I wa despairing because no prominent candidate has mentioned education. Kamala Harris spoke about public schools and teachers when she addressed the AFT yesterday in Houston. I expected that. She went to public schools and has always supported them, and that’s what a candidate says to a nation Union of teachers.
But on Jen Psaki’s show on MSNBC, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota denounced vouchers and book bans. I had never seen him speak. He was excellent! Please watch.
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.
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.
Dean Obeidallah blogs at “The Dean’s Report.” Here he describes Kamala Harris’s secret weapon. She terrifies Donald Trump. Can’t wait to see them debate. Trump will probably cancel.
Nothing triggers Donald Trump (and MAGA) more than strong Black women. Period. Black women are at the intersection of the racism and sexism that so fuels Trump and his MAGA movement.
We’ve seen this for years with Trump’s demonization of visible Black female leaders from repeatedly calling Rep. Maxine Waters “low IQ” to vile attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar including calling for her to “go back” to where she came from and worse. And in 2020, after Kamala Harris was named Joe Biden’s running mate, Trump lashed out by playing on the angry Black women trope by calling her a “mad woman,” “so angry” and even a “monster.”
But now with President Biden stepping aside and the Democratic party rallying around Harris, Trump will for be the first time called to go head-to-head with Harris—and he must be petrified. Harris is the manifestation of all that scares Trump: She is a powerful, successful, smart Black woman.
Harris is also a former prosecutor who was elected in 2004 as District Attorney for San Francisco and in 2010 she was victorious statewide when she won the race to be Attorney General for the State of California. The contrast between prosecutor Harris and convicted felon Trump is perfect. And Harris has been the administration’s point person on reproductive freedom, which again is a powerful contrast to Trump who has bragged, “I’m the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade.”
Trump knows Harris could beat him. We all saw how Trump’s frail ego reacted when Biden beat him in 2020—he attempted a coup and incited the Jan 6 terrorist attack. The prospect of now losing to a Black woman has to shake Trump to the core—as does the prospect of ending up in prison.
That means we can expect Trump, his right-wing allies in Congress and the media to smear Harris non-stop with lies and bigotry. Mika Brzezinski shared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday that, “I’ve heard from inside Republican circles and right-wing media that the hate campaign against Kamala Harris has begun.”
In reality, though, the racist right wing smears of Harris began two weeks ago when GOP member of Congress Chip Roy, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka and a NY Post columnist Charles Gasparino all labeled Harris a “DEI” hire meaning she only got her job because of diversity mandates, not because she earned it. Gorka—while on national TV–even despicably referred to Harris as “colored.”
Gasparino went even further to say if Biden ended up stepping down as President, then, “Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default.”
To the white right, it doesn’t matter that Harris has been a public servant for more than 20 years, winning election after election from DA, to California AG to the US Senate, where she distinguished herself with her service on the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. And of course, winning the 2020 election as VP.
Let’s be clear: Calling a person of color a DEI hire is what racism looks like. It springs from the white supremacist myth that people of color are inherently inferior to white people, hence, we can only achieve success and visible positions with the help of a program. (I was called a “quota hire” years ago on social media by a Fox News frequent guest because at the time I was the first Muslim hired to host a national radio show.)
When these people say “DEI hire,” in reality they are speaking in coded language to other bigots as the Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, who is Black, explained earlier this year. Scott, who some on the right have called a “DEI hire,” declared, “We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” adding bluntly, “They really want to say the N-word.” Mayor Johnson later gloriously trolled the bigots, saying on MSNBC that “DEI,” actually means “duly elected incumbent.”
The vitriol and bigotry that will be directed at Harris over the next 100 plus days until the Nov 5 election will likely far eclipse what we’ve seen to date. It will likely be worse than what was directed at Barack Obama given Harris is a woman.
These expected smears are designed to both delegitimize Harris as well as excite Trump’s bigoted, primarily white base. As Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, said in 2020 in response to Trump’s calling Harris “angry,” “nasty” and a “monster,” these attacks are intended to undermine Harris as a leader and as a person. Cooper explained, “White supremacy is lazy and unoriginal and doesn’t feel the need to ascribe humanity to Black women.”
And Kelly Dittmar, with the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, in 2020 addressed the politics of Trump’s smears of Harris, saying, Trump is “speaking to a contingent of voters, particularly white male voters, who support him and who are key to his base.” She added, “We know from multiple studies done on the last election that their levels of both sexism and racial resentment were actually pretty strong indicators of their support for Trump.”
Trump never made a person a bigot. He only emboldens bigots to feel comfortable being the worst version of themselves. That means we can expect to see an ugliness over the next 100 days that will be revolting.
But we have the power to win this election. And by doing so, these right-wing bigots now calling Harris a “DEI hire” and other racist names–come January 20, 2025– will be forced to watch America call her, “Madame President.”
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.
They say that converts are even more zealous than those who have been born into a religion. Jay Kuo thinks that’s the case with JD Vance. Having started as a harsh critic of Trump, he is now an extreme MAGAt. He is more Catholic than the Pope. A bad analogy, since Trump has no religion.
JD Vance represents the extremes of the MAGA GOP. On nearly every issue, Vance is about as wretched and radical as he could be without morphing into Marjorie Taylor Greene. How’s that for an image?
On the nifty side, this same extremism means the GOP ticket will create greater unease among moderate and independent voters looking for a cooling off of our politics and an end to chaos, fear and rising violence. Indeed, JD Vance is likely to turn up the national heat further at a moment when most voters want it turned down. And that spells trouble for the ticket.
As nasty as they come
It’s difficult to imagine a more radical VP choice than JD Vance when it comes to the most divisive issues facing America and already splintering the GOP. In earlier pieces, I discussed how the GOP is currently wedged on several major issues, with stakes driven deep into its side over abortion, January 6th, and traitorous support for Putin.
I would now add to that list the poisonous effect of Project 2025, which could peel off moderates and independents afraid of a fascist takeover.
On each of these wedges, Vance not only stands on the wrong side, but himself is a chief driver of the wedges.
Vance is an anti-abortion zealot who supports a national ban. Even on the question of exceptions, Vance is unyielding. For example, when asked in an interview whether people should have a right to get an abortion if they were victims of rape or incest, he belittled the trauma, said that society shouldn’t view a pregnancy or birth resulting from rape or incest as an “inconvenience.” He argued that when it came to such exceptions, “two wrongs don’t make a right”—meaning that while it was “wrong” to inflict rape or incest upon a girl or woman, it would be a second “wrong” to permit the abortion.
Over January 6 and the 2020 election, Vance is also a staunch election denier and has refused to unequivocally state that he will accept the results of the 2024 election. Instead, in an interview on CNN, he qualified his acceptance, saying that the results must be “free and fair”—suggesting ahead of time and without basis that they will not be. Further, in an interview with ABC News in February, Vance maintained that he would have halted the certification of the election on January 6. “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said. Former Rep. Liz Cheney blasted Vance for this, tweeting, “JD Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t – overturn an election and illegally seize power.”
Vance is also a Putin apologist of the most extreme kind. If given power, Vance would grant Putin a free hand in Europe and leave allies like Ukraine without critical U.S. aid. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Vance amazingly treated it with a shrug. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” Vance said. Since his election, he has become one of the most vocal critics of U.S. aid to Ukraine and led a campaign in the Senate to block a $60 billion aid package. He has urged Ukraine to stop all offensive maneuvers against Russia and negotiate a settlement quickly (thereby ceding much territory) because, in his view, victory isn’t feasible.
Finally, Vance would implement Project 2025 and replace thousands of career civil servants with Trump loyalists. In a podcast interview, Vance said that an incoming Trump administration should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop Trump, Vance said, he should simply ignore the law. “You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” Vance declared. This worldview and plan aligns squarely with Project 2025, which calls for the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with MAGA loyalists, as well as its theory of the unfettered power of the unitary executive.
The nifty silver lining
These positions held by Vance—and there are many other radical ones—are admittedly extreme and terrifying. But the good news is that extreme and terrifying positions have led to electoral losses by the GOP. Voters, including all-important swing state moderates, have been consistently unwilling to support them since 2022….
Finally, at age 39, Vance is inexperienced, with just two years in the Senate. Measured against Kamala Harris, Vance is green and untested. That could be on full display in their debate next month, the terms of which are still being negotiated. As a vocal champion of women’s reproductive rights and an experienced prosecutor, Harris will have an opportunity to paint Vance into a corner over his extremism.
Indeed, the contrast between an under-qualified white male MAGA radical and a seasoned minority woman defender of democracy and liberty could hardly be clearer. Trump may have thought he was making a smart bet, hoping to pull in more of his base voters in the midwestern swing states. But those people aren’t going to show up in greater numbers just because Vance is on the ticket. Trump already had those voters.
Jennifer Rubin was originally hired by The Washington Post to write the conservative point of view on its opinion pages. A journalist and a lawyer, Rubin found Trump to be intolerable, and she no longer writes from the right.
In this column, she commends the effort to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas and explains why:
Fed up with the justice’s stonewalling, egregious violation of judicial ethics, inaccurate legal filings and gross money grubbing from right-wing billionaires with business before the Supreme Court, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week demanding a special counsel be appointed “to investigate possible violations of federal ethics and tax laws by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas.” Well, it’s about time someone took Thomas’s inexcusable conduct seriously. (Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s introduction of articles of impeachment in a Republican-controlled House, meanwhile, which followed on Wednesday, is a showy gesture but a nonstarter.)
The letter details “repeated and willful omissions of gifts and income from Justice Thomas’s financial disclosure reports required by the Ethics in Government Act.” And as the senators point out, investigations have been raised against other government officials for far less serious allegations.
This is not a complaint about failure to recuse, as reprehensible as it might be for Thomas to sit on cases concerning the insurrection in which his wife played a limited role, or about bribery; thanks to this court, such prosecutions are practically impossible. Instead, the letter concerns bread-and-butter allegations of false statements signed under oath and tax violations.
The list of issues is gobsmacking. For example: forgiveness of the principal on a $267,000 loan that was never reported as income. (“Documents obtained by the Senate Finance Committee indicate that no principal was ever repaid on the loan and that Justice Thomas only made interest payments on the loan prior to all payments ceasing on the loan. Forgiven or discharged debt is taxable income, and the Ethics in Government Act requires justices to disclose any ‘income from discharge of indebtedness.’”) This was never included on Thomas’s financial disclosure reports. Thomas has refused to say whether he accounted for the loan forgiveness on his income taxes.
Then there are the gifts — lots of gifts. The senators cite “undisclosed gifts from other wealthy donors … including private jet travel from Paul Anthony Novelly; private jet travel and country club membership from the late Wayne Huizenga; and private jet travel, luxury sports tickets, and lodging at a ranch from David Sokol.” The senator include an appendix detailing these lavish gratuities. The senators write, “Justice Thomas has claimed that some omissions were ‘inadvertent,’ and he has
amended some past reports accordingly. However, Justice Thomas has not disclosed all of the gifts that have been uncovered, and there may well be more.” Therefore, they charge: “His long history of omissions indicates a pattern of willfulness meriting investigation under the Ethics in Government Act.”
Then there are the gifts specifically from Leonard Leo — the right-wing legal impresario and former vice president of the Federalist Society who has helped pick Supreme Court justices and contrived to bring cases before the court to advance his dark money groups agenda, according to Whitehouse. The senators explain: Last year, the Washington Post reported that Leo directed payments of at least $25,000 to a consulting firm run by Justice Thomas’s spouse, with Leo specifying that the documents related to the payments should make “[n]o mention” of Mrs. Thomas. The furtive nature of the payments raises further questions about how many such payments were orchestrated, whether legitimate services were actually rendered, and whether such payments required additional reporting by Justice Thomas. We have not yet adequately been able to investigate the extent to which any or all these undisclosed gifts were part of a coordinated gifts program to reward recipient justices.
In sum, the senators raise allegations of willfully false statements on government disclosure forms and income tax and gift tax violations. At this stage, these are allegations only. But surely there is a basis for further inquiry, the senators argue. After detailing other investigations into less egregious conduct, the senators argue that only a special counsel can properly investigate. (“Since no litigant appears before the Supreme Court more frequently than the United States government, represented by the Department of Justice, the Department may understandably hesitate to offend a member of that Court.”)
The senators are not the only ones to have advanced these arguments. In April 2023, the anti-corruption group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Garland after Pro Publica broke news of lavish gifts Thomas received from another billionaire, Harlan Crow.
In that letter, CREW and several ethics experts wrote: “If true, Justice Thomas’ acceptance and failure to report these gifts and sales transactions on his annual mandatory financial disclosure statements not only undermines trust in his ability to impartially and fairly administer his duties as a member of the Court, but also threatens to corrode public confidence in the Supreme Court as an institution.” CREW’s president, Noah Bookbinder, tells me CREW never received a response.
One of the ethics experts who signed that letter, Richard Painter, tells me, “The attorney general may or may not decide to appoint a special counsel. I believe it is justified in this case.” If Garland does not appoint a special counsel or undertake any investigation, the Supreme Court justices, like the president in the new scheme of government concocted by this court, will conclude they operate in a world of criminal immunity, secure in the knowledge a partisan Senate will never remove them from the bench. “Justice Thomas’s serious and frequent misconduct, including consistent failure to report lavish gifts from a wealthy benefactor with strong interests in the Supreme Court’s work and repeated failure to recuse from cases in which he had a clear conflict of interest, requires thorough investigation and genuine accountability,” Bookbinder tells me.
The Thomas scandal is what comes from refusing to adopt a mandatory ethics code for the Supreme Court and investing its justices with lifetime security. That leaves the rule of law dependent on the justices’ own good graces to remain ethical. That has obviously proven insufficient.
And so Whitehouse and Wyden, with no alternative, ask for the Justice Department to do its job. “The request is foundational to the rule of law,” constitutional scholar Dennis Aftergut tells me. “While many won’t expect Garland to pick it up before the election, if democracy survives November, the senators have written the bottom line for what must happen if we are to get corruption out of the court.”
Unfortunately, if felon and former president Donald Trump is elected, one can be sure no investigation will be undertaken. It therefore behooves Garland to move quickly, lest — again — justice delayed becomes justice denied.
Robert Hubbell writes a blog about the travails of politics. I have excerpted a small portion of his post. Please open the link to read in full.
Hubbell writes:
The 2024 election is not merely a choice between Biden and Trump. It is a choice between democracy and tyranny, liberty and subjugation, dignity and debasement, safety and mayhem, global stability and chaos, climate crisis mitigation or acceleration, retirement security and insecurity, justice and vengeance, science and ignorance, decency and depravity. If we cannot convince voters that the choice comes down to those polar opposites, it does not matter who the candidate is.
I support Joe Biden because he is a great president, a good and decent man, and a skilled politician who achieved great things with bare majorities in the House and Senate. His performance in the debate does not define him. I believe Joe Biden is the best candidate to defeat Trump. If he is forced out by a media-driven frenzy and a cabal of unnamed insiders and pundits, it will be the greatest miscalculation and tragedy in American politics in a century.
I am not giving up and I won’t be pressured into apologizing for Joe Biden’s imperfections in a world where every politician is imperfect. Shadowboxing with unnamed party insiders and pundits is a waste of time. We have real work to do. Let’s get to it!
I was born in 1938 in Houston. I’m five years older than Joe Biden. I grew up during World War II, which is sometimes called “the last good war.” I remember the air raid sirens, the blackouts (everyone turned off the lights and pulled down the shades in case there was an attack by enemy aircraft), saving scraps of metal to be recycled into bullets. The oldest family photograph I have shows me, my older brother and older sister earnestly waving American flags. I was immersed in patriotism and love of country. My mother was an immigrant from Bessarabia who would not tolerate a bad word against the country that took in her family.
Patriotism is in my blood.
In my school days, we learned only the positive spin on American history. All the bad stuff was left out. As a college student and a graduate student and an adult, I learned about the dark side of our nation’s history. I learned about race massacres, lynchings, the brutal treatment of indigenous people, and the misuse of military power.
Yet, still I am a patriot. Still I believe in the promise of America and the importance of democracy. I know the disappointments and betrayals of the American Dream, yet still I am devoted to it.
That’s why it is so sickening to see Donald Trump, a man without principle, character or ethics, running for President. It is sickening to see a man so selfish and narcissistic wrap himself in the American flag. It is sickening to see a man who professes admiration, even love, for the world’s worst tyrants, running for President as his best hope for avoiding prison. And it is even more sickening to know that millions of people believe his lies.
In addition, there is the threat posed by a rogue Supreme Court. Six radical Republicans are making mincemeat of our Constitution. In their confirmation hearings, they pledged to uphold precedent and stare decisisis, but now in lifetime positions, they shred women’s rights, limit the power of government to protect public safety, and eviscerate the basic principle of the Constitution that “no one is above the law.” It turns out that the Presdent is above the law. According to the six radical Justices, he may imprison or assassinate his political rivals as part of his “official duties.” It can’t happen here, we like to think, but we are on the cusp of losing what we treasure.
This is not a happy Fourth of July. The threats to democracy are clear, present and ominous. It’s up to us to save it by voting and getting our family, friends, and neighbors to vote in November.
Here’s hoping we can celebrate a new burst of freedom and the rule of law in 2025.
Let’s cut to the chase: President Joe Biden is not going to end his 2024 campaign over a single poor debate performance, any more than Donald Trump did in 2020 after a first-in-the-cycle debate performance that voters conclusively told pollsters was worse than the one yesterday by this sitting president.
President Biden will stay in the race not simply because he’s already the nominee; not simply because there’s no mechanism to force him to exit; not simply because major media’s and politicos’ hyperventilating response to his debate performance yesterday—about 40% of voters appear to think he won the debate, and only 5% said it changed their vote (a sentiment unlikely to survive beyond a day in any case)—fails to take into account that the president had a cold, is a lifelong stutterer, performed much better as the debate went along, told a fraction of the number of lies his rival did, and saw his intermittent “old man” optics repeatedly belied by his conspicuous command of facts, policy, and history (check the transcript of the debate if you doubt this); no, Joe Biden will not step away from the 2024 election cycle because it would hand the presidency, beyond any doubt, to a confirmed rapist, serial sexual assailant, active insurrectionist, convicted felon, pathological liar, malignant narcissistic sociopath, gleeful adulterer, career criminal, unrepentant con man, traitorous would-be U.S. dictator, misogynist, antisemite, racist, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, and budding war criminal.
Why would a Biden exit ensure a Trump victory?
Let us zoom through some reasons:
(1) Nobody now polls, or has ever polled, better against Trump than Biden. Rightly or not, it appears that at present American independents prefer one particular old white man to Donald Trump over any other option available to them. It is true now, and it was true in 2018 when Joe Biden first floated a presidential run and behind the scenes Trump and his team concluded that Biden was the biggest threat to his re-election. Team Trump thought so then—and turned out to be right—and it thinks so still. Why? Because all the polls say so. No poll has anyone else close to Trump, and Republicans are well aware of this.
(2) Biden has beat Trump before. Even if we ignore polls, we cannot ignore results. Joe Biden beat the pants off Trump in the popular vote and Electoral College in 2020, and the results weren’t that close. Biden picked up states Democrats thought they couldn’t get, more than doubled Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin over Trump, and did all this while, well, old. Was he less old in 2020 than today? Yes, of course. But he was still a stutterer who sometimes loses his train of thought, misspeaks, and underperforms in many debates and interviews. Nevertheless, voters decided that they liked him, trusted him, and believed he’d surrounded himself with great advisers. Which he did.
(3) Biden has had—unlike Trump—a successful presidency. Nonpartisan historians now universally rank President Biden in the Top 20 presidents ever. Yes, really; feel free to Google it. They do this because the Biden administration has gotten results, even when and as they have not been widely reported by the media. But the results are there even if you’re not a historian: inflation is easing, the economy is healthy, crime is down, COVID-19 is under control, we’re out of Afghanistan, NATO is stronger than ever, and the Executive Order the president just signed on the border has clearly had a major and immediate effect on reducing border crossings. Unemployment’s low and Biden has avoided any major scandals. Foreign leaders like him and trust him. By comparison, nonpartisan historians universally rank Donald Trump among the worst five presidents in American history due to his rank incompetence, deceit, corruption, and moral depravity. Why would the Democrats trade a Top 20 president for some as-yet unnamed pol who is untested on the national stage and has no POTUS track record?
Sabrina Haake is a veteran journalist who writes a blog called “The Haake Take.” This is her take on the debate. Read it and subscribe.
I watched the debate in horror, like millions of moderates. Here was a slick conman with a national bullhorn- sans fact checking- next to a decent man who tells the truth but can’t get his words out.
Even Republicans know Trump’s performance was a firehose of lies, but after the fact fact-checking is just background noise, irrelevant to all but political junkies. (We know who we are.) His base also knows Trump is a serial liar, which they consider a feature, not a bug. Whattaya do with that?
The sad reality is that facts vs. lies and the grave geopolitical risks facing us have now been upstaged by Biden’s pauses, weak voice and halting delivery, all of which seemed to confirm supporters’ fears about his age. Biden’s style, rather than the substance delivered by either man, dominates all the headlines.
Why o why didn’t Biden open with, ‘folks, I have a cold, bear with me, my voice is rough, but we’ll get through it…’? Instead, his voice gravelly and barely audible, he bumbled, even though most facts were on his side.
The whole cringe fest was a Fox News fantasy come to life. I cried for my country, popped an Ambien, and went to bed.
I realize, at this point, pundits are just echoing each other. No one really knows what the fallout will be, or how the undecideds felt about the debate. I have some shred of hope that Americans are smart enough to cut through the slick lies vs. bumbling truth and consider what both men actually said. But honestly, MAGA exists because about 30% of us want a show more than sound governance; violence and retribution are sexier than policy Every. Single. Time.
Also, morons get juiced by hate, which stimulates the brain like an opioid. Hate is the brain’s most powerful motivator- right up there with fear- which means hate-filled people vote in higher numbers than complacent moderates. This, very simply, is why the stupidest 20% of the U.S. has been able to impose minority rule, aligned with the morbidly rich seeking to avoid regulations and taxes. (Darwin suggests we get real serious about real education, real fast.)
A silver lining?
Maybe, since SCOTUS just gutted the administrative state, stripping the federal government of most of its power to fight climate change, we’ll see violence from the left this time. The absurdity of letting morons like Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch substitute their personal, lay opinions for those of trained experts is worse than partisan– it’s suicidal. (Thomas recently shot down the AFT’s expert opinion that bump stocks keep firing the trigger like a machine gun, while Gorsuch confused an air pollutant with nitrous oxide—ie, laughing gas– when gutting protections for the environment.)
Even peaceful leftists will get violent when their lives are threatened. Since the Court has also ruled that it’s ok to storm federal buildings, maybe climate activists will take a clue from the J6 mob. (Not advocating violence, just opining on its likelihood, which I learned from Fox News. Maybe when MAGA idiots clamoring for civil war finally get a taste of blood they’ll retract their claws. But veep candidate JD Vance told us most of them are on crack or drunk, so they’re probably itching for entertainment, what’s a few bodies? I’m just saying their mental vacuums need to be filled with something, and Trump rallies, Fox and stoning their neighbors can only fill so many hours.
The gaslighting got upstaged, but it was masterclass
Biden, far more forceful at a North Carolina rally right after debate, freely admits he stumbled. “I don’t debate as well as I used to,” he said, but “I know right from wrong.”
And that’s the thing: what he’s done in office in three and a half years should count far, far more than a bad 90 minute performance. As Vice President Kamala Harris said in her post-debate interview, “I got the point that you’re making about a one and a half hour debate tonight. I’m talking about three and a half years of performance in work that has been historic…”
And she’s right: if this is a contest on the merits, on substance, Biden wins hands down.
When Trump said Hamas attacked Israel and Putin attacked Ukraine because Biden is weak, I worried, because low information voters won’t think it through. No one needs any spin; Putin himself has said his invasion goes back to the 17th century, Peter the Great, and his personal power-lust for restoring the Soviet Empire.
The complexities of the Israel-Hamas war are even deeper. They far exceed Trump’s cranial capacity, going back decades, marginally beginning with Hitler’s atrocities. Israel’s history exceeds most voters’ attention spans, including mine. Biden has walked a tightrope, empathizing with suffering on both Israeli and Palestinian sides. He has forcefully denounced and criticized Netanyahu’s cruelty, and immediately denounced the naked brutality of Hamas. No one alive could do a better job navigating Israel’s scorching complexity.
Suffering Palestinians deserve all the aid, support and compassion they are getting– far more– students on the left are right in that regard. But where they’re wrong is in failing to understand that if Biden cut off support to Israel, Trump would collect billions of dollars in PAC donations overnight and storm back into power, and few people would ever hear or care about Palestinian suffering again.
Trump’s mendacity is unprecedented in US presidential history, and the damage he has caused already will linger for decades. His offenses are too numerous to list, including ending abortion, adding $8 trillion to the deficit, robbing the poor for tax cuts to billionaires, selling the climate to big oil, blah blah blah. It’s redundant already.
Military generals and experts who worked with Trump are warning us
Biden is running for re-election not to stay out of prison or engage in retribution, but to save America from Trump and his army of sycophants addicted to power. They are dangerous. Now is not the time to start over, but to armor up.
During his awful debate performance, Biden managed to reference— albeit far too softly– that in a national survey conducted by the University of Houston and Coastal Carolina University, peer-reviewed academic and social science researchers, along with qualified historians and political scientists rated Trump the worst president in the history of the United States. Ever. According to America’s historians. Don’t trust your own instincts after the debate? Let that sink in.
Not enough? Consider that Trump’s closest military and domestic advisors have warned us how dangerous it would be to return him to power….
I’ll close with Robert DeNiro’s words because I really can’t top them. Here’s what he just wrote in a post-debate email:
Over the years, I’ve played my share of vicious, low-life characters. I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men. I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, and the utter banality of their cruelty. Donald Trump is a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics who will do whatever he can to obtain power. As an actor, I could never play him. There’s not a shred of humanity to hang on to. I strongly support Joe Biden. He’s a lifelong public servant with great personal integrity. I trust him completely to run the country. He puts you first. Trump cares only about himself.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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