This is a photo of an actual cross burning here in Tennessee. Monday on @NC5 at 6 PM, I’ll have the disturbing results of my continuing investigation into the rise of hate in the Volunteer State! pic.twitter.com/5I00mtIRPP
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — At least three people were killed in a Russian bombing attack on Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, on Saturday afternoon, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Another 38 people were wounded in the attack, Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said. Four aerial bombs were launched against the city, damaging residential buildings, shops and public transport stops, said Kharkiv regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov. He said that four of the wounded were in serious condition.
“This Russian terror with guided aerial bombs must and can be stopped. Bold decisions from our partners are needed so that we can destroy Russian terrorists and Russian combat aircraft where they are,” Zelenskyy wrote on the messaging app Telegram.
A fresh attack on Kharkiv killed at least one person and wounded 10 on Sunday, according to local officials. Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the city was attacked by a guided bomb and that around half of Kharkiv was without electricity because of the strike.
Sunday’s attacks came after Russia struck Kharkiv on Saturday afternoon with four aerial bombs, hitting a five-story residential building and killing three people. Regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said that 41 people were still being treated for injuries on Sunday.
I spent an evening once with students in the hallway of a Vienna dorm listening to American rock and drinking bootleg schnapps crafted by somone’s grandfather. The English idiom “bootleg” took some explaining. It led to a long, alcohol-fueled exchange of English and German idioms. One German idiom for insane that stayed with me was, “Er hat nicht alle Tassen im Shrank.” (He doesn’t have all his cups in the cupboard.)
Watching clips from a couple of Donald Trump appearances last night brought that back in a big way.
Perhaps you’ve heard that under Joe Biden our airports are failing and in chaos? People are erecting tent camps because of flight delays, Trump claims. Trump heard something about “people camping out at the airport” because of a delay, put 2 and 2 together and got 5. It’s so crazy, noted Josh Marshall, that the Biden-Harris rapid response account simply reposted the rant without comment.
Most priceless part is the WTAF are you talking about face from spicer when he's talking about the tents pic.twitter.com/vaFWWfHb8G
Trump seems bothered by all the musings about his mental state after his rambling about electric boats and sharks. Rather than pretend he never said it, as he often does, he doubled down and made it worse.
“Wow. His brains are pudding,” commented Spiro’s Ghost. Trump claims genetic brilliance and “aptitude” because he had an uncle who once taught at MIT. Have you heard?
Wow. His brains are pudding. This is..just…dementia on steroids. He always has to amplify how deteriorated his brain is because he knows its getting worse so he thinks if he jokes about it, it makes him seem normal? It just makes him seem even more dementia laden & deranged! https://t.co/NmNxaG7bQg
“Jesus H. Christ, Trump. You and the f——- shark,” tweeted former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. “Just jump the shark. Just jump the goddamned shark. Again.”
Trump has really got it in for power generation technology not based on fossil fuels: windmills, electric cars, etc. Remember his hostility to the Navy shifting its new carriers from steam-driven to electromagnetic launch catapults?
“It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out,” he toldTime in 2017. So much for the very stable genius’ aptitiude.
Thus, electric trucks are on Trump’s shit list. Electric: bad. Did you know that unlike electric-powered trucks, diesel-fueled semis can drive from coast to coast without stopping? And yet there are truck stops every few exits.
Trump claims trucks can drive from LA to New York without stopping a single time.
How do people not get that EVERYTHING this guy says is total bulls*t.
There is no point in believing any of his promises or claims or anything. It is all nonsense. pic.twitter.com/5rO9unkJof
And water. Trump is obsessed with toilets and showers, convinced none of them work properly because of water conservation. News to you? Me too. He’s added dishwashers to the list.
Especially undocumented immigrants. Recall Trump’s insistence that Mexican migrants are “bad hombres“? Trump now thinks someone should form a “migrant league of fighters.” Gladiators for your entertainiment. Trump suggested the league to UFC President Dana White, Forbes reports.
Trump going hard after the Hispanic vote by: – raising prices on everything – stripping health insurance and reproductive freedom from tens of millions – keeping minimum wage at $7.25 – rounding up 10m+ immigrants into detention camps – starting a "migrant fight league" https://t.co/YwdyUAZrFG
At least North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un loves him.
Crazy dictator language, use of third person sounds like Idi Amin at his most manic. The ad for the free Trump knife is perfect with Trump speaking about himself in the past tense. https://t.co/8QPRknKNnf
Oh, and prep for this week’s presidential debate? Every accusation a confession? The internet lit up on Saturday after Trump’s suggestion that President Biden will get some sort of performance-enhancing “shot in the ass” before going on stage. *
This is just normal political rhetoric from a presidential candidate now I guess. https://t.co/IIQn8829gB
We know by now that Trump is (choose your idiom) mentally unbalanced. But as Digby mentioned yesterday, you must spend 12 minutes on this MSNBC segment with the head of the Heritage Foundation. The prion disease has spread to the entire MAGA movement.
At first I was dubious of @MSNBC for inviting a Heritage Foundation person on to spout lies.
Then I saw this interview and recognized that the best way to highlight the insanity that’s afoot is to put examples of it on television for all to see.
The 2024 Tribeca Film Festival wrapped last weekend, but I still have a few reviews in the can (as they say). Hopefully, some of these will be coming soon to a theater (or streaming platform) near you. Let’s dive in…
Alien Weaponry: Kua Tupo Te Ara (New Zealand) *** – Kent Belcher’s documentary opens with home movie footage of two boys around age (7? 8?) jamming out on drums and guitar. The guitarist/vocalist appears to be improvising his (mostly indecipherable) lyrics, but his committed, full-throat delivery suggests he could grow up to be the next Tom Araya.
Brothers Henry (drums) and Lewis (guitar/lead vocals) de Jong did in fact grow up to be luminaries in thrash-metal circles. The Waipu, New Zealand-born siblings formed the band Alien Weaponry in 2010 (with the full encouragement of their parents, who also assumed managerial duties). What made the band unique (aside from the fact that they were all of 9 and 10 at the time) was the integration of Māori culture and language into their music.
Belcher documents the band over a several year period, tagging along on road tours and an important gig at a major thrash metal festival. While the usual “rockumentary” travails ensue (backstage squabbles, bruised egos, and the inevitable creative differences), the strength of family and cultural bonds trumps all. An honest and ultimately heartwarming profile.
Come Closer (Israel/Italy) *** – Writer-director Tom Nesher’s character study concerns a young woman named Eden (Lia Elalouf) who is besotted by grief over the tragic death of her younger brother. While attending her brother’s funeral, she notices a bereaved young woman (Darya Rosenn) whom she has never met. As Eden and her late brother had few secrets between them, the presence and behavior of this mysterious stranger intrigues her. When Eden’s initial attempt to reach out to the young woman is met by a cold shoulder, her curiosity quickly turns to anger, jealousy, then obsession. Just when you think the story is headed for standard stalker thriller territory, it takes a wholly unexpected turn. A moving and absorbing drama, bolstered by brave and sensitive performances from Elalouf and Rosenn.
The Dog Thief (France/Mexico/Chile/Ecuador/Italy/Bolivia) *** – The future doesn’t look so bright for orphaned, semi-literate working class teenager Martin (Franklin Aro). Cruelly ridiculed by his bourgeois schoolmates, Martin ekes out a meager living as a shoeshine boy on the streets of La Paz and is only afforded lodging by the good graces of his late mother’s friend, who works as a maid in the spacious home of an ailing widow. Martin’s most loyal shoeshine customer is well-to-do tailor Mr. Novoa (Alfredo Castro). Novoa is an empty-nester who spends his off-hours training and pampering his prized German Shepherd.
One day, Martin has a sudden brainstorm for a get-rich-quick scheme; he will kidnap Mr. Novoa’s dog and then enlist his best bud to “find” it and collect the reward. As Martin ingratiates himself into insular Mr. Novoa’s life (initially as part of the scheme), an unexpected bond develops between the two, greatly complicating Martin’s not so-masterminded caper.
Reminiscent of P. T. Anderson’s Hard Eight, writer-director Vinko Tomičić Salinas’ film makes excellent use of the La Paz locales, rendered in a decidedly neorealist style (not so surprising, given the title’s wordplay on Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves). Keep an eye on this filmmaker.
Linda Perry: Let it Die Here (U.S.) ***½ – Initially bursting onto the music scene in the early 90s by creating and belting out the most distinctive “yeah yeah yeah” hook this side of The Beatles’ “She Loves You” (“What’s Up”), Linda Perry has long since slipped the surly bonds of “4 Non-Blondes’ lead singer with the hat” to become an in-demand songwriter and producer for a number of notable artists (Adele, Christina Aguilera, Brandi Carlisle, Miley Cyrus, Celine Dion, Gwen Stefani, et.al.). What makes this otherwise by-the-numbers music doc (directed by Don Hardy) really pop is its subject herself: charismatic, indomitable and boundlessly creative. One sequence, which observes Perry as she improvises, produces and arranges one of her own songs (essentially directing an orchestra on the fly) is one of the most riveting captures of the creative process I’ve seen on film since Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil.
Some Rain Must Fall (France/China/Singapore/U.S.) ** – Writer-director Qui Yang’s character study focuses on a middle-class family in crisis. While waiting in a school gym to pick up her daughter, Cai (Yu Aier) is hit by a stray ball. Preoccupied, she reflexively hurls it back in the direction it came from, unintentionally injuring a elderly woman (off-camera). The incident triggers an existential malaise already long-percolating due to her imminent plans to file divorce papers against her husband (who is trying to talk her out of it) and her increasingly strained relationship with her uncommunicative daughter. A setup very much in the vein of Diary of a Mad Housewife, but unfortunately not in the same league. Overall glacial pacing is not helped by the murky cinematography-which makes it frustratingly difficult to read the actor’s faces (the dialog is minimal; so how can the audience connect with any of the characters when it looks like everything was filmed with a hidden camera?).
Under the Grey Sky (Poland) *** – This “ripped from the headlines” political drama is set during the 2020 Belarusian election. In a genuinely tense and unnerving opening scene, a journalist (Aliaksandra Vaitsekhovich) opposed to the current regime is in a friend’s apartment, livestreaming an aggressive police action against demonstrators on the streets below.
Soon after an ominous pass of a police camera drone, the authorities burst in and arrest her. As her Kafkaesque nightmare ensues in the oppressive government’s court system, her husband (also a journalist) suffers his own travails as he is harassed by the police and eventually arrested on trumped-up charges. Based on a true story, writer-director Mara Tamkovich’s film is a sobering reminder that Orwellian totalitarianism is not dead…hell, it’s never even been resting. And yes…it could happen here.
CNN airs montage of Trump VP contenders saying they “never liked” Trump, they “wouldn’t do business with him,” calling him a “con artist,” and more pic.twitter.com/PtTSlXKHzW
There are dozens of comments like this from Vance. The ads write themselves.
I’m not sure he’ll be able to forgive Rubio for this. Look how angry he is here. He’s not going to choose him:
I’m sticking with Burgum. He looks out of central casting and he’s a billionaire which makes MAGA even more “populist” in GOP bizarroworld. I don’t know if he’s said anything more damning than the clip in that first video. If not, then I think he’s in. He’s shown a real Pencian flair for adoring sycophancy.
Crowley: Senator Joe McCarthy was right… The same deep state going after Donald Trump, the same deep state that removed Richard Nixon… that deep state smeared and attacked Joe McCarthy for speaking the truth.. pic.twitter.com/2Z1FQYpqdC
You’ve heard all about the new Louisiana law requiring the display of the 10 Commandments in every schoolroom in the state. But they’re just getting started:
The crowd at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette, La., applauded Gov. Jeff Landry as he signed bill after bill this week on public education in the state, making it clear he believed God was guiding his hand.
One new law requires that transgender students be addressed by the pronouns for the gender on their birth certificates (“God gives us our mark,” he said). Another allows public schools to employ chaplains (“a great step for expanding faith in public schools”).
Then he signed into law a mandate that the Ten Commandments be hung in every public classroom, demonstrating a new willingness for Louisiana to go where other states have not. Last month, Louisiana also became the first state to classify abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances.
“We don’t quit,” Mr. Landry, a Republican, said at the signing ceremony.
No they don’t. Ever. They have been working at this for many decades. And with Trump and the Supremes they believe they are on the precipice of their biggest victory.
Keep in mind that the ultra-right wing Christian Speaker of the House comes out of that Louisiana petrie dish. He has big plans.
Supporters of the Louisiana law now hope that other states will follow its example.
[…]
A poll about religion in schools, conducted last year by The Associated Press and NORC, a nonpartisan research institution at the University of Chicago, showed a country split over the influence of religion in what children are taught in public schools. Among those surveyed, 37 percent said there was too little religion, 31 percent said there was the right amount, and 31 percent said there was too much.
Heather L. Weaver, a senior staff attorney with the Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief at the American Civil Liberties Union, said she would not be surprised if next year’s state legislative sessions took up a “huge influx” of bills rooted in conservative Christian ideas. She pointed to Louisiana as a leader in the movement.
The Christian political movement has been evident in debates across the country over transgender rights, school curriculums, in vitro fertilization and abortion. In Arizona, during the fight over an abortion ban from 1864, the speaker of the House, Ben Toma, told The New York Times in April that “all of our laws are actually based on, what, the Ten Commandments and the Book of Genesis, which are thousands of years ago.”
It is an argument that has been repeated by supporters of the Ten Commandments law in Louisiana, who contend that the commandments are a historical document as well as a religious text.
“This is all born of the leftist culture war tearing down the fabric of the country, and we are saying, ‘Enough,’” said Jason Rapert, founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and a former state senator in Arkansas. “We are going to try to rebuild the foundation of this country.”
I think they mean it. Now that they’ve determined that they can even vote for a lying, criminal, libertine solely for the purpose of obtaining power for their Christian fascist agenda, they are feeling their oats. It doesn’t matter if a majority agrees with them. They can just force it through.
One of the biggest revelations in Watergate was the existence of Nixon’s enemies list. The episode was particularly dramatic because it was announced by CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr on live TV and as he was reading it he found his own name on the list. It was a tremendous scandal at the time which sounds downright quaint today what with the former president and current GOP nominee routinely calling the press the “enemy of the people” and publicly declaring his intention to prosecute his political rivals.
New York Magazine helpfully drew up a partial list which they promise will be updated as the threats add up: Joe Biden and family, obviously Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg New York Judge Juan Merchan New York Attorney General Leticia James New York Judge Arthur Engoron Special Counsel Jack Smith and anyone involved in the federal Trump investigations/indictments
Those are the obvious ones. But there are more. Here’s the rest of the list with the evidence:
Members of the House January 6 Select Committee
On June 6, Trump attacked the committee and accused its members of committing crimes in a Truth Social post, writing at the end of the post: “INDICT THE UNSELECT J6 COMMITTEE FOR ILLEGALLY DELETING AND DESTROYING ALL OF THEIR ‘FINDING!’”
Journalists and media organizations
Trump continues to attack members of the media, or at least those he views as unfriendly to him and his causes, as “the enemy of the people.” In a September 2023 Truth Social post, Trump attacked NBC News, MSNBC, and the organizations’ parent company, Comcast, before adding:
I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events. Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!
During an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast late last year, former Trump National Security Council member Kash Patel, who according to the New York Times will likely have a senior national security role in a second Trump administration, vowed that the administration would go after journalists. Though Patel said a second Trump administration would “follow the facts and the law,” he also said:
We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.
Nonprofits and charities that support migrants
In a November 2023 Truth Social post, Trump vowed that, “For any radical left charity, non-profit, or so called aid organizations supporting these caravans and illegal aliens, we will prosecute them for their participation in human trafficking, child smuggling, and every other crime we can find…”
Retired Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley
In September 2023, Trump posted a message on Truth Social attacking Milley over phone calls the former top general made to China in October 2020 and January 2021 (two days after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol) offering reassurance that Trump was not planning to attack China. Milley later said that both calls, at the time, were cleared by senior Trump administration Defense officials. But in his Truth Social post, Trump suggested Milley had in fact committed treason, writing that:
This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act. To be continued!!!
Employees at the National Archives
Per a Rolling Stone report in October 2022, Trump has expressed an interest in purging the federal agency — which he has said is “woke and broken” —after it sought to recover classified documents Trump took from the White House at the end of his presidency:
Trump has told close associates that he wants to gut the nonpartisan historical agency, which the former president believes is full of anti-MAGA subversives, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump has said he plans to make it a priority if he wins a second term, the sources say.
In some of these conversations, the former president has referenced specific officials — all installed during Democratic administrations — who he’d want to immediately “get rid of” and have replaced with pliable loyalists. One of these sources says that it was clear from the conversation that someone in Trump’s orbit had been slipping him names or lists of potential targets.
Mark Zuckerberg
In a February Truth Social post, Trump accused the Facebook/Meta CEO of interference in the 2020 election, citing an unproven allegation that the billionaire attempted to help Democrats via a nonpartisan nonprofit which donated millions of dollars to help bolster the operations of 2,500 local election offices ahead of the election.
“He cheated on the Election(s). The whole system is RIGGED. Why isn’t he being prosecuted?” Trump wrote.
Stay tuned. I’m sure there are more we don’t know about and more to come. You can be sure that he has a much longer list of journalists and like fascists before him he will also target people on his own team (as he did to Bob Good, a MAGA Republican who had the nerve to endorse Ron Desantis) just to keep the cult in line.
At first I was dubious of @MSNBC for inviting a Heritage Foundation person on to spout lies.
Then I saw this interview and recognized that the best way to highlight the insanity that’s afoot is to put examples of it on television for all to see.
That is the head of the Heritage Foundation which is pulling together Project 2025. He is very arrogant, very confident that they have the election in the bag and very proud of the work they are doing. First and foremost, he is obviously saying that they will not accept the results of the election if Trump doesn’t win. The rest is just as batshit crazy.
QUESTION: Is your organization going to accept the results of the 2024 presidential election, regardless of the election results.
ANSWER: Yes, if there isn’t massive fraud like there was in 2020.
QUESTION: There wasn’t massive fraud. Where was it?
ANSWER: no answer
QUESTION: What is the plan for the deportation of undocumented immigrants in the interior, not at the border.
ANSWER: We need to have the biggest mass deportation system in America.
QUESTION: What are these people (undocumented immigrants) doing?
ANSWER: A lot of them are committing crimes like murdering the 12-year-old girl in Houston.
FACT: That’s one out of 11 million. In Texas, undocumented immigrants were 37.1 % less likely to be convicted of a crime.
QUESTION: Should a woman be able to get an abortion if her doctor says she needs one?
ANSWER: Abortion is not healthcare . We will change the name of the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Life, because we are all in support of life.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) brought some heat to her stumping in Nevada for Joe Biden this week. This, this is what I’m talking about. Behold:
AOC: I have a message for this conservative court and Donald J. Trump. The women and people of this state do not consent. And the woman and people of this country certainly do not consent to Donald Trump nor this corrupt court that he has enabled. pic.twitter.com/I6MfefIrae
But what little coverage AOC’s appearance drew missed the fire. Las Vegas Sun:
“For women and gender diverse people, it is life and death,” said Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., during a discussion about reproductive rights Thursday in Las Vegas. Ocasio-Cortez later appeared in downtown Las Vegas for a rally to support Biden’s reelection campaign. “It’s not hyperbole. It’s reality.”
This is what Democrats fight in convincing progressive voices and younger voters that their vote is their voice, that their vote is their power, that their power matters, and that Democrats have their backs. If there is media bias, it is against progressives’ most powerful voices. Democrats themselves are uneasy about putting up a public fight. Several members of Nevada’s mostly Democrat Congressional delegation were absent fron the event.
“A Biden-Harris campaign spokeswoman acknowledged the absences and said ‘scheduling’ issues were to blame,” the New York Post reported.
This week, Rep. Jaime Raskin (D) of Maryland urged readers of The New Republic not to count out “self-deprecating” liberals. Don’t be fooled by their “essential modesty.” Except reticence in this environment is a liability.
“[B]attle-hardened post-Trump liberals have proved tough as nails and ready to fight all necessary battles for freedom and democracy in these days of resurgent authoritarianism,” Raskin wrote:
Ordinarily a live-and-let-live philosophy, liberalism fights hard when it’s up against the ropes. And here we are—in the fight of our lives ever since Florida Man came down the escalator to run a new nationwide grift. The good news is that the post–Donald Trump networks of liberals and progressives are ready for battle, strategically focused, and plentiful in the land.
“Tough as nails and ready to fight.” Is that Democrats’ secret weapon? The problem is few voters on the sidelines see a polite magazine essay as “fighting.” As Dr. Strangelove once said, “Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?”
Dispirited and disengaged voters want to see Democrats fighting for them, as Anat Shenker-Osorio found in recent focus groups:
If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis.
As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really. Even if Democrats won the House, the Senate, the presidency, they’ve had it before — didn’t do anything then.”
Again,
A laundry list of accomplishments doesn’t lodge in people’s brains the way a good story with heroes and villains does. Democrats aren’t telling one. It’s not voters’ fault that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s a challenge Democrats are struggling to meet. And the kitchen table? The kitchen table is on fire.
AOC preaches as though the table is on fire. More of that, please.
A casual friend introduced me to his buddy at a public concert last night. The usual. Tom works with the Democratic Party, etc. The buddy replied with the familiar “fed up with both parties” bit.
Cynicism is first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both these things. That the attitude that prides itself on world-weary experience is often so naïve says much about the triumph of style over substance, attitude over analysis.
[…]
If you set purity and perfection as your goals, you have an almost foolproof system according to which everything will necessarily fall short. But expecting perfection is naïve; failing to perceive value by using an impossible standard of measure is even more so. Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards. They are uncomfortable with victories, because victories are almost always temporary, incomplete, and compromised — but also because the openness of hope is dangerous, and in war, self-defense comes first. Naïve cynicism is absolutist; its practitioners assume that anything you don’t deplore you wholeheartedly endorse. But denouncing anything less than perfection as morally compromising means pursuing aggrandizement of the self, not engagement with a place or system or community, as the highest priority.
One thing you can say for the [party] old boys, they are patient and persistent. (Okay, that’s two things.) Patience and persistence are not the first qualities liberal activists look for in their change agents, and qualities that not enough activists cultivate in themselves. Whenever an Obama flings the wheel hard over (or not hard enough) and the ship of state doesn’t turn like a speedboat, impatient activists abandon their posts and jump ship. Do that, and nothing changes. And the old boys get their club back.
One thing to be said for old and unexciting Joe Biden is he has been persistent. James Lardner writes in The New Yorker that a recent Times and Sienna College poll found that nearly seventy per cent of Americans thinks the system needs “either a major shakeup or (the preference of fourteen per cent) to be ‘torn down entirely.’ ” Donald Trump was just the sort of guy to do it, not Joe Biden.
The Times’ Nate Cohn found that, ironically, people saw the same appeal in Barack Obama, “another candidate who famously represented change, change we could believe in.” Only to be disappointed when the ship didn’t turn like a speedboat and that hnis response to the financial crisis was overly timid. “And I think that it’s not a coincidence that there are so many Obama/Trump voters out there.”
“The upshot was a fresh wave of outrage against the government and politicians, a growing perception of Democrats as the party of a self-absorbed élite, and an opening for the likes of Donald Trump,” Lardner writes.
So few of us saw Joe Biden, change agent, coming. Lardner provides an impressive list of first-term accomplishments. But Biden’s record recalls the title of Frank Zappa’s live album, “The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life.” Biden’s is another band no one’s heard:
In a forbidding political environment, the Biden Administration has racked up an impressive record of impactful achievement; and yet even a goodly number of Biden’s 2020 voters are “surprisingly unaware of anything he has done as President,” according to Rich Thau, a public-policy researcher who runs regular focus groups with swing voters. The perception of Biden as ineffective has been a source of much vexation in the President’s camp, and the subject of many an op-ed column and blog post. Some commentators reason that the Administration’s policies need more time to prove their worth: most of the infrastructure projects, for example, have yet to reach the ribbon-cutting stage. Others blame a politically fractured media that tends to reinforce people’s biases. Ageism has been at work here, too: Americans could count themselves lucky to have a President who, after a lifetime in government, has shown a capacity to reflect on past mistakes—his own and his party’s—and a resolve to make the most of the opportunity belatedly granted him. But the polls suggest that, even among Biden’s supporters, his age is viewed almost entirely as a source of concern.
In one way, though, Biden has contributed to his own predicament. In his determination to sound the alarm against another Trump Presidency, he has had a lot to say about what Americans stand to lose: access to abortion, honest elections, civility, the rule of law. If Biden is seen as a system defender, it’s partly because he has spent so much of his campaign time on defense. He should say more—far more—about what his Administration and his party have done, and mean to do in the future, to make the economy and democracy more just.
His attacks on Trump could be more expansive, too. Trump is in some ways a sui-generis figure: the only convicted felon to be a major-party nominee for President, and the only candidate who has ever promised to be a “dictator” on Day One or spoken of using his office to exact “retribution” against his enemies. In the realm of economic policy, however, Trump has proved to be a conventional Republican of the modern era. His Administration, like those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, was a fount of special favors for powerful industries and a trasher of regulations that cost corporations money; and its first and biggest achievement was an enormous tax-cut bill tilted in favor of the rich. What set Trump and his governing crowd apart, beyond their many crimes and indictments, was only the brazenness of their quid-pro-quo understandings with donors and their readiness to direct a stream of the benefits of their official actions to themselves. When it comes to the privileges of the wealthy and powerful, Trump has been the defender and Biden the threat. Biden and his team would do well to remind voters of that, again and again, from now to Election Day.
Democrats, Biden included, also need to demonstrate a commitment to change by showing they mean to fight for it. Visibly. Loudly. What doesn’t get attention might as well not exist.
Misdiagnosing why Dem base voters report moving away from Biden will absolutely lead to wrong cure. Despite pundit-land evergreen answer – "be less woke" – in reality these voters are getting turned off by lack of resolve & fight.https://t.co/qqpd8q9pJq
— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) June 17, 2024
I’m pretty sure the guy last night has no idea what Biden and his Democratic colleagues have accomplished because good-government types tend to do a poor job of advertising their accomplishments. They’re just doing what they’ve been hired to do, and shrug. Not being visible and loud about it in this “forbidding political environment” looks like lethargy. Biden shook things up with his Independence Hall speech in 2022. His debate performance next week is another chance to change the narrative.
