Donald Trump and Joe Biden
After President Joe Biden expressed interest in debating presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election, right-wing media claimed Biden is running another “basement campaign” and his “puppeteers” would never allow any debates because it would be the “kiss of death” to the president's campaign. Those claims have followed years of right-wing and mainstream media fixating on the president’s age and mental acuity.
On May 15, Biden announced he had accepted an invitation to a CNN debate, and within hours, Biden and Trump mutually agreed to two debates, one each on CNN and ABC.
Biden and Trump have agreed to participate in two debates
- On May 15, Trump and Biden mutually agreed to participate in a series of two debates, which will be hosted by CNN and ABC, respectively. The candidates are now scheduled to debate on June 27 and September 10 after Biden posted on X (formerly Twitter) that he had accepted debate invitations from the respective networks. Trump has a history of skipping presidential debates, most recently skipping those scheduled for the GOP primaries, but he has agreed to the two debates with Biden. [CNN, 5/15/24; NPR 5/16/24; The Associated Press 8/21/23; Twitter/X, 5/15/24, 5/15/24]
- Weeks before Biden and Trump agreed to the debates, Biden had publicly expressed his desire to do so. In April, radio host Howard Stern asked Biden if he would debate Trump. Biden replied: “I am, somewhere, I don’t know when, but I am happy to debate him.” On May 9, Biden was asked when he would debate Trump during a White House event, to which he responded, “Set it up.” [The New York Times, 4/26/24; The White House, 5/9/24]
Right-wing and mainstream media have fixated on the president’s age and mental acuity
- Right-wing media have repeatedly attacked Biden for his age and claimed that he is too old and mentally unfit to campaign and continue serving in office. Beginning in 2020, Trump and his right-wing media allies attacked Biden for hosting virtual campaign events during the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that he was hiding in the “basement” to hide his age and lack of stamina. [Media Matters, 7/1/20, 2/9/24, 3/8/24; The Hill, 9/11/23; Politico, 6/24/20]
- Right-wing and mainstream media outlets have disproportionately fixated on Biden’s age and mental acuity, even though Trump is nearly the same age. In various studies, Media Matters has found that both cable news and widely circulated newspapers mentioned Biden’s at a much higher rate than Trump’s. [Media Matters, 9/29/23, 10/20/23]
Right-wing media claimed Biden's “puppeteers” would not allow him to debate Trump
- In response to Biden’s “set it up” comment, former White House press secretary and Outnumbered co-host Kayleigh McEnany said, “I won’t believe that Biden debates until I see it with my own eyes.” “Make no mistake this is basement campaign 2.0, it’s just run out of the Oval Office,” she said. “So do you really think the basement campaign is going to let him out of the Oval Office to go get demolished by Donald Trump? He will sit in the metaphorical basement. I hope to be proven wrong though.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 5/10/24]
- In response to McEnany, Fox News contributor and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, “Kayleigh’s right, there can’t be debates. If he debates it’s going to be the kiss of death for Joe Biden as well as the Democratic Party.” Referring to Biden’s “set it up” comment, Fleischer continued, “He can't even walk up the stairs to Air Force One, yet he can stand up on stage for an hour and a half at prime time? No. They’re going to have to hide him.” Then, referencing McEnany’s basement attack, Fleischer added, “You know there is a basement underneath the Oval Office. It’s located next to the Mess. And that’s what you’re going to have with Joe Biden if he takes the stage — a mess.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 5/10/24]
- As The Ingraham Angle's chyron displayed “Will Biden Actually Debate?,” Fox News contributor Byron York said that Biden did “get through” a “fawning, flattering, positive, easy” interview on The Howard Stern Show, but commented, “The idea of getting through an actual debate, clearly his team doesn’t want that.” During the segment, host Laura Ingraham played a clip of former White House secretary Jen Psaki on Meet the Press commenting on Biden saying he would debate Trump. “I was thinking, if I was in my old job from two years ago — you also don’t want him to say ‘no’ because no is weak and no is fear,” she said. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 4/29/24; NBC, Meet the Press, 4/28/24]
- When asked about Biden’s statement to Stern, Fox News contributor and former House Rep. Jason Chaffetz said that he would “be shocked if Joe Biden debated” and suggested that Biden did not check in with his “puppeteers” before making the statement. “I don’t know that he checked in with the puppeteers that help control this,” Chaffetz said. “I would be shocked if Joe Biden debated. I don’t think anybody on his team can afford to allow him to answer spontaneous questions and joust with probably one of the better debaters in Donald Trump.” He added, “He’s got to have people surrounding him just to walk to Marine One. The idea that he’s actually going to debate, I don’t think he’ll actually ever show up for that.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 4/26/24]
- During a Fox appearance two days later, Chaffetz once again claimed there was no way Biden’s “puppeteers” would “allow that guy out onto the stage to debate.” “The cognitive capability of this president does not allow him to debate,” Chaffetz added. Then, referencing Psaki’s appearance on Meet the Press, Chaffetz added: “Those five people on MSNBC or whatever network that was, they all know Joe Biden does not have the wherewithal to go toe-to-toe with the single best debater we’ve seen in Donald Trump.” [Fox News, The Big Weekend Show, 4/28/24]
- Podcaster and RNC co-chair Lara Trump claimed on Newsmax:“Joe Biden can barely read off a teleprompter, let alone stand on a stage and debate Donald Trump.” “We need debates,” she said. “But the team that Biden has is in a full-blown panic because that is the last thing they want.” [Twitter/X, 4/30/24]
- Real America’s Voice host John Fredericks played the clip of Psaki and claimed: “Of course he’s not going to debate, he can’t get three sentences out.” Michael Faulkender, America First chief economist, commented, “This is the guy that we would want to put in place for another four years to battle with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and he doesn’t even know what steps to go down on Air Force One or which way to exit a stage?" He went on, “So they’ve got to hide him, they’ve got to keep him in the basement, they’ve got to keep him on a beach in Delaware because he can’t possibly get out there for 90 minutes and have anywhere near the energy that Trump has.” [Real America’s Voice, Outside the Beltway with John Fredericks, 4/30/24]
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
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Jamie Dimon
In December 2022, Donald Trump said something that, in a healthy political culture, would have spelled his doom. He wrote, "A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!"
That is not the language of populism; that is aspiring despotism.
And how many Republicans announced after this that they could no longer in good conscience support Trump? I counted one. Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton said the post was "disqualifying" and that all GOP candidates should issue "Shermanesque" statements to that effect.
As with so many landings along the steep staircase of Republican decline, things would have been different if there had been pushback; if leading Republican officeholders and opinion shapers had stood on their hind legs and said, "Hey, I liked Trump fine until now but this is a deal breaker for me." But there was barely a bleat from the party; it was thoroughly demoralized in all senses of the word.
Today, the Constitution terminator leads in most of the polls, and bigwigs from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, are telling themselves and others that a second Trump term might actually be OK.
Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase reassured his audience in Davos (where else?) that Trump did many good things while in office and that whatever the outcome of the November election, "My company will survive and thrive."
Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, and hedge fund manager John Paulson hosted a fundraiser for Trump, reports Bloomberg News. Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz endorsed Trump, as did Robert Bigelow, a Ron DeSantis backer who has made his peace with the certain GOP nominee.
Lenin is supposed to have said that when it came time to hang them, the "capitalists will sell us the rope." These capitalists are deluding themselves if they imagine that another Trump term in office will be good for them. Yes, Trump is a "businessman," but more in the style of Tony Soprano than Andrew Carnegie.
Trump is promising an all-out trade war — 10% tariffs on all products, a 60% tariff on goods from China, and a 100% duty on imported cars. Think he hasn't the power? In his first term, he cited "national security" to impose tariffs on Canada (Canada!) and got away with it. The inflationary effect of his new, larger tariffs would be off the charts.
Similarly, Trump has issued broad hints that he will tamper with the independence of the Federal Reserve, which could spell much worse inflation than we've yet experienced.
In any case, what these Trump backers seem not to appreciate is that their riches are only possible because the United States is a stable, democratic country. If we cease to be stable — and perceived as such by investors around the world — our national debt would become a crushing burden. If we reelect a lying, despot-loving, quadruple-indicted, ignorant cretin, the United States will be a lot less appealing to overseas investors. And when we cease to be a safe haven for foreigners' nest eggs, we will have to raise interest rates to attract capital, which will increase the burden of our existing debt. How would Wall Street like them apples?
Honestly, these economic arguments ought to be third- and fourth-order considerations for any American — including billionaires. Economic stability is important, but the gravest threat is to our liberty.
We are staring down the possibility of putting someone back in power who has demonstrated that he is willing to use informal violence to achieve his anti-democratic ends. He attempted a coup with a mob of enraged zealots. How tragically foolish must you be to give him the power to wield formal, state-sanctioned violence? Think the president hasn't the power? Read the Insurrection Act.
The reason Trump was unable to order that border crossers be shot in the legs, or that the IRS conduct audits of his foes, or any of the myriad other crimes, outrages or stupidities the former president contemplated was that his own hires talked him out of things or slow-walked them until Trump's goldfish attention turned elsewhere.
In a second term, those officials would be gone. As his former chief of staff John Kelly put it, "The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don't put guys like me ... in those jobs. The lesson he learned was to find sycophants."
The foreign policy implications of electing Trump are just as frightening. He disrupted key American alliances in NATO and East Asia in his first term, but would destroy them in a second term. Without the U.S. security guarantee, nations around the globe would rush to acquire their own nuclear stockpiles. Trump would reward Putin's aggression by abandoning Ukraine, which would whet Putin's appetite for the Baltics, Xi's appetite for Taiwan, and God only knows what other aggressors' plans.
Those are the stakes. It is tragic and shameful that so many fail to see it.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
Rep. James Comer
The fur was flying in a contentious hearing Thursday night as the House Oversight and Investigations Committee passed a resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress. Democrats, with some help from GOP Chair James Comer, exposed the purely political motives behind this attack on Merrick and President Joe Biden over the White House’s refusal to turn over audio and video recordings from Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
The White House claimed executive privilege on the Hur recordings, with counsel Ed Siskel saying in a letter to Congress that the GOP lawmakers had no legitimate legislative purpose and that their intent in getting the recording was obvious—“to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”
Comer proved exactly that Thursday just before the hearing, sending out a fundraising appeal—using his Oversight Committee title—declaring that “Biden and his advisors are terrified that I will release the recordings, forcing the media and Democrats to answer for the dismal decline of Biden’s mental state.”
The top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, blasted Comer in his opening statement. “I thought you were serious about the legal enterprise here and not just another political huckster calling hearings to make a buck.”
Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida provided a must-see “spirited reading” of Comer’s fundraising pitch, after pointing out that the hearing had been delayed so that GOP members could make a pilgrimage to Manhattan to attend Donald Trump’s hush money trial. He noted that the pitch came from “the desk of the Oversight Chairman,” adding “I’m not sure you can do that, but I’m not an ethics expert.”
It was downhill from Republicans after that, largely thanks to the antics of—who else—Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who threw the process into chaos with a personal attack on Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, jibing “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”
The ensuing fight lasted nearly an hour, with Comer struggling to regain order, and culminated in a vote on whether to allow Greene to continue to participate. It ended in a party-line 22-20 vote, with one exception: Greene’s arch nemesis Rep. Lauren Boebert voted with Democrats to muffle Greene.
To get a sense of how surreal the whole mess was, there’s this: “I just want to apologize to the American people,” Boebert said. “When things get as heated as they have, unfortunately, it’s an embarrassment on our body as a whole.”
The whole debacle, one Democrat suggested, was fueled by the booze certain members consumed before the hearing—and an audience of lawmakers drinking during it. One panel member claimed “we have some members in the room who are drinking inside the hearing room, who are not members of this hearing.”
The crass politics of Comer, the Greene chaos, the partying—it’s all a reflection on just how low the GOP has sunk. It’s also making Speaker Mike Johnson’s job that much harder. Because the hardliners are going to push him to hold a vote on the contempt resolution, and some of the more moderate—and vulnerable—Republicans don’t want to go anywhere near it.
Republican Rep. David Joyce of Illinois is one of them, telling Politico that Congress has “important” work to do “but going after the attorney general isn’t one of them.”
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
Tavern patrons in San Diego, California watch Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate on October 20, 2020
President Joe Biden's campaign pulled a fast one on former President Donald Trump's team, according to the co-founder and co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD).
In a recent interview with Politico, Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. — the former chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) who has helmed the CPD for several decades — insisted the CPD was still alive and well despite the two campaigns going around his organization to hold their debates. The CPD chief did a combination of pushing back against the Biden team's assertions that its scheduled September and October general election debates were held too late in the election season, and praise for Biden's reelection campaign for managing to get Trump to agree to terms that were not the most favorable for the ex-president.
Fahrenkopf described the Trump team's acceptance of two general election debates hosted by CNN and ABC News "political malpractice," noting that the ex-president should have read the fine print before signing on the dotted line.
"Donald makes decisions like this and I’m not sure he listens to the staff," he said. "And I don’t think he ever saw all of the details that were in there. And that is a pretty spectacular job by the Biden people."
One of the major sticking points Biden's team wanted for both debates was not having a crowd present. An unnamed Biden aide speaking anonymously told Politico that because "Trump feeds off the crowd" and that cheering supporters "give him life," they demanded the debate room be empty save for the two candidates and the moderators.
"We wanted to take that away," the aide said.
Other demands Biden wanted that Trump agreed to included microphones that can be muted if a candidate speaks out of turn, and having moderators who didn't have a pro-Trump bias. That second demand sparked outrage from Fox News, with several of the networks prominent hosts worrying that CNN and ABC moderators would fact-check Trump while he was in mid-sentence.
Aside from the terms of the debate themselves, Trump may also not perform well due to his relative lack of experience. The former president hasn't debated since 2020, when he and Biden squared off in a shouting match that moderator Chris Wallace helplessly failed to control as Trump continuously interrupted his opponent. He notably did not participate in any of the Republican primary debates hosted by the RNC, and usually held competing events on nights his rivals debated.
In the two debates, which will take place in June and September, Biden will likely hammer the former president on his embrace of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that allowed for legal abortions. Republicans have yet to notch a win in any election when abortion is on the ballot — even in typically red states like Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. Biden is also aiming to highlight Trump's multiple threats to democracy in the upcoming debates.
Fahrenkopf told Politico that even though the CPD likely won't get to host a general election debate this cycle, that he hopes the Biden-Trump debates on CNN and ABC will be informative and educational for voters.
"We were created for one purpose and one purpose only... we want to make sure in every presidential election cycle that the man or woman who wants to be president or vice president of the United States debates their opponents. That’s our purpose," he said. "Now, if the Biden and Trump campaigns can reach some agreement and go forward with two debates, and that happens and they do a good job? That’s the only thing we exist for. I don’t get anything out of this in any other way. What happens to the debate commission thereafter, I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see."
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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Lauren Boebert
Even the most far-right members of the House Republican Conference are condemning Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) hijacking of a recent committee hearing.
During a Thursday night meeting of the House Oversight Committee, members were debating legislation to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt when Greene suddenly insulted Rep. Jasmine Crockett's (D-TX) "fake eyelashes." This resulted in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) coming to Crockett's defense, demanding that Greene's words be struck from the record and for the Georgia Republican to apologize. Crockett asked committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) if, hypothetically, she would be in the wrong for mentioning that a certain member of the committee had a "bleach blonde, bad built butch body."
Crockett recounted the incident in an interview with The Daily Beast, saying that Greene's comment about her eyelashes was "absolutely a racist thing."
"Any woman that knows anything about makeup and getting done up knows that eyelashes are one of those things that kind of come with it," she said. "MAGA has been trolling on social media for a while and it’s a way of them basically calling me ghetto and things like that, because of my hair and my lashes and my nails."
"It’s almost like, well, we don’t have anything intelligent to counter that with. So instead, we’ll be racist and we’ll attack her and go after her looks. Which, frankly, I am not lacking in my confidence about my looks…. but they do it all the time," she added. "So I think this was just a fundraising ploy for her and it’s also just her brand. Her brand is chaos and ignoring the rules."
The only Republican on the Oversight Committee to vote with Democrats to silence Greene for the remainder of the hearing was Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who has publicly squabbled with Greene in the past. Boebert suggested the far-right Georgia congresswoman was making other Republicans look bad with her behavior.
"It was embarrassing what was going on," Boebert said on Capitol Hill. "I couldn’t bring myself to stand in defense of that, I wouldn’t do it for the other side."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) also weighed in on the fracas, saying Greene's outburst was "not a good look for Congress."
The Oversight Committee eventually approved the contempt resolution against Garland, in response to the attorney general refusing to hand over audio recordings of President Joe Biden's conversations with former Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur. After concluding his investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents, Hur declined to charge the president with any crimes.
Ocasio-Cortez later tweeted that the resolution was approved notably without any votes on any amendments, which she characterized as an extraordinary breach of the legislative process on Comer's part.
"You see, this is the microcosm of what authoritarians do on a larger scale," she wrote. "ID a vulnerable person/community that’s easier to break the rules towards, normalize it (often w/ “both sides” rhetoric), and then use that rule-breaking to undermine deeper processes and rule of law."
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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Rep. Matt Gaetz outside the New York Supreme Court for Trump trial on May 15, 2024
The first Congressional Gold Medal was struck in 1776 as a way of saying thanks to George Washington. Since then, the medal has been awarded just 184 times to hallowed figures including Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama. Compared to the 647 civilian Presidential Medals of Freedom or the 3,517 military Medals of Honor, the Congressional Gold Medal is the rarest of the great honors awarded in America.
Naturally, a group of Republicans is angling to present one to Donald Trump.
As Politicoreports, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida is leading a squad of six Republicans determined to bestow a medal on Trump. Adding to the absurdity, they claim they want to award the medal because of Trump’s “dedication to strengthening America’s diplomatic relations.” Which apparently means threatening to abandon allies, enabling Vladimir Putin, and exchanging “love letters” with Kim Jong Un.
Finding the best way to show obeisance to Donald Trump is every modern Republican’s major obsession. Checking in at Trump’s criminal trial for falsifying documents to hide a sexual encounter with a porn star and protect his candidacy in the 2016 election is the hot new ticket for Republicans hoping to survive the 2024 election—and the purges that would follow a Trump victory.
However, not everyone can blow off a day of work and run to a New York courthouse to help Trump get around his gag order.
Scoring some sweet time in front of Fox News cameras to tell Trump they want to give him the greatest honor Congress can award must sound pretty good to this group of House Republicans, which includes Rep. Lauren Boebert and Chief Deputy Whip Guy Reschenthaler.
They get to talk about Trump’s accomplishments in the field of diplomacy, like that time Trump decided to launch a verbal war on Canada. Or how Trump prepared individual insults for G20 leaders. Or his no-U.S.-translator-allowed meetings with Putin. Or how world support for the U.S. crashed under Trump and rebounded under Joe Biden.
But they know it’s all just pretend. There’s absolutely zero chance that Trump will get a Congressional Gold Medal for his “exceptional leadership.”
That’s because the medal can only be awarded through an act of Congress. Two-thirds of the members on the House Committee on Financial Services and the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs are required to sponsor any proposed recipient before the measure can even make it to the House and Senate floor for a vote. And then the measure has to pass the full House with two-thirds of the vote.
Trump isn’t going to get past square one, and all six of those pushing this little scheme know it. This is just another example of so-called virtue signaling by Republicans—where the only virtue they understand is bolstering Trump's ego.
There is another shiny option Trump can strive for: the Congressional Award Gold Medal, which has been awarded to thousands of Americans. To get one, Trump would only have to do 400 hours of voluntary public service, 200 hours of personal development, 200 hours of physical fitness, and a five-day, four-night expedition or exploration. It sounds unlikely, but Republicans might declare that Trump’s rallies, social media attacks, golf outings, and court time in Manhattan satisfy those requirements.
He would also need to be between 14 and 18 years old. But considering the things Republicans are willing to believe about Trump, that doesn’t seem like an insurmountable problem.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
Rudy Giuliani
Rudy Giuliani's efforts to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election results have resulted in both civil lawsuits and two criminal indictments for the former New York City mayor. Giuliani is among Trump's co-defendants in Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' election interference case, and in late April, he was indicted by a grand jury in a separate election interference case being prosecuted by State Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, in Arizona.
But according to CNN, Arizona officials have been unable to "serve" Giuliani "with notice of his indictment."
CNN's Zachary Cohen reports that Giuliani "is the only defendant prosecutors have been unable to serve with a summons, according to Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for the Arizona Attorney General's Office."
Giuliani, the summons says, must appear before a judge on Tuesday, May 21.
"The day after the state-level grand jury handed up its indictment," Cohen reports, "two agents for the (Arizona) Attorney General's Office traveled to New York City with plans to hand-deliver the notice to Giuliani, Taylor said. The agents believed Giuliani was likely in his New York City apartment because he had recently video streamed from there — which they determined by matching the setting of the feed with pictures of the interior of the residence from an old real estate listing."
Cohen adds, "But upon arriving at the building, a person at the front desk told the agents they were not allowed to accept service of the documents, according to Taylor, who added that the individual did not dispute Giuliani lived there."
In addition to Giuliani, the Trump allies indicted in Mayes' case include former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Boris Epshteyn, Jenna Ellis, and Christina Bobb (formerly of One America News). Trump himself has not been indicted.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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Mitt Romney
Former President Donald Trump's ongoing criminal trial in Manhattan recently attracted a throng of Republicans in blue suits and red ties all taking turns praising the ex-president while bashing the trial, the witnesses and Judge Juan Merchan. One Senate Republican wasn't impressed by the show of fealty to the 45th U.S. president.
In a recent interview in Washington, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) spoke candidly about his fellow Republicans, which included House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and some of his colleagues like Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). Romney said the display of loyalty to the presumptive GOP nominee by those vying to be Trump's running mate was "really very difficult to watch."
"There is a level of dignity and decorum that you expect from people who are running for the highest station in the land, and going out and prostrating themselves in front of the public to try and apparently curry favor with the person whose our nominee, it's a little embarrassing," Romney said.
Romney — who isn't running for another term this fall — also opined that his fellow Republicans were debasing themselves in New York despite the sordid nature of the facts coming out in the trial proceedings. The 2012 GOP presidential nominee observed that it was "demeaning" for high-profile Republicans to effectively put their reputations on the line by defending the honor of a man disputing "an allegation of paying a porn star."
Of course, while Romney has not been shy about criticizing Trump, he's also been critical of President Joe Biden's Department of Justice for prosecuting the ex-president. In a separate interview with NBC's Stephanie Ruhle, the Utah senator said that if he were president, he would have "immediately" issued a presidential pardon to Trump. He cited Lyndon Baines' Johnson's pardon of Richard Nixon as an example.
"I'd have pardoned President Trump. Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy," Romney said. He also added he would have pressured Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to not bring criminal charges in their respective investigations.
"I have been around for a while. If LBJ had been president, and he didn’t want something like this to happen, he’d have been all over that prosecutor saying, ‘You better not bring that forward or I’m gonna drive you out of office,'" Romney said.
Trump's trial is in its fifth week, and defense attorneys are cross-examining former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, who is seen as one of Bragg's star witnesses. Prosecutors have said they plan to rest their case after Cohen is finished, and Trump's lawyers haven't yet clarified whether they plan to call any witnesses, or bring Trump himself to the witness stand.
Despite Romney being outspokenly critical of Trump, he has yet to say definitively how he would vote in November. The Utah senator may elaborate on his choice for president in a Wednesday night CNN interview at 11 PM.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
With the presidential election less than half a year away, evidence is everywhere that the right is planning to end the American experiment in representative government if it fails to legitimately return Donald Trump to the White House.
It was clear just a few months after Trump’s seditious plot to subvert the 2020 presidential election concluded with a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol that the right-wing propaganda apparatus was laying the groundwork to try again in 2024. Fox News and the rest of the MAGA media, which spent the weeks after the 2020 election fabricating and amplifying a host of election fraud lies and conspiracy theories to undermine the results, had begun working to institutionalize Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and to construct an alternative path to the presidency in which compliant party officials would secure a Republican victory by any means necessary.
Fox had become a loaded gun aimed at American democracy. Three years later, the bullet is in the chamber.
The disinformation ecosystem which revolves around Fox is telegraphing a plan to reject the results of the 2024 election if Trump loses. The former president’s propagandists will once again use baseless allegations of widespread fraud as a pretext to seek to overturn the vote — and GOP leaders are publicly signaling their willingness to comply.
Ultimately, this preordained coup scheme may not matter. As in 2020, Joe Biden might win by too large a margin in too many states for the plot to succeed. Or, as in 2016, Trump might win outright.
But in the event that Biden triumphs in a close election, the MAGA faithful have developed and road-tested a plan to steal it.
Fox stars aided Trump’s 2020 subversion plot. They were lying. And they’ll do it again.
It is sometimes unclear whether Fox’s falsehoods are deliberate lies. But filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit, which the network settled in April 2023 for $787.5 million, demonstrate beyond dispute that Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election results was rooted in malicious fabrication.
Fox’s top executives and biggest stars knew for a fact that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, even as the network’s coverage sought to undermine the legitimacy of the vote. The network, filings show, was intentionally peddling conspiracy theories in support of Trump’s stolen-election deception in order to compete with its far-right rivals.
These lies mattered. Communications revealed by the suit show that top Fox executives were aware the network was “uniquely positioned to state the message that the election was not stolen” but did not out of fears of losing viewers. They further show that when then-Fox Corp. Chair Rupert Murdoch asked his employees for evidence Fox had “fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 [was] an important chance to have the results overturned,” he received a list of 50 examples in response.
But the only lesson Fox’s executives apparently learned from fueling an attempted coup is that they need better lawyering to keep their damning internal emails and text messages off the front pages and avoid paying a record settlement.
Fox retained and even promoted some of its most unhinged election deniers, while punishing or even firing employees who fought the false narratives. In the years that followed, the network restocked its prime-time lineup with Trump loyalists who parrot whatever the former president says, put Trump allies and even a family member on the payroll, and replaced “news side” veterans with GOP operatives.
It’s no wonder that former employees keep loudly warning that Fox is a dangerous cesspool that produces Trumpian propaganda. The cogs who remain on the job, meanwhile, know without a doubt that they are part of a machine that manufactures lies. The pressure the network faces to hold on to its audience — including by promoting voter fraud conspiracy theories and other right-wing extremism — is stronger than ever. And so if Trump demands that Fox’s propagandists again focus on building him a pretext to overturn an election, they will do it.
The emerging right-wing scheme to overturn the 2024 election
Trumpists in the media and elsewhere have spent the years since Trump’s defeat laying the groundwork to rerun his subversion plot, systematically removing the guardrails that helped stymie the scheme in 2020, and helping him back to the Republican nomination. The result is a turnkey operation prepared to generate false election fraud claims and convert them into a rationale for Republican political leaders to reverse the results of the election and reinstall Trump in the White House.
MAGA propagandists are priming their audiences to disbelieve the election results and take action in response. They keep viewers in a state of terror with incendiary warnings that Biden is a jack-booted dictator who is deliberately trying to endanger their families, ensuring that some fraction would seek his removal by any means necessary. They valorize the January 6 insurrectionists as honorable patriots who did what they thought was right and were smeared by the media and punished by “deep state” malefactors. They flood the right-wing information ecosystem with lies and conspiracy theories about Democrats tainting past election results.
And they have already begun warning that the 2024 election will be rife with election fraud — and that only such cheating could explain a Trump defeat.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): There are no “issues" with the 2020 election — they stole it. Let me repeat that. They stole it. And they hate when we say this. They stole it. And they're on notice. They're not going to be able to steal it again. People are doing a ton of work on this, and that's still not enough, but it's going to get better. The hairy eyeball is going to be on them.
The only way they defeat Trump is to steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. He is unstoppable.
We saw how this played out in 2020: Trump’s coup plan relied on blanketing right-wing media with stolen-election lies in order to provide cover for GOP partisans to reverse the outcome in states Biden won. Under pressure from the Fox-addled rank and file, Republican election officials would refuse to certify results in key areas, GOP state legislators would overturn the results, and GOP members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence would hand Trump the election.
This scheme failed in part because too many Republican officials were unwilling to aid the effort. But since then, Trumpist propagandists like WarRoom host Steve Bannon and Fox’s lineup of right-wing stars have helped make election denial a core GOP value, and now, the guardrails are collapsing:
- Republicans purged their ranks of the sorts of GOP officials who resisted Trump’s subversion effort at the local, state, and federal level.
- Election lies seem to have become a benefit in GOP primaries and effectively a job requirement at the Republican National Committee, one enforced by the MAGA chorus.
- Prominent election deniers are recruiting their followers to take positions within the election infrastructure.
- In the House, Rep. Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) zealous efforts to overturn the election helped garner him the speakership, while in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is on his way out of the leadership after voting to certify the electoral votes and criticizing Trump’s role in the insurrection.
- Pence is effectively a party outcast after rejecting Trump’s entreaties to overturn the 2020 election results, and the politicians seeking to replace him on the GOP ticket are pushing voter fraud lies and refusing to say they will accept the results of the 2024 election.
Donald Trump will once again stand as the Republican presidential nominee this fall, less than four years after he attempted a coup to remain in office. He still maintains, unbowed by time, notoriety, or criminal charges, that the 2020 election was stolen. At the same time, he has embraced the January 6 offenders, regularly describing them as “hostages,” promising to consider blanket pardons for their actions, and treating their attack on the Capitol as “not a moment of national shame but of celebration,” as NPR described it.
None of this seemed to give right-wing propagandists much pause as Trump romped to the nomination. The Murdochs may have begun the primary season with other plans, but Fox had spent years crafting a political environment in which any criticism of Trump was inherently illegitimate, and its stars ultimately rallied to his side. As Trump’s victory became inevitable, his vanquished rivals were reduced to complaining — accurately — that Fox and its ilk had taken Trump’s side, while the few right-wing commentators who had criticized Trump and endorsed his primary opponents bent the knee.
If he loses in 2024, Trump will reject the results and seek to overturn them, as he has throughout his political career. Indeed, he began laying the groundwork for such a strategy during the GOP primaries, warning that only Democratic “cheating” could explain such an outcome. And he has no apparent qualms over whether his deliberate radicalization of his supporters leads to right-wing political violence. Indeed, he is signaling that is exactly what he wants.
No one can say they didn’t know what was coming
Here’s part of an interview with Trump that Time magazine published on April 30, six months before Election Day:
Mr. President, in our last conversation you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.” What if you don't win, sir?
Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win. We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. I don't believe they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time. I don't think they'll be able to get away with it. And if that's the case, we're gonna win in record-setting fashion.
Polls suggest that the 2024 presidential election will be close. But according to Trump, he’s “way ahead” and on track to win “in record-setting fashion.” The only thing that can prevent that outcome, Trump claims, is “the things that they did the last time,” i.e. the Democratic election fraud conspiracy theories he’s been hocking since before the 2020 vote. And if that happens, Trump says, his supporters might respond to such a result with violence.
None of this is even remotely subtle.
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, some political commentators expressed doubts over whether Trump would really respond to defeat by refusing to accept the election results and taking action to try to remain in office.
But that is precisely what Trump did. Now he is saying quite clearly that he will do it again if given the chance. And his propagandists in the right-wing media will have had four years to lay the groundwork to ensure his plot’s success.
Five days after the Time interview dropped, Semafor founder Ben Smith published a Q-and-A with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. The interview began like this:
Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?
Joe Kahn: Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.
It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.
It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?
That exchange generated a lot of smart responses. Critics pointed out that Smith’s question mischaracterized Pfeiffer’s critique; that Kahn’s response ignores the actual criticisms mounted by his paper’s critics, including Biden himself; that the Times’ business interests lead Kahn to endorse “a kind of performative neutrality in politics coverage”; and that, contra Kahn’s claims, the Times does not generally base its coverage decisions on polling and, if it did, the result should be a greater focus on the impact of Trump’s policy proposals on inflation and immigration than the paper actually provides.
What strikes me most about Kahn’s answer is his apparent lack of urgency. A former president left office after using the lie that the election he lost had been rigged to try to reverse the outcome, culminating in a violent assault by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. He has all but promised to try again, and after transforming his party into a personality cult which treats the insurrectionists as heroes and his election lie as unvarnished truth, he very well could succeed.
That is the central reality of the 2024 presidential election, one that should be foregrounded to the readers and viewers on news outlets at every opportunity but often fades from the discourse. The former president’s media allies are foreshadowing their eagerness to take every possible opportunity to participate in his scheme. And the leader of the nation’s most powerful mainstream press organ gives no indication that he has considered those implications in any but the shallowest way. We are all in a lot of trouble.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
President Joe Biden
New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn made an astute observation about a new Times/Siena poll, which showed President Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump in most battleground states.
"If there's any consolation [for Biden], it's that the poll is also littered with evidence that folks aren't super tuned in, and disengaged voters remain Biden's weakness," Cohn tweeted.
It's an insight that will likely define the presidential contest moving forward.
In the survey, for example, just 29 percent of registered voters said they are closely following the legal cases against Donald Trump. That means that less than one-third of voters are paying "a lot of attention" to the ongoing trial of a former president who will almost assuredly be the Republican nominee in the 2024 election.
The ancillary to Cohn's observation is that Biden performs better among high information, high propensity voters—or likely voters—a point veteran Democratic strategistSimon Rosenberg has been making for weeks now. A pattern has begun to emerge where Biden performs increasingly better as polling models move from "adults" to "registered voters" to "likely voters."
Rosenberg cites a recent Ipsos poll for ABC News, where Biden trails Trump among adults, 44 to 46 percent, but bests him by a point among registered voters, 46 to 45 percent. And Biden takes a four-point lead among likely voters, 49 to 45 percent. A Marist poll for NPR and PBS NewsHour made a similar finding, with Biden running just two points ahead of Trump with registered voters, 50 to 48 percent, but opening up a five-point lead among likely voters, 51 to 46 percent.
John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, made the same observation about voters ages 18 to 29 in the Siena battleground poll. Among registered youth voters, Biden trails Trump by three points, but among likely youth voters, Biden leads by seven points—a net turnaround of 10 points in the direction of Biden.
"Takeaway: the more you know; the more you vote; the better Biden does. It’s not complicated," he tweeted.
In an interview with Greg Sargent on "The Daily Blast" podcast, Biden pollster Jefrey Pollock said undecided voters make up anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the electorate depending on the state, "which is actually rather large." Those voters are disproportionately young, Black, and Latino.
The Siena poll also included about 20 percent of respondents who either didn't vote in 2020 or who did vote in 2020 but skipped the 2022 midterms.
Both sets of voters—the undecided and the lower propensity voters—are voting blocs that the Biden campaign will be targeting to make up ground in the final months of the election.
Pollock cited Nevada where, every two years, about 25 percent of the electorate consists of voters who have never before cast a ballot in an election.
"That's what makes Nevada so interesting and challenging but also as movable as it is," Pollock explained. "You've got these voters who don't really pay attention to politics, who are just getting into the political scene."
They are going to pay attention to the election much later, Pollock said. "You have to force your way into their lives," he explained, because they are more concerned with their kids’ activities, making sure they have health care, and simply paying their bills.
"We have to force them to pay attention to politics. It's why advertising and campaigns mean so much, particularly in those closing months, because we really do have to find ways to get into those houses," he said.
Biden certainly has the resources and the campaign to help address that information deficit, but whether or not his campaign manages to reach and persuade those voters remains to be seen.
As former Obama White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer wrote in his "Message Box" substack: "My main takeaway from the [Siena] poll is that the more voters know about Biden and Trump, the better it will be for Biden."
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
RFK Jr. Campaign Director Reveals Her True Allegiance Is To Trump
Angela Stanton King
Angela Stanton King, a far-right commentator working as a director for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign, said on a conspiratorial podcast last month that she loves Trump and that Kennedy is “another option” because her “fear is that they're going to stop at nothing to keep Trump from winning.”
She also said that she's working to take away votes from President Joe Biden and “if Trump or Kennedy gets it, I don't lose either way.”
Stanton King’s remarks resemble those of then-Kennedy official Rita Palma, who argued that the independent candidate’s presence on the New York ballot would help Trump defeat Biden, which she said was her “No. 1 priority.” (Palma was later fired.)
Kennedy has frequently attempted to appeal to right-wing audiences. He has also promoted numerous conspiracy theories as a commentator and has populated his campaign with conspiracy theorists.
Stanton King fits the Kennedy campaign's attempts to cater to right-wing media audiences. She is a far-right speaker, author, and guest on right-wing programming. She has claimed that the election was stolen from Trump, promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, and made bigoted remarks about LGBTQ people.
She works as the Black voter engagement director for Kennedy and has participated in events and door knocking with him. He also recorded a song with her. This past weekend, Stanton King appeared at a campaign event with Kennedy’s running mate Nicole Shanahan.
Stanton King has been a strong supporter of Trump, who pardoned her in 2020 for a 2004 car theft sentence. In 2021, for instance, she said: “Trump can’t be President forever and I know that. But he’s the only one bold enough to fight these evil Demonic Satanic forces from the pits of HELL and I’m standing with him.”
Stanton King is still praising the former president, including while doing surrogate work for Kennedy on the April 20, 2024, edition of Nino’s Corner. That show is hosted by David “Niño” Rodriguez, a far-right podcaster who has said that Biden “stole the election”; 9/11 “was an inside job”; and COVID-19 “was a hoax and vaccines would kill u.” He has frequently promoted QAnon, including offering programming that analyzes “Q drops” and “Q posts.”
During the start of his interview with Stanton King, Rodriguez said: “I will say, I'm one foot in, one foot out with RFK. I'm a Trump supporter. Everybody knows that.” Stanton King replied: “Me too.” She later said that she’s “in a pickle here because I love” Trump and Kennedy and said:
ANGELA STANTON KING: RFK is liked by a lot of people. Like, we love Trump, but we know that RFK is not afraid to stand up to the establishment either. And I think that's what many of us respect about RFK. And for me personally, I made this decision because I was tired of being on one side where all we're doing is constantly fighting, and I was tired of not being able to work with certain people in my community because I was being labeled as a Trump supporter. And I just honestly believe that in order for us to come together that we do have to stop fighting.
She later stated that part of her efforts is to take away votes from Biden:
DAVID RODRIGUEZ: Throughout history, right, it's shown that third-party candidates kind of siphon votes from one or the other. And it looks like in this instance with RFK, he's going to probably take a lot of the votes away from Biden. Correct? I mean, that's what you're looking [inaudible]--?
STANTON KING: Well, yeah, that's true because he, and not to cut you off, but for my community — and you know how it is, you know how the media has created this stereotype that Trump and the Republicans are all racists — so for people in my community that aren't necessarily comfortable with coming over to the Republican Party, this provides a space for them. And to me, I'm like, listen, we've got to get away from the Democrats. So you guys have two options, right? If you don't want to vote for Trump, then Kennedy is a much better option than Joe Biden. And for me, shifting my community is very important. And I think that the independent space provides a safety net for those that are just not comfortable with the Republican Party but want to step away from the Democrats.
Stanton King continued offering Trump-friendly rhetoric during the interview (“I love Trump”), including stating that she loves Trump and views RFK Jr. as “another option” because she fears that “they're going to stop at nothing to keep Trump from winning”:
STANTON KING: My fear is that they're going to stop at nothing to keep Trump from winning. And I don't want to just give it over to Joe Biden. If for some reason we see another 2020, we need to have another option. And I think that RFK may be that. So that's kind of like where I'm at. I love Trump, my Republican friends that have supported me so much, I love them too. But even sometimes when it comes to the Republican Party, we've seen where the Republican Party didn't even stand behind Trump. Like, they let them get indicted four times. We saw what Mike Pence did with the vote. You know what I'm saying? So, I think it's time for us all to put people over party.
She later said that while campaigning with Trump she saw him draw vastly bigger crowds than Biden, asking, “How in the world was Joe Biden able to win or steal or whatever an election from Trump?”
She also suggested that she'd be happy if either Trump or Kennedy wins the election, stating: “If Trump or Kennedy gets it, I don't lose either way.”
STANTON KING: I love them both very dearly. A Trump-Kennedy ticket would mean the world to me because they're both guys that have shown me that not only do they care for me, but they care for my community. So for me, it's the winning ticket. Like I don't lose either way, right? If Trump or Kennedy gets it, I don't lose either way. But for both of them to get in, to me that would be a dream come true. And I don't know what those guys are doing. Trump hasn't picked a VP yet, and I'm thinking like Trump still may want to — if Trump got in and Kennedy didn’t, Trump still may want to pull Kennedy and make him, you know, the director of health administration. There are just so many options here. But I don't think that the Kennedy campaign and the Trump campaign are enemies.
Stanton King later portrayed the 2024 election as “us against the Democrats, either way it goes. It's the Republicans and independents against the Democrat Party. And we've gotta all unite.”
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.