Archives for category: Biden
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

A Few Memorable Rants from Trump’s Speeches

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2024 //
10

Margaret Hartmann, a senior editor at New York magazine, compiled six examples (by no means definitive!) of Trump rants.

Hartmann’s article includes tweets and videos that I did not include. Open the link to read the article in full.

She writes:

Donald Trump’s rally speeches have always been a dizzying mix of fearmongering, conspiracy theories, threats against his enemies, and laments about how America is a “nation in decline.” Since Trump made Joe Biden’s decrepitude the centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, even before the Democrat’s calamitous debate, you might have expected the Republican to focus on appearing more competent and presidential at his MAGA gatherings. Yet Trump’s rallies are now weirder than ever.

It’s not just that the substance of Trump’s remarks has grown more disturbing, though it certainly has (for example, he regularly celebrates the January 6 rioters and uses Nazi rhetoric to describe migrants). These days his speeches are also littered with pointless and astoundingly strange musings, like his anti-shark diatribes and tributes to a fictional serial killer.

Trump insists he isn’t incoherent; he’s just misunderstood. “The fake news will say ‘Trump is rambling,’” he declared recently in Philadelphia. “No, it’s genius what I’m doing up here, but nobody understands.”

You can be the judge of that. Here’s a running list of Trump’s most bizarre rally rants from the 2024 campaign trail.

Trump claims magnets don’t work underwater.

Trump likes to brag that he’s “like, a really smart person,” often citing his MIT professor-uncle as proof that scientific brilliance is in his genes. But it seems Uncle John forgot to cover the basics properties of magnets.

“Think of it, magnets,” Trump said at a January 2024 rally in Mason City, Iowa. “Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.”

Fact check: It is not.

Trump brags about putting on pants.

Okay, so Trump isn’t smarter than a fifth-grader when it comes to magnets. But as he revealed at the same January rally in Mason City, he does dress himself like a big boy.

“First they say, ‘Sir, how do you do it? How do you wake up in the morning and put on your pants?’” Trump mused. “And I say, ‘Well, I don’t think about it too much.’ I don’t want to think about it because if I think about it too much maybe I won’t want to do it, but I love it because we’re going to do something for this country that’s never been done before.”

Trump is so proud of his ability to put on pants that he bragged about it again at a rally in the Bronx in May.

Trump blasts Abraham Lincoln for not negotiating his way out of a Civil War.

Trump has a longstanding rivalry with Abraham Lincoln. It seems he knows this will not be received well by the public, as Lincoln is beloved, and also dead. But during a January rally in Newton, Iowa, the 45th president could not resist jabbing the 16th president for failing to prevent the Civil War via negotiation.

“So many mistakes were made” ahead of the Civil War, Trump said. “See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died. So many people died.”

Trump went on to suggest that concerns about his legacy might have prevented Lincoln from embracing the lessons of The Art of the Deal.

“Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was,” Trump said. “He would’ve been president, but he would’ve been president, and he would have been — he wouldn’t have been the Abraham Lincoln.”

Trump imitates Dread Pirate Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg.

In April, Trump showed off another thing he has on Lincoln: His predecessor’s Gettysburg Address did not feature a pirate impression. (As far as we know!)

After describing the Battle of Gettysburg, in which about 50,000 soldiers died, as “so beautiful in so many different ways,” Trump delivered a fake quote from Confederate general Robert E. Lee in a Captain Jack Sparrow voice:

Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor — did you ever notice it? He’s no longer in favor. “Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.” They were fighting uphill. He said, “Wow, that was a big mistake.” He lost his big general. “Never fight uphill, me boys,” but it was too late.

Trump reveals he’d rather die by shark than by electrocution.

The chances of Donald Trump being caught on a sinking boat and forced to choose between electrocution and being devoured by a shark are fairly slim. Yet he seems to think about this dilemma quite a lot.

He debuted his shark-versus-electrocution riff during an October 2023 rally in Ottumwa, Iowa. There was no context that would have explained these remarks, other than the fact that Trump has a well-documented shark phobia and an irrational disdain for electric-powered vehicles.

No one had any idea what Trump was talking about, but that did not keep him from telling the tale again and again during rallies, or insisting in June that we’re dumb for not understanding his “smart story” about ways he might die at sea.

Trump praises ‘great man’ Hannibal Lecter.

If there’s one Trump rant that’s guaranteed to make your brain melt, it’s the one where he gushes about fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Praising the Silence of the Lambs villain is now a regular part of Trump’s stump speech, but most people only noticed in May because he went on and on about it.

Trump does sort of have a reason for bringing up Lecter: He’s invoking the movie villain to demonize migrants. But Trump’s tale is all wrong, both factually and dramaturgically. Here’s why:

• Trump says many migrants have been in mental institutions like the one shown in Silence of the Lambs, but there is no evidence that criminals and mentally ill people are flooding into the U.S.

• Trump has repeatedly said that Hannibal Lecter is a “great man’ who deserves our “congratulations” — so why keep him out of the U.S.?

• Trump seems confused about whether Hannibal Lecter is a character or the man who played him. He’s remarked, “Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he?”

• Trump has said he loves Lecter because the actor once said “I love Donald Trump” in a TV interview. It’s unclear who he was referring to, but all the actors who have portrayed Lecter — Anthony Hopkins, Mads Mikkelsen, and Brian Cox — have said they dislike Trump.

• Trump often refers to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” but the character does not die in any of the book, TV, or film adaptations.

• By the end of The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter has escaped from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and is stalking his next victim in the Bahamas. So this is an example of the United States unleashing its inmates on a foreign country, not the other way around….

Trump isn’t stressing about any of these details. The once-and-possibly-future president of the United States just loves yelling “Hannibal Lecter!” at his rallies, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

Even at his rambling 92-minute speech accepting the Republican nomination, he went off-script to refer to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” Why? Any ideas why he is obsessed with this film creature?

  

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Jonathan V. Last on Biden’s Graceful Farewell

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2024 //
93

Jonathan V. Last posted two videos of President Biden speaking. One took place in April 2023, when he spoke in his ancestral hometown of Ballina in County Mayo, Ireland. He received an ecstatic welcome from the locals. Biden’s voice was strong and clear. He was vigorous and joyful. He was not senile then, he’s not senile now. But he has aged.

Last wrote:

I’ll always remember Joe Biden in Ballina. 

It was nighttime. America’s last great Irish pol was visiting the county of his forebears. A bunch of local Irish notables gave boring remarks in front of an ancient stone church. There was a minute of restless silence. Then the music hit. 

Suddenly the Dropkick Murphys are blaring from the speakers. Lasers and lights cut through the evening mist.

And Joe Biden strides out in a black longcoat like a damn WWE star to the single biggest pop I’ve seen in politics.

Absolute legend.

That was 15 months ago. Only 15 months ago.

The President Biden we saw last night was a different man. We can all see the physical changes. But where the Biden in Ballina was exuberant, sharing a once-in-a-lifetime moment of pure joy, the Biden of last night was doing something different and infinitely more important. He was teaching his country a lesson.

It was, on the surface, a valedictory speech with boilerplate about what his administration accomplished. But under the hood, the important stuff wasn’t so much a valediction as a homily. He was talking directly to Americans not about the job he’d done, but about our jobs going forward.

Two sections are worth clipping and saving.

The first was the part where Biden explained why he stepped aside:

When you elected me to this office, I promised to always level with you, to tell you the truth. And the truth, the sacred cause of this country, is larger than any one of us. Those of us who [cherish] that cause cherish it so much. The cause of American democracy itself. We must unite to protect it.

In recent weeks, it has become clear to me that I need to unite my party in this critical endeavor. I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term. But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.

So I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. It’s the best way to unite our nation. I know there was a time and a place for long years of experience in public life. There’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.

I submit to you that no other president in our lifetimes would have believed that he was replaceable. None of those guys could have even countenanced the idea that the country might be better served if he passed the torch.

Biden’s humility in this act is so unique that we risk overlooking it and failing to appreciate how singular and extraordinary it is.

Categories Biden, Character, Health, Walker, Scott

John Merrow: The Biggest Problem with the Trump-Biden Debate

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2024 //
17

John Merrow spent many years as an investigative reporter, most recently at PBS. In the education space, he is probably best known for his multiple segments on “miracle-worker” Michelle Rhee as chancellor of the D.C. public schools, which ended with his hour-long expose of her failures.

He writes:

I spent nearly 75 years reporting for PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Pravda. During that time I received three Pulitzer Prizes, 12 George Foster Peabody Awards, 17 Emmy nominations (but only nine Emmys, to my great disappointment), and three George Polk Awards.  

(My editor and I have agreed that fact-checking this column wasn’t necessary.)

In 2016 I had the unprecedented honor of being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II AND receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama.  These awards were somewhat controversial because of my quite public romances over the years with Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Farah Fawcett, Cindy Crawford, and Beyonce.

(The internet has made fact-checking irrelevant.)

But there’s no truth to the rumor that Mother Teresa and I were romantically involved.  We were very good friends, that’s all. 

(Fact-checking is soooo yesterday!)

In 1996 at the age of 55, I fulfilled a childhood dream: I temporarily gave up reporting and signed with The New York Yankees.  That season was a dream–I batted .307, stole 36 bases, and won a Gold Glove for my defensive play in left field. Many feel that I should have won the Rookie of the Year award, but my teammate and good friend Derek Jeter was certainly a deserving winner.

(Why would anyone want to fact-check me? Don’t you trust me?)

During my time as a war correspondent when I was embedded with the Special Forces in Iraq, I saved the lives of seven Americans when I picked up and threw an unexploded IED into a ditch. It subsequently exploded, and observers said we all would have been killed but for my instinctive action.  For this, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the only civilian to ever have received this recognition.

(Are you thinking about fact-checking this? Maybe you should!)

OK, subtlety isn’t my strong suit, and you’ve probably figured out that I’m really writing about the absence of fact-checking during the televised debate between President Biden and former President Trump, for which both political parties and CNN agreed that there would be no live fact-checking.   The result, which many of you saw, was a lie-filled 90 minutes during which Trump lied 28 or 29 times–and was never challenged!

Why am I upset?  Because CNN should never have agreed to that condition.  And once CNN did agree, the two reporters that CNN assigned to serve as moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, should have flat-out refused to participate. But they went ahead, giving candidate Trump license to say whatever he wanted, without fear of being challenged.  

The result damaged Biden, as we all know. But for me, the process also did serious damage to CNN and to the reputations of Tapper and Bash. When I tried to make that point recently with Marty Baron, the former editor of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, he dismissed the idea, and I imagine that many others in my (former) line of work agree with him, but I strongly believe that no reporter anywhere should ever agree to that condition.   

For every journalist, fact-checking is not a choice but an obligation!

(Editor’s note: Fact-checking reveals that Merrow told at least 16 lies in the preceding paragraphs. We apologize for our failure to fact-check and will be certain to keep a closer watch on him in the future. To do so, we have subscribed to his blog, which YOU may also do by clicking the ‘subscribe’ button at the top of the page.)

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Andy Borowitz: Biden Uses His New Immunity Power to Replace Judge Cannon with his Dog Commander

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2024 //
8

Andy Borowitz is a humorist, probably the best in the country. He notes here that President Biden has exercised the new power of immunity for his official actions granted him by the U.S. Supreme Court. Very likely the rightwing majority created that “one person is above the law” exemption with the expectation that Trump would be the next president. Maybe they will reverse their decision when Kamala Harris is elected President.

Borowitz writes:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Using the sweeping presidential immunity recently granted him by the U.S. Supreme Court, President Biden on Tuesday replaced Judge Aileen Cannon with his dog, Commander.


The legal community’s initial reaction to the appointment was favorable, with most experts agreeing that Judge Commander is an improvement over Judge Cannon.


In his first official act, the German Shepherd reversed Cannon’s ruling on the Trump documents case by eating it.


President Biden had no comment on Commander’s decision, other than, “Good boy.”
In a positive development for Judge Cannon, a GoFundMe has been established to send her to law school.

Categories Biden, Elections, Humor, Trump

Never-Trumpers Respond to the New Political Scene

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2024 //
112

Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, a site founded by Never Trump Republicans, explains how he sees the new situation, the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ascension of Kamala Harris as the likely nominee:

The Democratic party is healthy. The Republican party is not.

Our greatest living president. (Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

1. Seven Lessons

(1) The Democratic party is a healthy institution.

On the night of June 27, the various power centers within the Democratic party began a difficult conversation: Was Joe Biden still capable of running a vigorous campaign?

Over three weeks the party reached a diffuse—if not unanimous—consensus: He was not. This consensus was the product of all levels of the party: Elder statesmen such as Nancy Pelosi, elected Democrats analyzing their own future prospects, donors making decisions about spending, and the main body of public opinion among Democratic voters.

Once this consensus was reached, the various power centers began a dialogue with the party’s leader, President Biden. The party expressed its choice. Biden pushed back. The party took up the question again and, after due consideration, held firm.

Joe Biden then stepped aside for the good of the nation.

This is how healthy institutions are supposed to work…

2. The process which elevated Kamala Harris was sensible.

The Democratic party made another institutional decision in parallel with the Biden question: It vetted Kamala Harris.

This subroutine executed in the background, but it was active. Democratic voters began to consider her as the nominee and polling showed that they were comfortable with her. Party elders evaluated her fitness. Donors and elected Democrats took her measure. The fact that no anti-Harris groundswell—or even boomlet—emerged is proof that the party decided that Harris was an acceptable nominee.

After Biden blessed Harris on Sunday afternoon, the party coalesced around her in much the way it did Biden after the New Hampshire primary in 2020.

The Democratic party will enter the election more unified than it had been pre-debate.

3. Kamala Harris can run as an insurgent, but with the advantages of an incumbent.

The largest advantage of incumbency is that a candidate does not have to take base-pleasing positions during a primary campaign that can hurt him during a general election.

Because of the extraordinary nature of her ascendence, Harris possesses this advantage. She will carry nearly every advantage of incumbency and yet she can credibly position herself as this election’s change agent.

4. Trump is holding the age bomb.

The Trump campaign spent two years creating a political bomb concerning old age. They assumed that they could plant this bomb at the feet of Joe Biden.

Trump is now the one holding the age bomb. He is not only a full generation older than Harris—everything about him looks geriatric by comparison. From his gait to his bronzed-over pallor; from the way he rambles and gets lost in sentences to his inability to keep facts straight.

Every split screen now makes Trump look old and decrepit by comparison. 

5. There was enormous pent-up demand among Democrats for a younger leader.

In the first 24 hours, Kamala Harris raised over $100 million from small-dollar donors.

Sit with that for a moment. $100 million.

That’s more money than any Democrat has ever raised in a single day. It’s twice as much as Trump raised following his felony conviction. If this doesn’t snap your head back, it should.

Because it’s as good a proxy as you’ll find for excitement.

It will be several days until we have polling with a more detailed view of Harris’s support from Democratic voters, but it is already clear that she will perform much better than Biden has within her party.

Here’s my advice: You should be open to the idea that Harris could ride a wave of excitement and passion that absolutely no one was seeing until Biden stepped aside. I’m talking Obama ‘08-levels of energy.

It’s not a given. But it’s in the realm of the possible. Keep your eyes peeled for it.

6. The Republican party is a failed state.

At the debate, Donald Trump also demonstrated (again) that he is unfit for office. He rambled and lied incoherently. He is a convicted felon. A jury found him guilty of sexual assault. He has said he wants to be a “dictator” and that he wants to “terminate” parts of the Constitution. He selected as his running mate a man who advised disobeying orders from the Supreme Court and forcing a constitutional crisis.

Until last week there was nothing stopping the Republican party from forcing Trump off the ticket. The party elders and elected officials could have demanded that Trump step aside. Republican voters could have said that they had no confidence in his ability to govern. Donors could have closed their wallets.

But the plain fact is that not one single Republican called on Trump to step aside.

Not one.

Why? Because the various precincts of the Republican party understand that they hold no power—at all—over Trump. They could not ask him to withdraw from the race. Even broaching the subject would be grounds for excommunication from the party.

The Democratic party is a functioning institution, with checks and balances; constituencies and power structures. Like any institution, it is amorphous and its decision making is mostly organic.

The Republican party is an autocracy where the only thing that matters is the will of the leader. All power flows through him. All decisions are made by him. There are no competing power centers—only vassal states overseen by his noblemen.

7. Harris is an underdog.

One of the reasons the last three weeks have been so difficult is because Democrats were not choosing between a “good” outcome and a “bad” outcome. 

Those sorts of choices are easy.

Instead, Democrats were tasked with deciding between least-bad options. Humans rebel against the idea of “least-bad.” When faced with choices, we want to believe that at least one of them is “good.”

When the first real Harris-vs.-Trump polling comes out next week we’ll see how big of a hole she’s in. But unlike Biden, Harris has the ability to spend the next three months on offense, all day, every day. If she can deliver the goods, she has a puncher’s chance.

2. In Praise of Biden

A slight push-back against those who believe Biden took too long to step aside:

It was three and a half weeks from the debate to Biden pulling out. That’s it.

Joe Biden is the president, but he’s also just a man. Coming to a decision like this one—an unprecedented decision—is hard. There’s a lot to weigh and there’s a tremendous responsibility to get it right.

My own view is that Biden made the call basically as quickly as possible. He couldn’t have done it the week of the NATO summit. Then Trump was shot in the ear. Then there was the Republican convention. To my mind, Biden’s timing on this was optimal, actually.

Nothing about Joe Biden’s presidency was inevitable. Not his candidacy. Not his victory over Trump. Not his withdrawal from reelection.

At nearly every turn, Biden did the right thing for America.

His legacy is assured. He will be remembered as one of the great modern presidents.

I said this last night and I’ll say it again. History had its eye on Joe Biden, and he met the moment. He did his part. Now it’s up to Kamala Harris and us to do ours.

This is the moment. Live it with us.

Categories Biden, Courage, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, History, Hope, Republicans, Trump

Biden Leaves the Presidential Race

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2024 //
181

President Biden finally conceded to the growing crescendoes of fellow Democrats urging him to leave the race.

This is a historic and sad moment.

Joe Biden has been a GREAT President!

But his disastrous debate performance last month doomed his candidacy.

My personal preference: Kamala Harris for President.

For Vice President: Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

Either team would be a bold, innovative statement that would bring excitement to voters. Younger voters would especially be attentive to a team that is fresh, thoughtful, well-informed and articulate. They would be well situated to confront abortion, climate change, gun control, and voting rights, all of which Republicans have attacked.

If Democrats decide to add a man to the ticket, Andy Beshear would be a great choice, as a governor in a red state. He has demonstrated his ability to get bipartisan support and he is a strong friend to public schools. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania would be a terrible choice because he supports charters and vouchers, probably because of words whispered by Jeff Yass, a multibillionaire who is the richest man in Pennsylvania and an arch-enemy of public schools even though he was educated in NYC public schools.

I’m sad to see President Biden step down. He will go down in history as one of our best presidents because of his legislative accomplishments, done with a razor-thin majority or none at all.

But I’m excited about the prospect of seeing Kamala Harris debate Trump, whose ignorance of policy is well known.

Categories Biden, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Trump

James Fallows: Why Does the Press have a Double Standard for Trump and Biden?

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2024 //
39

James Fallows is one of the most eminent journalists in the nation, having served as editor of The Atlantic and published in every major media outlet. I was happy to discover his blog, “Breaking the News,” where great articles like this one appear.

In a ghoulish touch during his acceptance speech, Donald Trump went over to kiss the gear of Corey Comperatore, the fire fighter who was killed in the shooting attack that injured Trump. (Later reports said that this was Comperatore’s own jacket, on which he’d intentionally left his name misspelled for years.) In the opening part of the speech, Trump followed a script in discussing the shooting before moving into an ad-libbed MAGA-rally riff that evoked images of martyrdom and resurrection. (Photo Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

This post has one central point. It is that the press should give “fair and balanced” attention to what each of the major candidates is revealing about temperament, competence, and cognition, especially in their public performances.

Right now we have these opposing, imbalanced narrative cycles:

—For Joe Biden, every flub, freeze, slurred word, or physical-or-verbal misstep adds to the case against him. There’s an ever-mounting dossier, which can only grow in cumulative importance. “In another difficult moment for the President….” “Coming after his disastrous debate appearance…”

—For Donald Trump, every flub, fantasy, non-sequitur, “Sir” story, or revelation of profound ignorance dulls and blunts the case against him. “That’s just Trump.” “Are you new here? Never heard a MAGA rally speech before?” “It’s what the crowd is waiting for.” “Oh, here comes the ‘shark’ again!” There’s an ever-thickening layer of habituation, normalization, jadedness, just plain tedium. The first five times Trump tells the Hannibal Lecter story, reporters notice and write about it. The next hundred times, they’re checking their phones. 

Last night a member of the Washington Posteditorial board actually put it just this bluntly. Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC and now of Zeteo, asked Shadi Hamid, of the Post, about the many ludicrous and damaging claims in Trump’s convention speech, which Hamid had waved off as “just normal Trump.” Hamid chuckled and answered, “I guess what I’m trying to say is that Trump is Trump, and it’s a low bar, and that’s what we’ve got to work with.” To which Hasan replied, “Some of us are trying to raise the bar.” You can see it here. 

I’m sure that on reflection Shadi Hamid would have made the point more carefully. But his instant reaction distilled the “it’s just Trump!” framing that has prevailed through the 2024 campaign.

The obvious and unequal result: The public registers more and more about Biden’s “fitness” based on his appearances, less and less about Trump’s. 

Suppose we judged Donald Trump’s performances not on the sliding scale of “That’s just Trump” but the way we do Biden’s? That is, by comparison with the way other people who have ever run for president have sounded and behaved?

—By that standard, everyone who watched Joe Biden’s debate performance last month agreed that it was disastrous, easily the worst presentation by a major-party candidate in the history of televised debates. Not even his staunchest backers denied this reality, though many then framed it as “just a bad night.”

—By a similar real-world standard, I contend that Donald Trump’s acceptance speech two days ago should also be considered disastrous, easily the worst presentation of its type ever. I claimed as much, in a tweet, as soon as its 96-minute sprawl was done. Most GOP commentators I’ve heard or read since then have been predictably more unified and upbeat. One even claimed that the speech had “worked” because most of the audience would already have turned it off after about 30 minutes.

Maybe I’m wrong in that judgment, for which I’ll give my reasoning below. But I’m sure of the reality that the “it’s just Trump!” mindset within the press is badly distorting the public’s view of the candidates

What we should expect from the press is more stories about Trump’s fitness, to match those about Biden. Including: Why have we still heard absolutely nothing from medical authorities about the cause, nature, or consequences of his recent injury? This stonewalling is not normal, or defensible. If anything remotely comparable had happened with Biden, press demands for every forensic detail would grow more intense by the moment. (Yes, Biden is a serving president, but that’s what Trump wants to be again.)

So let’s start with this disastrous speech, in four summary points.

Why was Trump’s speech terrible?

First, it was not a “speech.” 

Eight years ago, I stood near the front of the crowd at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, listening to Donald Trump give his first acceptance speech. I thought it was dark, dystopian, and narcissistic. But it was a speech. It had a beginning, a middle section, and a conclusion. It had a theme. (That theme, unfortunately, was “everything is broken, and I alone can fix it.”) It appeared to have been “written,” and Trump appeared mainly to be saying what was set out in the text. The crowd roared when Trump gave the big, planned applause lines.

Thursday night’s speech started out that way. It had some “writerly” early segments—which you can always identify in Trump’s speeches by the way his voice and rhythm change. When he’s sounding out words from “planned” text from a teleprompter, the energy goes out of his voice, and his tone is that of a schoolboy struggling through an unfamiliar primer. Sometimes he gives a little aside of meta-commentary appreciation for a nice line he’s just read: “You know, that’s so true.”

The written part of this speech contained a “bring us together” line that died on Trump’s lips even as he said it: “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.” And his opening description of the shooting had an unmistakable “he is risen!” framing. For example, with emphasis added:

Many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was. When I rose [!], surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confusedbecause they thought I was dead. And there was great, great sorrow. I could see that on their faces as I looked out. 

They didn’t know I was looking out; they thought it was over. 

But I could see it and I wanted to do something to let them know I was OK. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousandsof people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, “Fight, fight, fight.”

You don’t have be a Christian to recognize the Easter-weekend iconography. 

If he had stopped there, or even 10 or 15 minutes further in, this speech would have registered as something new and impressive from Trump. Comparison: in the first few minutes of his debate with Biden, Trump was controlled, calm-sounding, relatively clear, nothing like the figure who yelled ceaselessly at Biden during their first debate four years ago. He seemed on a mission to introduce a “new” Donald Trump, and in those opening exchanges he held it together. (Things changed as the debate went on.) 

That seems also to have been the intention in this speech, which in its “for release” version is said to have been 3,000 words long. That’s about half an hour of talking, “normal” for a live-TV evening speech of this sort.¹

But of course Trump did not stop there. He went on until after midnight Eastern time, through 96 minutes of talking, creating a transcript of well over 12,000 words. Simple math meant that three-quarters of the airtime was not a planned-and-written “speech” but instead a random-association playlist from Trump’s familiar MAGA rally themes.

On and on it went. Grievances. Attacks and ridicule. More grievances and slights. Fabrications. “Sir” stories. The return of Hannibal Lecter. Farcical claims about his greatness and Biden’s failures. Amazingly, no sharks. It was another MAGA rally. Should you so choose, you could read the whole thing here. 

I had to force myself to stay up and keep listening. We’d just gotten home from a long trip. Deb drifted away to do some unpacking, and was asleep by the time the speech was halfway done. Camera shots of the captive audience in Milwaukee indicated that they wished they could do the same thing.

To return to the theme of age and its toll on candidates: this was different from 2016. Then, Trump held the crowd throughout. Now, he came across as the guy in a bar you couldn’t get away from.

Second, it undercut its announced purpose, and missed its main opportunity.

Some of the pre-speech “analysis” was taken in by the “new Trump” opening section. For instance, here was a tweet just before Trump spoke, from Scott Jennings, a former aide to Mitch McConnell whom CNN now employs as an “analyst”:

In a similar vein, from a credulous Axios reporter:

For a sampling of even more gullible “new softness” reporting, I recommend this brilliant segment, from The Daily Show.

If Trump could have held things together for even 20 or 30 minutes, this was the opportunity he could have seized. Reporters love a “New [Person X]” story. The “New Nixon” back in 1968, potentially the “New Trump” now. And the venue itself is (along with presidential debates) among the tiny handful of occasions suited to a candidate’s re-introduction. 

JD Vance had tried this formula the night before, presenting himself not as a culture warrior (andmost definitely not as the person who called Trump “America’s Hitler”) but instead as just a lucky guy who grew up hard-scrabble. Bill Clinton’s well-conceived acceptance speech in 1992 introduced him as the young man from “a place called Hope.” John Kerry’s less-successful acceptance speech in 2004 began with him saluting and saying, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.”

The point is, it’s a moment, and one that can’t be recaptured or repeated. And Trump could not control or contain himself long enough to have this moment pay off the way it could have. 

He started out preaching unity, comity, and providential guidance. But here’s the kind of thing he was saying in most of his speech:

If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States—think of it! The 10 worst!—and added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done. Only going to use the term once. ‘Biden.’ I’m not going to use the name anymore. [Cheers] Just one time. The damage that he’s done to this country is unthinkable. It’s unthinkable.²

Trump came alive only when on the attack. That should be as newsworthy as Biden’s stiffness when walking or his “President of Mexico” gaffes.

Categories Biden, Character, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans, Trump

Politico: Party Leaders Pressure Biden to Step Aside

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2024 //
125

President Biden has been a great President. He has been an amazingly effective President, passing crucial legislation that helped ordinary Americans even though he has only a razor-thin margin in the Senate and none in the House. I have supported him vigorously, believing that he would do what was best for the country. I took offense at the media pile-on against him, even though I was stunned by his frail appearance and appalling performance at the June debate.

But, Politico reports, Democratic Party leaders have decided he can’t win and have coalesced to persuade him to step aside. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but it seems unlikely that Biden can continue when those who know him best withdraw their support.

Politico reports:

For weeks, the Democratic Party has been paralyzed by uncertainty about whether President JOE BIDEN should stay atop the ticket or step aside. But over the last 24 hours, that uncertainty has given way to a growing clarity about the reality facing the president: The walls are closing in, and his position leading the Democratic ticket appears increasingly unsustainable.

The president’s reelection bid has now lost the confidence of Congress’ senior-most Democratic leaders, as well of party elders around the country.

Yesterday alone …

  • ABC News’ Jon Karl scooped on World News Tonight that Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER and House Minority Leader HAKEEM JEFFRIEStold Biden in person that he should end his reelection campaign for the good of the country.
  • CNN’s MJ Lee, Jamie Gangel and Jeff Zeleny reported that former Speaker NANCY PELOSI told the president that he can’t win and is dragging down the party, jeopardizing potential majorities in Congress. (More on this below) 
  • Rep. ADAM SCHIFF (D-Calif.), Pelosi’s longtime protégé, became the latest Hill Democrat to publicly call on Biden to step aside, arguing that he has “serious concerns about whether the President can defeat DONALD TRUMP,” and that it’s “time for him to pass the torch.”
  • Biden’s confidant and campaign adviser JEFFREY KATZENBERG confronted the president about new financial woes, telling him that big donors — skeptical that he can win — have all but stopped writing checks, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman and Ben Smith scooped.
  • Senior Democrats started privately circulating jarring numbers from Blue Rose Research, which found that “just 18 percent of voters and only 36 percent of people who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 believe he is mentally fit and up to the job of being president,” according to the NYT. Other super PAC polling shows “Biden’s deficit growing to 5 percentage points or more in the must-win states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.”
  • And DNC officials were pressured by their own party into pushing back a virtual roll call nominating Biden after an attempt to move it up was seen as a way of assuring Biden could run out the clock on the Dump Biden crowd.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi speaks with reporters.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has coordinated with senior Democrats to try to push Biden out. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

This flurry of stories yesterday is no accident. Senior Democrats had hoped to address this matter privately — Pelosi herself certainly advised members to try to do so, at least for a time.

But Biden and his inner circle have refused to listen. So now, Democrats are leaking tidbits of private conversations with the president himself, using the news media as a microphone to send a message: We’re no longer with you — and we will force you off the ticket, if needed. 

“The speaker does not want to call on him to resign [as the Democratic nominee], but she will do everything in her power to make sure it happens,” one Pelosi ally we spoke with said.

The developments underscore a new, more public phase of the Dump Biden movement. It’s also an astonishing turn of events that puts Biden’s presidential bid on life support: With Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Schumer and Jeffries against him, how can he possibly continue?

Open the link to read more.

Categories Biden, Elections

David Frum: Violence: You Reap What You Sow

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2024 //
34

David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. His views evolved, and he is now a Never-Trumper. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where this article appeared.

Frum wrote:

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.

Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.

It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.

Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.

The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.

Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptlyturned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.

Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.

One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.

Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.

The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.

The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subordinated to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.

Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.

But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.

Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

The New Republic on New Poll: The Public Doesn’t Want a Liar as President

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2024 //
52

The latest poll from Marist/NPR/PBS had good news for Biden and bad news for Trump: the public does not like liars. Being a liar is worse than being old. Note to Biden: Keep reminding people about Trump’s nonstop lying.

Greg Sargent writes for The New Republic:

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

A new Marist poll takes the novel step of asking registered voters which is more off-putting in an occupant of the Oval Office: dishonesty or excessive age. The results are surprising, and along with other polling along these lines, it should influence how Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s relative qualifications for the presidency are covered from here on out.

The poll asked: Which is more concerning in a president, someone who doesn’t tell the truth, or someone who might be too old to serve? The results were lopsided: By 68 to 32 percent, respondents were more concerned about the lying than the aging. Given the relentless media focus on presidential age of late, that’s simply remarkable.

Subscribed

While the poll doesn’t directly compare Trump and Biden on that particular question, it also finds that 52 percent of Americans say Biden has the “character to serve as president,” whereas only 43 percent say this about Trump. Fifty-six percent say Trump lacks the character to serve, which surely reflects public perceptions of Trump’s dishonesty.

The new Marist poll, by the way, also shows Biden leading Trump by 50 to 48 percent. But that’s out of sync with polling averages, so we should be cautious about that finding. Still, even if the overall poll is off by a few points, the numbers on dishonesty and age remain striking.

Trump was probably the most dishonest president in U.S. history. His lies and distortions topped 30,000 during his presidency, accordingto The Washington Post. That has continued unabated: CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale tallied up over 30 lies from Trump at the recent presidential debate, while Biden’s falsehoods amounted to maybe a third of that. Critically, many of Trump’s whoppers were far more gargantuan lies—such as the claim that Democratic states execute babies—leading Dale to describe Trump’s lying as “staggering.”

Voters grasp Trump’s world-historical levels of dishonesty. This week’s Pew poll found that only 36 percent of voters view Trump as “honest.” By contrast, 48 percent view Biden that way—not good enough, clearly, but Biden’s large advantage here is especially notable given that as president, he has been subjected to a far harsher media spotlight for the last four years.

What the new Marist poll adds to this debate is the idea that voters see excessive lying as a serious problem in a president. Yet ask yourself this: How often is Trump’s lying covered that way? Trump’s dishonesty is rarely treated as a sign of his temperamental unfitness for the presidency. Biden’s age, of course, is constantly covered as an important factor in determining his fitness for the office. Biden’s age should be covered this way, to be clear. But so should Trump’s relentless lying.

Categories Biden, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Lies, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »