This is an excellent interview of Heather Cox Richardson by Christiane Amanpour. They discuss the infamous debate between Biden and Trump. Richardson explains brilliantly how the media has framed the debate as “disastrous” for Biden yet has failed to portray the danger posed by Trump. Trump, she says, is a threat to our democracy.
Whatever you do today, watch this discussion. Richardson’s historical insights are invaluable. She is succinct, clear, and compelling.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
From the July 4, 2024 NY Times:
“President Biden sought to steady his re-election campaign by talking with two Black radio hosts for interviews broadcast on Thursday, but he spoke haltingly at points during one interview and struggled to find the right phrase in the other, saying that he was proud to have been “the first Black woman to serve with a Black president.”
So Biden thought that he is a Black woman? Does Diane Ravitch still believe that Joe Biden is cognitively fit enough to serve another four term? Don’t dodge the question by deflecting to Trump’s awfulness.
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Is Trump morally and cognitively fit to serve a second term? After all, this is the guy who wanted to SHOOT asylum seekers and abandoned our allies, the Kurds, to be slaughtered, and this is the guy who thought that we should send astronauts to the sun and sweep forests and nuke hurricanes and look into injecting disinfectant and that the Continental Army captured the British airports and that there is a book called Two Corinthians and that Denmark would want to sell Greenland to us and that China doesn’t have a border with India and that Alabama is on the East Coast and that Frederick Douglas is alive and doing a great job and that a dementia screening is an IQ test and that other countries pay the tariffs we place on their goods.
Don’t dodge the question by deflecting to Biden’s age. Whatever his age, he AND THE GROUP AROUND HIM are doing a great job. Unlike Trump, whose massive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans added 7.8 TRILLION dollars to the national debt.
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Trump is not fit morally and intellectually to be President, and he never was. I have doubts about his cognitive fitness as well.
But that doesn’t change the glaringly obvious fact that Biden won’t last a full four year term, maybe not even his first term. You know that, too. Have some pride and stop acting like a groupie for Diane Ravitch.
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Kirk,
There are no “Diane Ravitch groupies.” Regular commenters here are educated, thoughtful, and knowledgeable.
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See my note to PA Bonner, above.
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Kirk: if you really thought in terms of “a plague on both their houses,” you would have said so initially. What do you have to say about Citizens United? Dobbs? Belotti? Heller? How do you feel about Trump’s record of usurping human rights by executive fiat?
Sorry. I am just voting for the yellow dog this time around. Not that it will help, since I am in a red blood state.
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People misspeak. Happens all the time. It especially happens to elderly people with histories of speech difficulties. But we have a choice between the elderly Biden and his team, which have given us good governance, and a profoundly ignorant and aged and dangerous criminal psychopathic buffoon and traitor to his country.
Sorry, you cannot couch this in “do not deflect” terms. We have this stark choice. One or the other. And that’s it.
If you want a draft dodging serial sexual predator who calls our military losers and has spent his life swindling people, Donnie’s your guy. The only choices are that lowlife or Biden.
Don’t deflect by opting out or suggesting that it isn’t a choice between the two.
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Every time I think Trump can’t go lower, he does. Not only did he attempt nutty things in his first term, now he has actually published a list of political targets he wishes to put through military tribunals. Yet today, many major media outlets, from the Times to the Atlantic are publishing opinions calling for Biden to pull out of the race. Some are going as far as asking him to resign. I think the overall panic we are witnessing is because we witnessed a Joe Biden we had been assured did not exist. He just tried to reassure Governors that he was going to overcome this by setting an earlier bed time. Reports are that they were not amused. I will vote for him if he remains the nominee, but Americans are now simply scared for our future, if they weren’t before the debate. Biden has to put our minds at ease. His choices this week of selective interviews and a family meeting have done nothing to ease this angst. His unwillingness to hold press conferences and unscripted town halls haven’t helped either. After this years cataclysmic SCOTUS session and the revelations of project 2025, anyone of reason knows our democratic future is at risk. Biden needs to prove that he is up to the task. Scripted speeches at campaign rallies will not do the trick.
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According to Howard Baker, writing in his autobiography, when Baker became Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff in Reagan’s second term, one of the other Cabinet members pulled him aside before the first Cabinet meeting and said to him, “Don’t be surprised if the old man is not entirely there.” I watched throughout that second term as Reagan started sentences, forgot what he was saying mid-sentence, and ended with something entirely unrelated, and I said to myself, “Well, this guy has advanced senile dementia.” And he did. But he had set a direction for the country, at home and abroad, and THE PEOPLE AROUND HIM CONTINUED TO CARRY THIS OUT.
Another Trump term is unthinkable. It would be an utter disaster. ANYTHING BUT THAT. Where is the media coverage, wall to wall, of what a lowlife piece of lying, traitorous, criminal scum Trump is? Of how dangerous he is?
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The podcast “American Scandal” does great reporting on the Iran Contra scandal. Although it is clearly documented that Reagan was present in most of the meetings that decided to give arms to Iran, while we also lended aid to Iraq in that war by the way, he would vehemently deny agreeing to Arms for Hostages. When the special prosecutor interviewed Reagan for the investigation, he left dismayed by Reagan’s condition. Reagan didn’t believe he agreed to trading arms for hostages because he didn’t remember participating in the meetings led by such upstanding public servants as Col. Oliver North. That should serve as a cautionary tale regarding both of the presumptive nominees for President.
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Even before the election against Jimmy Carter, they made this deal, asking Iran to hold the hostages until after the election in exchange for arms. And private citizen Nixon just happened to make a trip to Tehran about that time. What a coincidence!
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Yes. The people around Biden who have been hiding his actual condition from the public have acted shamefully. It’s inexcusable, and I think that you are exactly right about the reaction being a consequence of the revelation of what they have been hiding.
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Who answers the phone when Trump is called at 3 am?
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When Trump picks up a phone call, he is simply the remote-control device for Tsar Vladimir the Defenestrator.
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👍👍👍, Bob!
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Despite concerns about corporate greedflation, the US economy has rebounded far better from Covid than our allies or enemies under team Biden’s policies. Democrats should crow about this success because we won’t hear it on mainstream media.
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What you think about Biden, does not matter. Why? Because the administration of every president (except Traitor Trump) is made up of competent cabinet members and advisers. With the traitor, his cabinet and advisers were a revolving door because the traitor kept firing anyone that told the traitor what the traitor didn’t want to hear.
Then, back to Biden, there is his Vice President who would replace Biden if he couldn’t perform his duties as president.
I listened to two videos of Biden, one from last September, a few days before his interview with a Traitor Trump loyalist over the classified document found immediately turned in at a Biden office, and one the day after the debate that wasn’t a debate.
I did not hear one slip like the only short pull quote you provided in your comment. Not one.
Last point why what Kirk Hauser thinks doesn’t matter, expect to Kirk Hauser.
I’ll be 79 next month, and I often find myself losing words I know that come to me a moment or longer later.
Someone older like me and Biden fumbling for words is not a sign of dementia. However, unlike Biden who is on camera and on the spot, I have my lapses in front of a monitor with my fingers hovering over a keyboard. I know the word or words I want to use but they are slower coming to mind. Sometimes, I turn to Google and ask for words that mean the same as what I want to use and then I’ll see the word I wanted, and it comes back to me. I’ll think, “Yea, that’s the word that got lost in my head.”
“Speech and language processing are largely intact in older adults under normal conditions, although processing time may be somewhat slower than in young adults. In fact, there is evidence that discourse skills actually improve with age.” … “They usually have more extensive vocabularies; and although they exhibit the occasional word-finding difficulty, older adults are easily able to provide circumlocutions to mask the problem.”
Changes in Cognitive Function in Human Aging – Brain Aging – NCBI Bookshelf (nih.gov)
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Kirk: When you get done playing “Gotcha!” you might consider that you might have mistaken Biden’s miss-speak phrasing for what he most likely was thinking. “So Biden thought that he is Black woman?” Right. In your dreams.
I chalk that comment off to a long history of well-known Biden gaffs, long before age came on the scene, which mean not-one-thing in the face of his record of “for the people” attitude coupled with hard-won political gains.
Your comment doesn’t really inspire trust in. your ability to understand context and interpret fairly. . . . not to mention your apparently thinking your readers will just gobble it up. But unlike you, I’d still give it a little time–ingenuity and critical skills can always be improved, even in the worst among us. . . . Well, maybe not Trump or even some of the worst MAGA mush brains, but as a general rule. Go in peace, but please: GO. CBK
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I have a friend who told me that Trump won the last election. He told me to get Brighteon news. Here is one article. I seriously doubt that Trump has any interest in anything except making himself more wealthy and to be adored by his ignorant followers.
The far R believes this nonsense.
Trump Launches Probe into Big Pharma, Big Food, and Toxic Chemicals
Trump just made a truly huge announcement: He will form a commission to investigate Big Pharma, dangerous prescription medications, toxic food ingredients, toxic chemicals and much more.
In today’s Brighteon Broadcast News, I volunteer my laboratory services to help Trump clean up America’s farm soils and food supply. This is an historic effort on Trump’s part to finally identify the causes of chronic degenerative disease (like cancer) and to END the causes instead of spending fortunes treating the disease.
Get the full details in today’s’ Brighteon Broadcast News here.ogjtepm
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It would be interesting to make a list of Trump boasts and compare them to what he actually did.
Remember when he said at every rally that he would build “a big, beautiful wall” and Mexico would pay for it. Huh?
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And when he spent his Inaugural Address talking about the great national rebuilding he was going to oversee via his infrastructure plan that would put forgotten Americans back to work? Or when he spent his entire administration talking about his healthcare plan which was so beautiful and so much better than Obamacare and was going to appear next week?
It’s always bullshit with Trump. Bullshit followed by bullshit with a heap of bullshit as a chaser.
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What problems did Trump solve during his term? Maybe he lowered his golf score.
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He solved the problem of installing “just asses” on the court who would keep his big behind out of prison.
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Diane: What’s the matter with you, girl? Don’t you know that Trump has a magic marker that can redirect the movement of hurricanes? CBK
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If Trump is elected he will be no more than a figure head. He will play a lot of golf and lean on his grift to enrich he and his family. Meanwhile his sycophantic goons will have free rein to implement Project 2025. Can’t wait for that first holiday when jumbo jets collide. It would be great if the electorate would decide to run this current iteration of the Republican Party out of office, but it won’t. I lived in Alabama where a significant majority of adults have simply chosen to no longer participate in democracy. Prior to that I lived in North Carolina where we believed we were the progressive South. That is no longer the case. Richardson was right when she described what we are witnessing as a coup. I suggest you listen to the Podcast “Landslide”. This has been a political assault at least 5 decades in the making. Trump, like Reagan before him, is the useful idiot that gets this theocratic white nationalist movement over the finish line.
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carolmalaysia: Even if Trump talks about bringing rafts of wonderful things down the river, . . . the fact that someone might believe him after all the lies says more about them than it does about Trump. When did so many Americans become so gullible . . . and anti-American? CBK
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Richardson appeals to me. Us historians think alike in that we love to disagree. I never agree with all of her characterization of history or current events, but that is just the way of history. The more you know, the more you question.
This is why we should fear Trump and the 2025 plan that is his guide. The Heritage Foundation is, as of 2021 when a solid Trump supporter assumed its lead, all in for Trump. This means that, regardless of the religion washing, conservatives have now openly backed several ideas that quash representative government with a hammer. Extreme judges, restrictions on women’s health far beyond Dobbs, and a free reign for industry to pollute at will suggest a policy that will doom at least a generation.
Democrats are often like historians: they disagree on points, but they agree on principles. This is a time when they need to put aside differences to fight a Republican unity. Otherwise we might never be free to disagree.
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Roy: I thought that Heritage president guy looked and sounded like he was right out of Hollywood casting . . . for a male stand-in for Nurse Hatchet in One Flew Over the Cuckcoo’s Nest or worse, one of those men donating their sperm in Margaret Attwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale.”
It’s crazy, man, especially that they’re actually serious. CBK
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Diane, you yourself basically characterized the debate as disastrous (albeit, you didn’t use that word). You said you couldn’t stand to watch it continuously. You said that Biden mumbled and misspoke. You complained that the moderators didn’t step in and correct blatant misstatements **on both sides**. https://dianeravitch.net/2024/06/27/the-debate-a-big-downer/
You had it right.
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I did. And on reflection, I concluded that if Biden pulled out, Trump would win.
We can’t take that risk.
Trump is a fascist.
Biden has a great team, many accomplishments, and the right ideals and vision.
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So the media *correctly characterized the debate as disastrous because it was. You can still make the case for Biden staying in the race, but don’t minimize that dreadful performance even after he spent a solid week dedicated to preparing for it. Worse, his family has tried to blame his advisors for the debacle, which is taking the low road. Biden messed up at an important juncture. It’s up to him now to show he is capable of continuing to manage the presidency and the media can and should document those efforts whether successful or not. If he can’t successfully show his capability, he needs to step aside for the good of his party, not blame his advisors or the media.
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People I respect say that if drops out, Trump wins. That’s the worst possible outcome
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No one knows what will happen. There is a plausible case that the Dems lose if Biden exits, and there is a plausible cases that they lose if he doesn’t exit. The risk of the former may be high enough to justify staying the course. But the real tragedy is that Biden didn’t step down a long time ago. And if the Dems lose this election, I’m putting a lot of that blame on Biden himself and everyone who tried to minimize the obvious issue of his age, for putting us in this position.
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By “step down” I mean “agree to not run for a second term,” to be clear.
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dienne: You write, “Worse, his family has tried to blame his advisors for the debacle, which is taking the low road.”
I thought the same before I heard it from the family. In my view, it’s an extremely plausible scenario–staff so worried that they fire-hosed Biden with stuff that was probably good and even needed for the public to hear, and maybe for a policy paper, but didn’t fit with the scene of a reasonable person trying to talk about “what’s good for the people” with a human loogie. CBK
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I have confidence in Kamala Harris if she needs to step in due to the death or incapacitation of the president. We have a good VP who could do the job if necessary. This is the price we pay for keeping vice presidents quiet so that they don’t overshadow the president. People don’t know a lot about her or see her a lot. It’s a big problem.
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I was really impressed by Richardson’s analysis here. Where I wish the press would reconsider is through their comparison of our current circumstances with LBJ’s decision in 1968. Johnson resigned in March of 1968 at a time when Presidential campaigns did not really get started until after the party conventions the summer prior to an election. There was an active campaign among his suitors that was then moving to primaries that at that time were not binding toward a nominee. LBJ, nor anyone else, knew MLK would be assassinated that April or that RFK, the presumptive nominee the night of his California primary victory, would be shot down as well. Historically, we now know that the active antiwar and civil rights movements were not majoritarian and that Americans were far more moderate, if not conservative, than was presented by the mass media at the time. Yes, there were those in the Democratic Convention who resented Humphries nomination due to his not participating in the primaries. However, what few today seem to acknowledge is that despite all of the events of the day that brought profound headwinds to a Democratic candidate, he lost to Nixon by only 1%. Despite comments to the contrary, the American people are not stupid. Like today, 1968 was a revolutionary year internationally (France had an actual revolution that year and it might be happening again as I right this). What scares our electorate, and one could argue that the behavior of the New York Times is relative to this as well, is that we need a profound reset in our judicial branch, Republican Party, and Constitutional government to get us back to the governing principles we have followed at least since 1965. This will require painful reform in our judiciary, in our administrative institutions, and our representative democracy. Whether those changes include term limits, reasonable taxation for the wealthy, or an expanded court, these changes will be met with fierce resistance. It is being argued that the reaction to Biden’s “performance” last Thursday is overblown. Perhaps it is. However, what we all saw on that debate stage was not about his age, but his health. Thus the question, does he have the wherewithal to actually end the ascendance of this threatened autocracy? As Diane says, I will vote for the old man over the lunatic every time. What we are debating is, will that be enough to stop an openly criminal enterprise.
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when thinking about the 1968 election, there has been some pretty strong evidence that the Nixon campaign reached out to Thieu while negotiations were ongoing, suggesting that stonewalling until Nixon was elected might get him a better deal. Some think a Vietnam deal might have pushed Humphrey into the White House. This would, of course, have been illegal.
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There is evidence that Reagan’s team reached out to Iran in 1980. Then there was the kaki revolt of 2000 in Florida. The consistency of criminal behavior for the sake of power is mind-blowing.
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Good analysis, Paul.
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The consistency of criminal behavior is mind blowing.
THIS
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There are no good options. Biden should have agreed to step aside a year ago or earlier. We should have had a primary process. Instead we stuck to the fiction that Biden was not too old, that video that showed him frail and incoherent should be dismissed as misinformation. Now we know that he can only function at top form (such as it is) for a small window during the day, and not past 8 pm, and we’re backed into such a corner that we tell ourselves that’s ok because he has other people around him who can run the presidency. Remember the Hillary Clinton ad about who you would rather have receiving “the phone call” at 3 am? Now it’s a 10 pm phone call. And this is the narrative we are stuck with when Biden needs to win swing voters. This is an utter disaster.
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Totally frightening
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Agree with some of these points, but a reminder that ad is from 2008 and Hillary Clinton LOST the primary when she ran that ad – to the inexperienced Barack Obama. There was some concern that John McCain – military officer and experienced foreign policy politician – would be able to use that same message against inexperienced Obama, but it didn’t work for him.
“Who would you rather answer the phone at 3am?” message also didn’t work in 2016, when the former Secy of State was running against the leader of the birther movement, the guy who conned folks out of their money to attend a fake university, the guy who said Ted Cruz dad helped assassinate JFK, said Mexico was “sending us” rapists, the guy who claimed he knew more about ISIS “than the generals do”, the guy who definitely saw thousands and thousands of Muslims cheering in Jersey City on 9/11 when the WTC fell even though that only happened in his completely unbalanced mind.
“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.” – March 2016, Trump’s answer to Morning Joe’s question about who his policy consultants are.
And that’s just from the 2016 campaign, when Trump was the LAST guy – including Biden – you’d want answering the phone at 3am – yet Trump won. Now Trump believes that the Revolutionary War was fought on airports.
However, I agree that Trump will be able to destroy Biden with that “who do you want answering the phone at 3am?” ad, because the message that Biden is unfit and it is dangerous to have Biden in office has already been turned into truth by the so-called liberal media. Oddly, when Trump was running in 2016 and 2024, the message that Trump is the last person you want answering the phone at 3am was simply a partisan election attack that the liberal media treated as unworthy of coverage, not a vital issue voters needed to be reminded of in every story.
In my opinion, the person who should be the Democratic candidate because she would be an excellent president is Hillary Clinton. She is 15 months YOUNGER than Trump and has never been accused of being cognitively unfit. But she can’t win. The question of which candidate you’d want answering the phone at 3am – Trump or Hillary – will no longer be an issue. Without Biden, the question of cognitive fitness will no longer be a pressing issue of the campaign at all, despite Trump obviously being cognitively unfit by every measure. That issue is only relevant if it hurts the Democrat, otherwise it is a partisan attack and the NYT must turn its reporting to the real, important issues that the public needs to be concerned about in this campaign.
We can’t know what the most concerning issue of the campaign will be until Biden steps down and immediately the dangers of having an old cognitively unfit man answering the phone at 3am will no longer be relevant nor important.
We can’t know what issue will be the most important until we know who Trump will be running against and the Republicans tell us which issue that is. But we know for certain it will be whatever issue most damages the Democrat. “California in chaos!” “Michigan in chaos!” if Newsom or Whitmer become the nominee, “who answers the phone at 3am” will be immediately deemed unimportant, and what voters need to be concerned about is how bad Governors ruin their states and will do that to the country.
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My humble view: Hillary lost in 2016 because of Comey’s last minute reopening of her emails, not because of her ads. When he dropped the investigation, the damage was done.
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I agree.
But the reason that Comey’s last minute re-opening of her emails hurt her was because the NYT had made the major narrative of the 2016 campaign about how corrupt she was. “do you want the corrupt Hillary answering the phone at 3am?” and not “do you want the unbalanced and hysterical Trump answering the phone at 3am?”
Now that the Democrat is the candidate who is supposedly cognitively unfit, that narrative is now “do you want the unbalanced Joe Biden to answer the phone?”
But the cognitive fitness of who answers the phone will completely cease to be a campaign issue and will return to being portrayed in the NYT as a “partisan attack” as soon as a new nominee replaces Biden.
Questions about Trump’s fitness are partisan attacks. Questions about Democrats’ fitness are of vital importance, as the NYT believes it is “fair and balanced” to inform the public that both sides – Dems and Republicans – know Biden staying in office is incredibly risky. The NYT also did that in 2016. Any criticisms of Trump was reported as simply a “partisan attack”. But (in NYT’s eyes) there was widespread bi-partisan agreement that there were serious questions raised about HRC’s corrupt character and thus the NYT informing the public of the huge risk that having her in office would be was absolutely necessary to do – frequently and loudly. The NYT is still reporting all criticism of Trump – and the right wing Supreme Court’s Immunity decision – as entirely partisan.
The NYT believes its job is to inform the public about the grave risks our country will experience because the Democrat nominee is corrupt/cognitively unfit/looks stupid in a tank. Supposedly this is because they know they can only influence Democrats and independents, and not GOP folks, so therefore there is no point in mentioning the flaws of the Republican except for the one or two times they write about it in a both sides article.
And by the way, if you live in a swing state and refuse to vote because voting doesn’t matter, the NYT would like to feature you in one of their 100 new articles directed to non-GOP supporters — don’t let those nasty elites try to bully you into voting. There is no point.
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It is well documented that Trump is often on his ceramic throne texting with someone else’s phone at 3:00 a.m.
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NYC public school parent: Di Trump really say this? “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.” – March 2016, Trump’s answer to Morning Joe’s question about who his policy consultants are.” (rhetorical question)
You have to remember, however, that such Trumpian statements are for his follower people whom he already informed that he was about to say something important so that, when he says it, they should believe him. . . . and they do. CBK
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I love this ticket!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/05/opinions/kamala-harris-gretchen-whitmer-winning-ticket-zelizer/index.html
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All this discussion is moot unless something happens between now and November that forces Biden or Trump to step aside. We have a choice between an elderly statesman and the devil.
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