idea of America, that we are all created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives. 

We’ve never fully lived up to that idea, but we’ve never walked away from it either. 

And I won’t walk away from it now. 

My fellow Americans the issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are it’s how old our ideas are? 

Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas. 

But you can’t lead America with ancient ideas that only take us back. 

To lead America, the land of possibilities, you need a vision for the future of what America can and should be. 

Tonight you’ve heard mine. 

While they rant about communists and socialists, TFG and men like Johnson and North Carolina’s Mark Robinson want to lead America in the 21st century while permanently stuck in the 20th.

“Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative,” Biden often says. I don’t agree with him on everything, but he’s learned as he’s grown. They have not.

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Is This Where The Dynasty Ends?

Published by digby on March 7, 2024

He knew ’em all!

MAGA Mike Is Wrestling with His Own Illogic

Published by digby on March 7, 2024

This guy…

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday that in vitro fertilization and the handling of embryos remains an issue that “policymakers have to determine how to handle.”

“We need to look at the ethics surrounding that issue, but it’s an important one,” Johnson told “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil on Thursday. “If you do believe that life begins at conception, it’s a really important question to wrestle with.”

Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, made clear his support for the “sanctity of life” as well as IVF. But he then said there’s an “ethical handling” of the issue that must be considered by states. 

“In some states, like in Louisiana, there’s a limit on the number of embryos that can be created because they’re sensitive to that issue,” he said. “But it’s something that every state has to wrestle with and I think Alabama has done a good job of it.”

Really Mike? What “ethics” are you talking about? You believe that life begins at conception but killing certain little babies “is an issue you have to wrestle with?” Really? Do you truly think killing a few is ok but you really shouldn’t get carried away? And that each state can decide if they want to murder little babies?

I’m sorry, these “personhood” chickens have come home to roost. They are now facing the illogic that says abortion of an embryo naturally conceived is murder but discarding embryos from IVF isn’t is where they have landed and it makes no sense.

Well, unless it isn’t about embryos and never has been. Pretty sure it’s about women refusing to fulfill their natural duty as incubators. To patriarchal throwbacks like Mike Johnson, a woman is nothing more than the soil for man’s seed and they cannot be trusted with decisions about procreation.

Like this guy:

No Labels Sabotage Is Confirmed

Published by digby on March 7, 2024
He must not have a problem with it

It looks like it’s going to happen. I can hardly believe it, although I should. Mark Penn and Joe Lieberman are two former Democrats with massive axes to grind against their own party. They will burn this country down to get revenge for having been treated disrespectfully:

The third-party presidential movement No Labels is planning to move toward fielding a presidential candidate in the November election, even as high-profile contenders for the ticket have decided not to run, two people familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

After months of leaving open whether the group would offer a ticket, No Labels delegates are expected to vote Friday in favor of launching a presidential campaign for this fall’s election, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the group’s internal deliberations.

No Labels will not name its presidential and vice presidential picks on Friday, when roughly 800 delegates meet virtually in a private meeting. The group is instead expected to debut a formal selection process late next week for potential candidates who would be selected in the coming weeks, the people said.

Democratic President Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump’s romp on Super Tuesday all but ensured a November rematch of the 2020 election. Polls suggest many Americans don’t have favorable views of Biden or Trump, a dynamic No Labels sees as an opening to offer a bipartisan ticket. But Biden supporters worry No Labels will pull votes away from the president in battleground states and are critical of how the group won’t disclose its donors or much of its decision-making.

No Labels officials would not publicly confirm plans for Friday’s meeting. In a statement, senior strategist Ryan Clancy said only, “We expect our delegates to encourage the process to continue.”

I don’t know who they’re going to get to be n this ticket but there are rumors that Kyrsten Sinema is on the list. This wouldn’t surprise me. She seems to be on a self-destruct mission so I could certainly see her joining this wrecking crew. She and Joe Lieberman have a lot in common.

Captain Trumper

Published by digby on March 7, 2024

Ronny Jackson M.D. was stripped of his Admiral stripes and nobody knew about it

Souza was the White House photographer during the Obama administration

Why didn’t anyone know about it?

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.

The Big Speech

Published by digby on March 7, 2024

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;

-He didn’t want to imperil an empty trade deal with China (which, don’t forget, was paying him money under the table right up until COVID hit).

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. 

There’s much more at his great newsletter Off Message, which you can subscribe to here. But I think you get the gist.

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:

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.

Trump’s Greatest Hits

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 7, 2024

While Biden reminds Americans tonight what he’s accomplished

Seth Meyers walks us through a not-quite-exhaustive list of Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s greatest hits.

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