The rules Biden insisted on mean he will be delivering a series of canned talking points, without interruption. And he can be assured the moderator will undercut Trump (or any Republican candidate). Not a bad set up for him. Also, as we saw with the state of the union, when expectations about cognitive ability are so low, just being able to stand up for while and yell out a few disconnected sound bytes can look good
So, what you're saying is that Trump. long before he was declared the Republican candidate caused Donna Brazille, a long time Clinton apologist to throw the Dem debates to Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders.
Interesting take, especially the option value comment. How about another type of option value: By agreeing to the debates now, Biden can then use a hypothetical guilty verdict in the hush money case as an excuse to walk away from the debates, saying “I’m unwilling to appear on the debate stage with a convicted felon” — but he still gets moral credit for having agreed to the debate before walking away on principle…
Eh, I think this is a lot simpler than Nate and many others are making it out to be. He just barely waves a hand at it by referencing the Axios "Biden Team in Denial" story; the simple explanation is that the Biden team believes they are in the stronger position in this election and are playing the debate game as we would expect from them in that case. That isn't the Biden team being "in denial" about the polling. It's simply them believing that there are a number of factors that will lead to his performance in November being better than his polling right now. You many or may not agree...but it's not a crazy concept, and it's not denial.
Oh yeah, and also, the "optionality" thing doesn't really make sense at all, because it's Biden's team playing these tactics. Biden's team wants to elect Biden, not some other (hypothetical!) Democrat.
Whether or not you think it would be in the Democratic Party's interest to preserve that optionality, it's definitely not a goal of the team who is pursuing these debate tactics.
It’s worth remembering that the Biden campaign theory is that many voters are not paying much attention yet, and will ‘come home’ when they start to.
Perhaps they’re betting that earlier debates will cause an upswing in ‘paying attention’, which likely happened for a while after the State of the Union this year. Would it last? No? Maybe a bit?
Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for that. They could definitely use a narrative shift early. A clear debate win (which I tend to think is more likely than not) in June just as the media is really starting to cover the election in "happening now" mode could change the whole trajectory. Then having accomplished that there's less utility in the later debates.
Of course both things could be true. The Biden campaign could think that potential upside is there *and* there's a risk of catastrophic failure. They may just assess based on how they feel the narratives work that the failure would be easier to recover from if it's early, whereas the success could be easier to build on.
No debate meltdown could possibly get Biden off the ticket anyway. For Biden to be replaced he would either have to be literally deceased or be in such bad condition that he has to be spoon fed by a nurse.
this is where my understanding of national politics breaks down. I understand that Biden somehow has total control over whether he's the nominee, but I don't understand why/how. It seems that in the rare occasion when nearly every member of the party doesn't want the incumbent to be the nominee again, they would simply put up another candidate and have an actual vote. You know, democracy and all?
"It seems that in the rare occasion when nearly every member of the party doesn't want the incumbent to be the nominee again, they would simply put up another candidate and have an actual vote."
Well yes, that would roughly be how that would work. Your misunderstanding isn't how the thing works...just the idea that "nearly every member of the party" doesn't want Biden. That's not true and never has been. Biden *only* had (nearly) "total control over whether he's the nominee" because most Democrats want him to be the nominee. If he had been unpopular with Dems, a serious primary challenger likely would have emerged.
I can see how you'd get the idea that nobody wants him. That's certainly the narrative. Sadly, it's a false one.
I guess when I generalized about nearly everyone not wanting Biden, what i'm really saying is that given the choice "Biden or Someone Else" most everyone can come up with 'Someone' they'd rather be the nominee. While I agree with you that most democrats want Biden, I suggest that's only because there isn't a 'Someone Else'.
You have a fundamental failure to understand how the world works. "they" Is not an agent. It's a huge collection of individuals with no means of coordinating. And who is this mythical candidate that "they" would democratically select? You have the cart before the horse. There has to be a candidate before people can democratically vote for them.
I understand your point about Biden’s team pulling for their guy and not some other democrat, and you’re correct, but I think you’re underestimating the role that the party plays in a candidate’s campaign.
The public got a chance to see that dynamic play out within the Republican Party in 2022. One of the chief complaints during the midterms was the outsized role Trump continued to play within the GOP. Republican candidates were (accused of) running elections that amounted to loyalty tests and the Party was unable to coordinate strategy and keep tight control of the talk tracks like they normally do.
All of this is to say is that yes, a candidate’s team is primarily concerned about getting their guy elected, but I suspect in modern America the Parties have a bigger say in what a campaign does than we would assume.
It's weird that you say I'm underestimating the role the party plays in the campaign, and then offering as evidence the fact the GOP party apparatus couldn't do anything to influence the 2022 campaign.
The evidence of the last few cycles strongly suggests that incumbent Presidents have near total control over their parties, not the other way around. The Trump situation just about speaks for itself...just straight up installing his daughter-in-law at the head of the national party takes it to new absurdist heights. But don't count out Biden in this regard either; moving up SC in the primary was a big deal, and everything else the party has done has been in lockstep with Biden's interest. In particular the party has made exactly zero moves that suggest they have even considered exploring another nominee, let alone exert some kind of force on the campaign to keep "optionality" for some other candidate open.
But of course all of this is kind of tangential to the main thing about the Democratic Party and Some Other Nominee, which is that the whole concept falls apart when you try to attach a real name to it. None of the options commonly discussed actually poll any better than Biden. And all of them would start out with a party torn asunder by whatever happened that resulted in them being the nominee. That's doubly so for anybody not named Kamala Harris...which is a shame cause her polling looks worse than pretty much everybody else's. And all of that is leaving aside the miracle it would take to solve the collective action problem of picking the new nominee in the first place. So yeah...it's a pipe dream, and it always has been.
Yes, it's strange: he's acting like a man who knows with absolute certainty that factors external to the act of voting will guarantee his victory regardless of what the electorate wants. Luckily we have all been assured by the media that it is impossible for there to be election fraud in the US, and the media would never lie to us.
Yawn. Yeah, and the Chiefs projecting confidence going into the Super Bowl when the 49ers were the Vegas line favorites is proof the NFL is rigged. Shut up troll.
I agree it may just point to them thinking they're in a strong position and wanting to be cautious on that basis, but if the Axios story is accurate then it does seem like they're in denial. The arguments from the Biden camp were not that they still have a lot of time and a good plan to overtake Trump. It was that the polls were just wrong and couldn't be trusted, and that he is currently more popular than they indicate.
Well, I suppose this is encompassed in "if the Axios story is accurate" but I would just say that a couple of "people familiar with the matter" blind paraphrases are not a whole lot to try to base such a fine distinction on. Certainly whatever those people said to Axios was much more detailed and nuanced than the bullet points version that came out the other end. And even their story closes out by noting that Biden is clearly well briefed on the actual polls, saying he "often goes deep into the cross tabs." So to the degree Biden and team think the polls are wrong or just not representative of the future situation, even Axios isn't claiming they're ignoring them or off in some other universe somehow.
Bottom line: that story tells us a lot more about how Axios (excellent proxy for DC conventional wisdom) likes to frame things than how the campaign actually views things. Every campaign ever that trailed in polls said things a lot like this. Republicans in particular always, 100% of the time, project certainty they're going to win anyway, including by directly saying the polls are wrong or biased for any/no reason. That's apparently never news, but a Democratic candidate thinking they're OK when they're 1 point behind in the RCP average 6 months out is incredible denial worth writing about!
Obviously we expect some public spin on the polls from the campaigns. It would be a huge blunder for any candidate or a spokesperson to publicly agree with polls showing them losing and I'd completely expect Biden or any other candidate to downplay the polls or claim they're not interested in them.
The more concerning part of the Axios story (again, assuming it's accurate) is that for Biden and his closest advisors, this is not just spin, it's what they actually sincerely believe even in private, and they are persuing a conservative campaign strategy as a result. The crosstab diving isn't much of a reassurance either and reads more like the desperate Republican poll unskewing of 2012 where they are just trying to sniff out anything positive, even if it's not with a representative sample.
Wow ok, so not only do you buy their framing uncritically, but when you read them say "the preceding blind quote wasn't just spin...we promise that's exactly what the team sincerely believes" you don't snicker automatically?
Seriously, it's like the reporter is going "no seriously they didn't even like wink or elbow me when they said it! Totally not spin!"
I did not buy their framing uncritically (hence the caveats about the accuracy) but your completely unnecessary condescension doesn't make me want to continue this any further.
Both are true. They believe that their standing will improve over time. They also explicitly say that they don’t believe the polls. See the below quote from Evan Osnos’s New Yorker piece on the Biden campaign. As others stated, the Axios piece similarly states their belief that the polls are wrong.
Behaving like a front runner because they believe they are currently ahead and doing so because they believe they will pull ahead in the future is a distinction without a different. The issue is that they have an intuitive theory of the campaign and find ways to contort data to support their intuition.
It’s also a very concerning failure of campaign tactics. Let’s say that they’re right and they have secret internal polling data that would convince all of us that they are way ahead. It’s still the best approach to message that they are behind. Energize donors, energize voters, and avoid complacency.
“A series of senior aides told me that they doubt Biden is trailing Trump as much as some polls have suggested. “Polling is broken,” one of them said. “You can’t figure out how to get someone on the phone.””
First off, it does seem that Trump receives less scrutiny for his various gaffes than Biden does for similar missteps. I think this changes the game theory to some degree in the debate vs no debate decision. The upside for Biden from a Trump gaffe is lower than the upside for Trump from a Biden gaffe. Even if you think your candidate is a better debater and has a lower percentage chance of a severe gaffe, it still makes sense to minimize exposure because the incentive structure is -EV. This same incentive structure did not exist in the 2020 debates because Biden wasn't perceived to be senile at the time.
In addition, Democrats are now setting the terms for the debates, Republicans are in a responsive mode. Terms like no live audience and mics cut would seem to benefit Biden. It also effectively eliminates RFK from participation.
Finally, I believe it's possible that Democrats want to pursue a conservative debate schedule in fall because by then they plan to be trying to hit hard on Trump trials/abortion/whatever other narrative they might have in store for the final months prior to the election. If they have a gameplan already which they expect to poll well, why put the candidate in multiple disadvantageous situations with a chance to derail the media narrative they're pushing?
These are all extremely good points. The first one in particular is critical; lots of people (and especially Nate) have been hollering that Biden needs to be out in front of cameras more, and I've said for some time that this demand ignores the reality of how the media covers his interactions. There is plenty of material out there. And watching any Biden press conference or interview *in full* gives the clear impression that this is a guy who generally understands policy and government and thinks deeply about them. But you don't see or hear that reported...all the focus is on the few seconds when he forgot something or mixed up some words. The Biden team should assume that future media engagements will be covered the same way.
Any debate will likely most fairly be described as "Biden behaved as a perfectly normal, knowledgeable and competent but not very eloquent, politician...and Trump behaved like a raving lunatic who knows nothing about politics or policy, lies so constantly it's hard to tell whether he even sees a distinction, regularly spews hateful fearmongering, and can't really form sentences." But that's not how it will be described even if that's exactly what happens. The Biden team understands that and acts accordingly.
It becomes impossible to sustain the claim that Biden gets more scrutiny for gaffes when one considers that the media simply makes up “gaffes” for Trump that never even happened.
Look at this very thread, with people gullibly referencing the supposed Hannibal Lecter “gaffe”, which was just Trump making a sarcastic reference to him as the kind of mental patient he doesn't want as an immigrant, but the media pretended that Trump was praising him when the whole point of the reference was that he is archetypally bad. The media simply lied, changing the very direction of his words, and that was lapped up as a gaffe by the naïve. There were many such cases during his Presidency too, perhaps most often during the covid hysteria, such as the lie that he suggested people inject themselves with bleach.
Overall then it's not plausible to claim that Biden gets more scrutiny for gaffes when you observe that nearly all of the Trump “gaffes” are media confections.
Bwahahaha, yeah ok, that Hannibal Lecter thing was totally manufactured. You really need us all to hit the sweet spot of just enough context but not too much. Enough to say "well he mentioned Lecter because he was talking about mental patients immigrating" but not so much that we get all the way to "wait, maybe the more important thing is that Trump regularly falsely claims that other countries are conspiring to send all their mental patients to the US, and uses that bogus claim to bolster his calls for concentration camps." The Lecter parts were the funny part, but the context is at least as crazy.
I would encourage anybody who wonders whether Trump was actually making sense to go watch the whole speech. It's bonkers start to finish. And certainly the whole piece around "mental patients as illegal immigrants" was unmitigated lying fearmongering. The media just liked the Lecter parts because they're entertaining in a way his random lies aren't.
I don't disagree with you per se. To the extent that Trump was making a dubious factual claim—about foreign countries emptying their asylums into immigration—that is absolutely open to critique and fact-checking. But the media claims that he was “praising Hannibal Lecter”? That's just a lie by the media.
Btw you say that I “need you to hit the sweet spot” as if I am a Trump partisan trying to advocate for him in general. I'm not even an American, I'm just a neutral outside observer despairing at the American media blatantly lying, and doing so consistently, about a candidate for the Presidency who is also being persecuted by the legal system as if the Arsenal of Democracy is some Third World junta.
Yeah yeah, just a totally neutral observer. No politics at all, just so sad to see the legal system persecute a poor unfortunate lifelong criminal. How dare they put him on trial for a few dozen of his obvious crimes? He's running for President for chrissakes, and he only tried to overthrow the republic once so far!
You mean “obvious crimes” like a loan the lender agreed to, which he repaid in full, and the lender testified on his behalf at the trial that there was no problem with it and the whole proceeding was ridiculous? That kind of “obvious crime”?
Candidates for the Presidency suddenly being swamped with court cases for minor regulatory infractions going back decades is a characteristic hallmark of authoritarian regimes. You're letting your personal distaste for Trump block you from seeing that.
And of course I have politics, in my own country. The most recent political party I was a member of is the UK's centre-left Labour Party. Not exactly Trumpian. But I can see the situation in the US, and the Democrats' slide towards authoritarianism, under the pretext of “stopping Trump”, is clear.
"You mean 'obvious crimes' like a loan the lender agreed to, which he repaid in full, and the lender testified on his behalf at the trial that there was no problem with it..."
No...
I mean "obvious crimes" like telling the IRS your apartment is 3x the size it actually is.
I mean "obvious crimes" like stealing a giant trove of classified documents, storing it insecurely including in a bathroom, refusing to give it back when the archives asked, stiffing the DOJ on a subpoena for it, then giving some of it back and signing a sworn statement that it was all returned when it wasn't.
I mean "obvious crimes" like engaging in a multistate conspiracy to create "fake electors" in swing states to subvert the election, including coordinating with said electors to make fraudulent statements and forge documents.
I mean "obvious crimes" like soliciting corrupt behavior from Georgia state elections officials in another attempt to subvert the election.
I mean "obvious crimes" like directing illegal campaign expenditures on hush money payments and then creating fraudulent business records to cover it up.
I mean "obvious crimes" like refusing to let black people rent his apartments 50 years ago, or defrauding his university students, or all the times he stiffed contractors. Or lawyers.
The loan the lender agreed to after false pretenses. Let me explain what you are trying to say. If I ran a amusement part ride that is potentially dangerous and I lie to the regulators about where I got the parts, but I get caught before there is an accident, then I should not be prosecuted because there were no victims and all the passengers agreed to go on the ride. Or I just ignore speed limits to get an unfair advantage on my delivery company and bribe the cops to look the other way, then if I get caught I should be prosecuted because I didn't cause an accident and the customers said their parcels were delivered on time and the police was happy to be bribed. Trump took a risk with other people's money. This time it worked ok for him. During his multiple bankruptsies he did the same thing and stiffed his investors and lenders. Yet you think he should be allowed to keep doing that, because you want to vote for him.
Another fine example in the media today of a made-up Trump “gaffe”: an intern reposted a fan-made video that quoted from Wikipedia about Bismarck's “unified Reich”, and the media are pretending that Trump was saying he wants to be Hitler. Because apparently Democrats are now the party of demonising foreign words as suspicious and alien? Do they even have any principles any more?
I agree that fairly frequently a Trump statement will be taken out of context to sound more ridiculous than it actually is for a nice headline.
Where I disagree is that I think it's actually an advantage for Trump. As Hunter mentions, the full context of what Trump says is rather extreme, but the focus is on his Hannibal Lecter joke, and he's able continue to claim (somewhat correctly) that you can't trust the media because they warp his words.
EDIT: Hunter wasn't actually inconsistent, someone else was. I still disagree with him on a bunch, but he was consistent.
But notice that Hunter went seamlessly from asserting that the praise for Lecter was genuine to saying that ackshually what was important was the wider context. His approach, deriving as it does from the media's, is non-falsifiable: whatever Trump does he will find cause to criticise it, and the actual particulars are so unimportant that he doesn't even flinch when he has to change story mid-flow.
Excuse me. I did not at any point assert that Trump was genuinely praising Hannibal Lecter. Please point out any place you think I did.
What I did say is that considering that whole piece of his rally in its full context, it is absolutely nutbar crazy. And I stand by that.
Let's pause for a second to take it all in: Trump says, regularly and having never produced any evidence, that psychiatrists in Latin America don't have any work anymore, because their countries are sending all their mentally ill to the US as illegal immigrants. Are you trying to say that's not an insane accusation?
Ah, you're right, it was someone else saying that: I take that back. That's what comes of trying to have political discussions when I should be working lmao.
Well I hear you on that, guilty myself. But the larger point is probably worth examining, cause really who is out there claiming straight up that he was being serious and saying he thinks Hannibal Lecter is a great person?
I have seen a few headlines that said he praised him. But not one of the stories underneath those headlines reported it as though he was seriously saying he thought Lecter is a great person. Most of them reported out that it was a new addition to his rally standard piece on criminals and mental patients as illegal immigrants. The ones I went and found at MSNBC and the like (in hopes of seeing what you're talking about) went further and broke down how crazy the whole thing is. But they didn't try to convince anybody he actually meant the Lecter thing...it was just a "how crazy is this" hook to hang stuff on.
Now I expect it's easy to find tweets that play it straight up like that. Or a comment here. But that hardly matters. And maybe if I searched hard enough I could find some story somewhere in real media that treats it that earnestly. But that's not the normal tone of coverage, even in leftwing media. So I think you've kinda got a strawman here.
Biden does get more scrutiny for verbal gaffes, but he also gets more credit just for seeming competent. He got a lot of praise for his state of the union address, mostly just on the grounds for not coming across as senile.
One of the biggest things going against Biden is the perceptive that he is well and truly dysfunctional due to his age. If Bidens team believed that perception to be wrong, then they would benefit greatly from more debates. I think it's pretty clear that Bidens team does not have a great deal of confidence in him.
I think the gaffe value difference narrows somewhat for bipartisan events like debates. Under normal circumstances, full speeches and public appearances are generally only seen by committed partisans. Negative partisans will clip and reshare the gaffes, and which ones break through is more about which side has a better coordinated apparatus. On these kinds of events though, some people who don't normally pay much attention tend to tune in and there's not really any hiding bad moments from either side.
I agree to a point, but it depends on just how unaware the viewers are. "Is Biden too old?" is a major talking point which has been in the media for months and so viewers are going to be extra sensitive to anything that suggests that he is.
This isn't to say that Biden isn't old/doesn't look old. But if you took someone with absolutely no prior knowledge of Trump and Biden and let them view both candidates I think you'd get "wow, both of these guys are pretty old" and a comparison would be made with that as the baseline. Instead the baseline is "Biden might be too old."
Trump making "similar missteps"? You're joking, right? They're not even in the same galaxy.
Biden is incoherent even with a teleprompter and constantly exhibits spacial disorientation, to say nothing of constant falling and tripping. The poor guy has dementia, period. I know, because I have seen my father go through that.
Trump is a blowhard who is prone to exaggeration and bluster, but he is 100% cognitively there, whereas the other guy is not.
It reveals he fell right in to Trumps hands. Biden HAS to debate because he can only win. He can’t lose because he was already lost.
It’s essentially a Hail Mary. The economy is getting worse. The tech industry is shedding jobs. Red Lobster just closed over 50 locations along with dozens of other restaurants and other industries. The GDP has come to a crawl.
If you pay bills and don’t make over $300,000 a year you remember fondly how much better it was precovid.
Biden has zero successes to brag about to working class people.
Trump wants to debate because his opponent is Joe Biden. There’s a real chance ol’ Joe refuses to shake Trumps hand and then tries to shake an invisible hand (again).
There’s a chance Biden says “illegal alien” (again) on stage and then walks it back (again) in reference to a murdered woman. He might sniff some young girls hair (again, again) on his way to the stage. Or he might fall on his way up again. Or not find his way off again.
Because a debate solidifies his win. Biden will not be able to effectively debate unless his questions are rehearsed. That’s exactly what Trump wants America to see.
Yes, it was reported in "Potomac New" that on May 5tat two Middle Eastern men, who had illegal crossed the Southern Border, had enter the Marine Base at Quatico, VA, claiming to be Amazon staff delivering packages. When the guard stopped them, they sped off, but were stopped by the road barriers. Why didn't the national news outlet report this story? Had they not been stopped, could they have been carrying WMDs? What does this say about our open borders and the potential for terrorist attacks?
It's just bizarre that the Biden is considered the only one at risk here given that Trump has in the last few days alone praised the "late, great Hannibal Lecter" and mistaken Jimmy Carter and Jimmy Connors from the campaign stump.
Yeah, and apparently not just the ones from mental institutions, they're even sending some from insane asylums! I didn't realize those were different things, but Trump helpfully explained that insane asylums are "like mental institutions on steroids."
Anyway, you're justifying his bananas Hannibal Lecter riff by pointing to the context of his "other countries are emptying out their insane asylums across our boarders" riff...which is itself quite bananas. So I'm not sure that's really helping.
In his inartful way Trump may be on to something. There is a clear historical precedent in Cuba/Mariel where Castro emptied his prisons by shipping all the convicts off to the US to claim asylum. When Trump points out that a number of countries are seeing surprising drops in the populations of prisons and asylums the natural question is where have the inmates gone.
No, the natural question is "is any of that true?" because mostly things he says aren't.
Do you have evidence that Latin American psychiatric populations have experienced a sudden recent decline that's out of step with patterns elsewhere in the world?
Meanwhile knock it off trying to launder his baseless fearmongering through Tuckeresque "just asking questions" doubletalk. He didn't ask questions. He flatly asserted multiple times, falsely and without any evidence whatsoever, that there is a coordinated campaign in other countries to "release all [their] mental patients into the United States." He usually tells the story as something a doctor in one of those countries told him. One of those "sir" stories he loves to tell which are so transparently made up. It's just a lie.
Also, just an aside nobody outside your bubble knows what you guys are talking about when you say "bloodbath" like that's a whole sentence. It's kinda like how you all thought "Benghazi" was a killer indictment of Clinton contained fully in just one word, but the other 70% of America the whole time was like "uh Benghazi what?"
OK, so what's happening in places like Venezuela then? Knock off the innuendo...if you have evidence that ANY of this nonsense is true please let's see it.
If you watch the clips, he barely makes any effort to tie the two together. It's just a random aside that's seemingly tossed in, like a Family Guy cutaway joke. And, as Hunter points out below, it's all made-up nonsense!
No. As I said, the Lecter aside comes off as a random throwaway. Even if he were trying to say "illegal immigrants = Lecter", the phrasing "late, great", "congratulations", "wonderful man" all make no sense. It's Trump's usual argle-bargle that has to get explained away later.
OK but see the problem is that criminally insane inmates like Lecter ARE NOT entering the country illegally. He was lying, and demonizing immigrants, and saying weird things about Hannibal Lecter.
Once again, you're trying to thread an impossible needle. You want it to be a huge issue that somebody somewhere said something about the Lecter thing without tying it to his larger point...but you completely refuse to consider at all the fact that his larger point is a dangerous lie.
I'm guessing your DNC programming did not include a sarcasm and humor aspect. Hopefully, with advanced AI DNC bots, we will be able to get these features in the future.
"The media has mostly gone along with the White House narrative" Gee, I wonder why?
I'm equally shocked by the Biden people's sudden change on this: "Debates will just platform a racist election-denier" to "Why aren't you debating us, Donald?" in 5 minutes or less. So yes, clearly they're more worried than they're letting on.
However, regardless of Biden's problems unscripted (and they are many), he performed well in 2020. And Donald Trump has his own unscripted problems. Biden makes stuff up because he's senile and can't remember what he had for breakfast. Trump makes stuff up because he truly doesn't know or care what the truth is. Bottom line: neither of these guys are going to do well. And it's probably to both their advantages for debates to be early and therefore largely washed out long prior to voting.
Your theory about a pre-convention debate is a good one. I still believe Biden will not be the nominee.
>Biden makes stuff up because he's senile and can't remember what he had for breakfast. Trump makes stuff up because he truly doesn't know or care what the truth is.
Best summary of the two I've heard here. Sums up most of the other comments here as well, if you just listen to what most partisans say about the OTHER guy.
>Your theory about a pre-convention debate is a good one. I still believe Biden will not be the nominee.
I still have a lot of trouble buying this however, unless Biden shows some unmistakable sign of decline that is much worse than the worst we've seen so far. He appears totally confused at a debate, for example. Or he has a severe stroke. Otherwise, with every day that passes, the harder it is to move off the path of Biden as nominee.
Biden himself seems like a man who very much wants to run. People have been trying to dissuade him from running for a long time to no avail. And the nature of this sort of decline is that it generates lot of denial; he's going to become LESS aware of his shortcomings over time, not more. Meanwhile all the important voices in the Democratic Party have made it clear and invested their reputations in saying that in his present state, he's a great candidate. I don't see a path to profitably launching a coup against him unless he's basically a nonentity.
I hope you're right, Thomas, since I believe almost any Democrat not named Kamala Harris could defeat Donald Trump. And that's the problem for the Dems: their default backup is even less popular and more batty than their lead. But she's a black woman and therefore (by their own internal logic) can't be pushed aside for someone young and pretty and experienced like Gavin "Hairgell" Newsome.
I don't think it'd be that hard to call for more debates last minute if necessary. Just call your opponent a coward if they refuse all debates in October. I'm expecting Biden to perform well at the debates. I'm not sure how much Biden has degraded, but watching his speeches I don't think it's *that* badly. Meanwhile looking at Truth Social I think Trump has gone into a conspiracy echo chamber and will expose mainstream America to levels of insanity even greater than what he's said in the past.
Many early stage dementia patients have normal lucid moments and forgetful moments, the ratio of which can often seem random - though it deteriorates over time. I think most people don't think that Biden is completely senile, but are concerned about the possibility that he's heading that way and may have a "moment" during an important world crisis or delicate diplomatic event.
I agree that he's probably mostly okay, but it seems likely he's having real moments with memory problems and understanding. In a normal election with normal candidates, he wouldn't even be thinking of running and the people around him would work hard to keep him out. Think about the campaign commercials asking about whether we can trust our president to take a crisis call at 3am. Biden is definitely not the person everyone is hoping takes that call. Politics in the US have gone crazy since 2008, though, and many people are even more worried about Trump getting that call (even during normal business hours with lots of sleep!).
You touched on a point that Nate Silver nearly reached near the end of his column, while noting the Biden campaign's possible A+++ rated tactic of going with an early debate for its option value.
You pointed out, and most would agree, that Biden's cognition is in decline. We can debate about whether he is officially senile or his degree of decline, but everyone can see he's not as lucid as, say, in his 2008 campaign.
Hence the value of a June debate. He'll have three fewer months of decline on his back vs. at a second September debate. If he can yell at Trump as effectively as he yelled at his teleprompter at the State of the Union speech, he just might book an early win. Those odds can only decline going forward.
Personally the further I read of Nate's opinion on the 2020 election I just think he dislikes Biden, and dislikes the Democrats, and is trying to position himself as the smug "I told you so" pundit at the end of the election. There's also little downside: if Biden wins, who cares? Nate's position is not that different than before. If Biden loses he can propel himself further in the pundit realm.
What’s there to like about Biden’s performance as president?
For most people, including my upper-middle-class household, life has not improved in the past 3.5 years.
Then I look at Biden’s foreign policy and all I see if train wreck after train wreck.
Do I need to go into the border and the Biden admin’s never-ending attempts to find new ways to violate the 1st amendment via backroom deals with social media and search companies?
Even the CHIPs act was ruined by absurd DEI requirements.
We were promised responsible adults and instead we got Joe Biden and his merry band of activists and incompetent loyalists.
"For most people, including my upper-middle-class household, life has not improved in the past 3.5 years."
This is demonstrably false in every way we have to measure it. Real incomes are higher than pre-pandemic and so is employment. And when people are polled about *their* economic situation they are very positive right now. It's only when they're asked about "the economy" that their answers turn negative. And perhaps unsurprisingly, peek into the crosstabs and it's clear partisanship explains the whole effect. Both parties' views of the economy are skewed by who's in the white house, but the effect is much, much larger for Republicans.
Meanwhile the rest of your stuff is just a bunch of talking points. None of it bears any resemblance to reality and it's not really supposed to, so not much point rebutting it.
So many industries are having massive layoffs. Industries with well paying jobs.
The largest job growth is in government jobs, low paying hospitality jobs and health care.
Good paying blue collar jobs are not being created. Look it up. The economy does not with from “the middle out”.
Biden restructured corporate taxes, they raised prices to make up the losses and Biden taxes the middle class by default with inflation.
The working class is running from Democrats as fast as they can. Every polls shows it. The 2020 election showed it. Biden lost the working class and has lost many more with his anti middle class policies.
I expect Trump Deranged people to delusional but not it’s just denial of reality.
OMG just stop, we just posted our 40th consecutive month of positive job growth. During Biden's tenure the lowest quintile of the income distribution has had higher real income growth than any other segment. And inflation is currently lower than when Reagan gave the "Morning in America" speech.
Meanwhile the idea that the post-covid inflation spike is all due to Biden's policies (fictitious corporate taxes or otherwise) is pretty hard to square with the fact inflation was at least as bad in Europe at the same time.
Most of that was people going back to work after blue states overreacted to Covid.
Then for a short while the benefits of Trumps renegotiation of NAFTA was still having an effect on manufacturing but after the “Inflation Reduction Act” we have seen private sector hits left and right.
The job creation is not good paying jobs. Go to the department of labors site and see for yourself. It’s mostly Govt and low paying hospitality jobs. That’s the two largest growing industries.
The job market is horrible. Gen Z is on every social media platform talking about it. There’s no good paying jobs out there.
Even in blue states with insane minimum wage laws are losing because companies started closing or having less staff because of the laws.
It’s a wrap on Biden. It’s time for the adults to come back in to the room. He may have mean tweets but times were much better.
When you let in over a million people a year and create a few hundred thousand jobs a year, that's not a net positive.
And even then the figures show that the growth in “jobs” is entirely in part-time and casual jobs, including double-counting people who have to take multiple jobs to take ends meet.
Now you're just making stuff up. It's a few hundred thousand jobs created per *month* not per year...there were 3M more people employed at the end of 2023 than the start. And your assertion that all jobs growth is part time and casual is simply false.
The stats aren't that complicated: Biden came into office with unemployment at 6.4%, got it under 4% before his first year was finished, and it has stayed there ever since. Meanwhile the labor force participation rate among prime age workers is the highest it's been in 2 decades. The jobs situation in this country is excellent right now, that's a plain fact.
It's demonstrably true in almost every way we measure it that doesn't involve massaging the numbers and eliminating categories that create inconvenient numbers.
From March of 2021 through February of 2023 inflation significantly outpaced wage growth, and those prices have never come down. Since February of 2023 wage growth has slightly outpaced inflation, but that doesn't account for the continued rise in prices that wipes out every bit of wage gain.
Thanks for showing your economic illiteracy by not understanding that price rises are cumulative, and rises in the cost of fuel and energy make the cost of everything else go up.
Food, fuel, electricity, rent, cost of borrowing have all risen dramatically. The overinflated housing prices lead property taxes to go higher, and that valuation adds a couple of hundred per month to your home insurance bill.
Want to buy a car? Have fun with those interest rates blowing up your monthly payment.
Want to buy a house? Better have mommy and daddy putting down a huge cash deposit if you want to outbid Blackrock.
But no, the proles need to stop believing their lying eyes and their lived experience and trust the economic data presented by the Biden admin. That guy doesn't have a track record of lying about his accomplishments.
You can blather about on this but you make zero sense. My life has improved dramatically from being able to actually leave my house and travel, with vaccines which were free and easy to get: Covid is gone! That's a huge accomplishment, which Biden accomplished. My income is up, my company is doing well, the economy has recovered and compared to our peer countries we're doing dramatically better than you could expect. He also signed the most substantive gun safety bill in years.
Biden also managed to completely avoid a financial crisis to the point people completely forgot it happened.
From a personal standpoint: gay marriage is now both constitutionally protected by the Supreme Court, and legislatively protected by Congress. That's a big deal in my book.
Foreign Policy has been a dramatic improvement; our alliances are in far better shape, he's currently got Russia stuck in a quagmire in Ukraine (and destroying the Russian military complex at a minimal cost). This is helping restore American industrial preparedness by creating a ton of demand for American weapons. We're making more artillery shells than we have in years.
Investment in American manufacturing is also increasing, entirely due to the CHIPS act and Biden's infrastructure bill. He also made the largest investment in green manufacturing to live up to our climate commitments.
So yea, while I don't like all that's happened, I really don't have that much complaints. Your first amendment violation complaint is laughable.
Because almost everything you just said is inaccurate.
The vaccines that didn’t stop the spread of Covid-19 were rolled out in December of 2020. Biden had nothing to do with that.
If you lived in a state governed by sane people, you could leave your house, eat at restaurants, and go to the gym by late May of 2020.
Ukraine is currently getting crushed. The Russian economy beat growth projections this year and they’re currently out producing all of NATO when it comes to war material. Particularly artillery shells and anti-air missiles.
The CHIPS act has failed because they could not resist putting in unworkable DEI requirements and the chip manufacturers are looking to potentially build in Germany, Vietnam, Poland, and Spain instead. It's easier than dealing with federal DEI compliance officers who don't understand that most of the people capable of building bleeding edge technology products are straight white and Asian males.
You seem to believe all the talking points the Biden admin has published, hook, line, and sinker. That’s why I’m asking if you’re a real person.
If your life is going awesome, great for you. For most people, life is a much bigger struggle now than it was pre-covid, and Biden’s policies have exacerbated their suffering.
A fool would be someone who listens to a politician's PR team and believes their portrayal of the politician's performance.
I get it. No one wants to admit they voted for an incompetent man, despite having 44 years (now 48) of poor track record to judge him by beforehand. Still, most of those people who plan on voting for Biden again aren't big enough fools to go around posting his campaign team's horseshit talking points about his nonexistent accomplishments.
Voting for an idiot doesn't make you an idiot. Repeating the words of the idiot does, though.
It's called an "anecdote" or colloquially "anecdata". There's always a minority but I would guess that majority opinion is far different given the polling.
He uses his critical thinking ability unlike a lot of people on the left. The left literally smears people who aren’t a part of the hivemind and dares says anything that offends it.
It throws the left for a loop that someone can think independently and be on the left. The left wants everyone to think in unison.
The right disagrees on a lot of things. Ukraine and Israel. No abortion vs abortion with common sense restrictions. Trumps vaccine vs those that don’t trust multi billion dollar pharmaceutical companies.
Not the left though. They just tap in to the hivemind to see what their belief is this month and how mad they should be about it.
That's an interesting claim: could you list some of the policy areas where you believe that the entire right-wing, stretching from staid Boomercons to the extremely online alt-right, has hivemind-like total uniformity of opinion but the left allows a free and open debate?
I don't mind adjusting the phrasing: I wrote it as I did because your claim was about the right being part of a hivemind, not the left. Try this:
That's an interesting claim: could you list some of the policy areas where you believe that the entire right-wing, stretching from staid Boomercons to the extremely online alt-right, has hivemind-like total uniformity of opinion but the entire left-wing, stretching from normie centre-left dads to radical socialists, allows a free and open debate?
Can you provide any examples? If not, my suggestion is that there is no projection going on, and your claim was false.
So you agree that "both sides" are in actuality a wide spread of various identifying groups with varying policy ideas and beliefs and therefore by definition not hive-minds? And thus you also agree that the premise of the original comment is false?
The banal explanation is Biden is an arrogant politician who thinks that these are the same people who never liked him. They didn’t like him in 2008, wanted Obama to replace him in 2012. Didn’t want him to run in 2016, counted him out in 2020, and then dismissed his plans to be a bipartisan deal maker after he won.
Biden was a good VP who helped his president win. He probably beats Trump in 2016 had they backed him, he DID win in 2020 despite their misgivings, and HAS been a successful president in spite of all these pundits saying he was going to fail. Biden has always viewed himself as the underdog nobody liked so it’s unsurprising to me that he thinks so now.
Now, that doesn’t mean I think his strategy is good or that he’s being wise. I don’t think that, but do I believe this malarkey that Biden is actually scared to debate Trump, they’re trying to hide him, etc? No. I don’t. I think that’s hyperbole and silliness on Nate’s part. He isn’t alone.
Gore and Kerry were better candidates than Bush and they lost. Hillary 2008 was much better than Trump but I believe she was sick in 2016 and so she was limited as a candidate…but she still should have won based on the fumes of the Obama presidency. Just because Democrats nominate a better candidate than Republicans doesn’t mean they will win the race.
And as a follow up. The reason why Biden hasn’t interviewed with the NYT is because he dislikes them and think they’re being petty elitist jerks. I don’t think it has anything to do with fear
I don't think he particularly likes him, but I expect he still wants him to win (or at least for Trump to lose). His writing has been negative, but the angle always reads like he's concerned rather than happy about it
This is exactly my read. Certainly Nate is on record as a pretty solidly Democratic voter, though his policy views are more idiosyncratic than just down the line mainstream D. He clearly doesn't like Biden as a candidate, and that's fine. Biden has real weaknesses, no doubt about it.
That said, I have begun to wonder whether Nate's genuine concern has started to shade into concern trolling, and it has occurred to me more than once that he might be at least in part positioning himself. The cynic in me suspects he figures in a Biden loss he will have a nice stock of "I told you so" for sale, whereas in a Biden victory there will always be plenty of "Thank heavens they listened to me" to go around.
But of course none of that is mutually exclusive. I think Nate believes what he says, and he thinks that if they do what he recommends Democrats will have a better chance of winning.
No mention at all of RFK, Jr.? That's who both candidates fear.
RFK's recent video - narrated by Woody Harrelson - got 34 million views - and it was shadow-banned by Facebook. Aaron Rodgers just did a 2-hour interview with Tucker Carlson where 20 percent of his comments are Rodgers bragging about Kennedy ... and that video already has more than 24 million views on X.
So, a political candidate with the last name Kennedy - someone that tens of millions of Americans are clearly very interested in - and who is doing better than any independent since Ross Perot in the polls - can't even be mentioned in a debate story.
What a great "democracy" we have here. (CNN and ABC are real big on promoting "democracy.")
Those aren't "porn bots" that are watching those videos. Those counts include many of my Substack subscribers. For example, This article on Rodgers was very popular.
Are you claiming 34 million readers? If not then this is an irrelevant point.
Whatever your numbers of readers actually are, they are miniscule in comparison to the number of fake accounts that "view" and spread misinformation on Twitter. Which is such common knowledge combating it was a specific point in the reasoning of the current owner buying the company.
That alleged misinformation that was spread on Twitter was actually important truths. The vaccines did NOT stop infection or spread. They are not "safe" to everyone (even the NY Times now admits this). There was no "pandemic of the unvaccinated." Kennedy said all of this and so did I. (I've been banned and shadow-banned just like Kennedy). Even if some of those 34 million views were "bots," all of them weren't or most of them weren't. I watched the interview. I'm a real person and was counted as such.
Nate believes in polls, or some polls. Take a couple of polls of American citizens and ask respondents if they think RFK, Jr. should be allowed in the presidential debate. Don't ask CNN's owners or the two candidates of the two political parties. Ask a sample of American citizens ... you know, the people who make up a "democracy."
"The vaccines did NOT stop infection or spread. They are not "safe" to everyone (even the NY Times now admits this). There was no 'pandemic of the unvaccinated.'"
So three claims, and three statements so misinformed as to be not unreasonably declared false.
You might want to take Nate's "bubble" claim to heart beyond clearly believing it about everyone else.
RFK's campaign no doubt hurts Trump and Biden in that he would take away voters for both candidates. Who he'd hurt more is up for (no pun intended) debate.
But this doesn't matter. All that should matter is that he is a serious candidate who already has significant support. He'd probably get a lot more support if he could just present his ideas in a nationally-televised debate (against a man who has dementia and another candidate who just specializes in juvenile insults).
He wrote two best-selling books, each more than 400 pages and each with more than 2,200 footnotes. That's a serious person to me. He started a non-profit (CHD) based on seriously-held principles and convictions. He's filed scores of lawsuits and represented hundreds of plaintiffs in environmental lawsuits, Covid lawsuits and censorship lawsuits. That takes a serious person.
Running for president as an independent takes a very serious person as there are 1,000 hurdles that have put in front of him and he's still making progress.
It's true most of his family wants to disown him, but how does that prove he's not serious or that he is an "embarrassment"? What if he is right and they are wrong?
The fact he did all these things - knowing most of his family members would consider him an embarrassment - speaks highly of his character and courage. Wouldn't it have been easier to NOT fight for the things he's fighting for? Taking the road less travelled isn't always easy.
Plus, regarding myriad Covid issues, He was right on everything he said and his family members were wrong. So was Fauci, Birx et al.
Being a prolific, best-selling writer doesn’t mean a whit to me about being a serious person. The author of The Secret isn’t a serious person, they just sold snake oil to rubes.
Many of his “seriously-held” beliefs are falsifiable. Believing things that are demonstrably false doesn’t make someone a serious person - quite the contrary.
Running for president takes money - he wasn’t leaping those hurdles himself.
He used his diagnosis of a brain parasite to claim in a divorce case that his earning power was greatly diminished due to memory loss and other neurological issues. Yet he now claims to be perfectly mentally fit to be president. These are not the actions of a serious person.
I won’t engage with discussions about COVID or vaccine science, because we are unlikely to agree what is factual on those topics.
I remain unconvinced on his seriousness as a person. If his last name weren’t Kennedy, he’d just be a random conspiracy theorist. His name recognition gives him a platform.
You can't write books as complex and dense as The Real Anthony Fauci and The Wuhan Cover-up without being a serious person IMO. You might not agree with his conclusions, but that was extremely serious research. He wasn't just making random claims or stating opinions. He cited credible sources over and over and developed his arguments. His family, that thinks he's an embarrassment, probably didn't even read the books. They haven't spoken to the thousands of mothers who think their children were harmed by vaccines. Kennedy has. He once didn't believe this, but as a serious person, he listened, did his own research and changed his views. Whether his siblings or cousins disagreed with him or not didn't matter.
(Galileo probably had family members who were embarrassed by him. Socrates, I'm sure, had family members who told him, "Hey, man, stop asking those type questions.")
Future historians will tell us if Kennedy was right or not. So far, nothing he's said has been debunked.
What we need is a big study of the Amish and see how many of the Amish died from Covid or any of the diseases they are not innocculated against.
We need a real debate on topics we're told are off-limits to debate. I'm leery of people who are not willing to debate. Fauci wouldn't debate Kennedy, probably for the same reasons Biden and Trump won't either.
I’d love to see Kennedy invited. I think Trump would welcome it. No way Biden would. Kennedy is too far left for Biden to debate. He would take so much support from Biden after the debate.
I am not an rfk guy but he should be included, just read he is the Texas ballot . That alone means 10,000s may 6 figure votes . Let people see and decide
The 15% rule belonged to the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization that this deal explicitly replaces with a private agreement between Biden and Trump that specifically excludes the possibility of including a third party candidate, no matter how they’re polling in the upcoming months. That’s the real story Nate is ignoring. These two candidates are running on a platform of the other being an existential threat to democracy, and yet the one thing they can agree on is that they’d rather people not have a third option. When it comes to the actual norms that define our politics, Trump hasn’t changed a thing.
"These two candidates are running on a platform of the other being an existential threat to democracy, and yet the one thing they can agree on is that they’d rather people not have a third option."
I mean...blame James Madison? It's not like the logic of spoilers is some kind of grand conspiracy. Biden is absolutely right that JFK is a threat, 0% because JFK might win, 100% because JFK might throw the election to Trump. There's no contradiction there...they think Trump is a mortal threat to democracy and they think JFK might help get him elected.
CNN, which I believe is hosting the June debate, says that they will be abiding by the old CPD rules of polling at 15% and on the ballot in enough states to conceivably win in the electoral college. ABC, which is hosting the September debate, has not disclosed the rules for inclusion yet.
The WSJ is reporting that both networks are requiring that candidates receive 15% support in 4 national polls and be on the ballot in enough states to reach 270 electoral votes. That currently excludes Kennedy and I don't know if that was a stipulation of the Biden campaign but it is possible Kennedy could meet those metrics before the September debate
Trump literally posted on Truth Social yesterday that he would have no issue with RFK attending the debate, but Orange Man Bad must always be the narrative.
I haven't seen that. I'll check it out. If he did say that, it was probably for appearances sake ... because he knows it's not going to happen.
There's nothing stopping him from debating Kennedy 1-on-1. In fact, Kennedy just challenged Trump to a debate. It turns out they are both speaking at a libertarian event and so they are going to be in the same town at the same time - go ahead and have a debate.
Why would he have a 1v1 debate? It's stupid and pointless. You just have TDS. Trump said he has no problem with RFK being in the June debate, so go cry for Biden and his goons instead of crying about Trump.
Trump might have said, "I have no problem with Kennedy being in the debate," but I don't believe that for a second. Biden's not going to grill him about the lockdowns or the warp speed "vaccines" - because Biden supported (and continued) the lockdowns and, if you haven't noticed, is a huge fan of the "vaccines."
In contrast, Mr. Kennedy did not support the lockdowns and is not a big fan of the Covid vaccines and would have challenged Mr. Trump on why he thought both were so necessary. That inevitable debating scenario would be a nightmare for Trump as he would have no good answers.
Kennedy would score points on the trillions of dollars flushed down the toilet and the massive inflation that resulted from Trump and Biden's Covid policies. And he'd score points with anyone who still cares about civil liberties. Etc. Etc.
The last thing Trump wants is RFK, Jr. on a debating stage. That's also the last thing Biden wants and, apparently, Biden set the terms of this debate.
1. Your 'MUH BOTH GUYS BAD' argument falls flat when Trump has no opposition to your guy being in the debate.
2. RFK was not a relevant political party until recently.
3. Trump was against vax mandates. Trump didn't force the vaccine on anybody it was not mandatory unlike the democrats that tried to push vax mandates everywhere. Trump pushed for an end to the lockdowns. Also, you're acting as if the President has control over such wide-ranging policies when he doesn't. If if Califoania wanted to have lockdowns for 10 years, there's not much Trump could have done about it outside of a drawn-out lawsuit that would have ended only years later.
4. Trump left office with 1.4% inflation; he had nothing to do with the mass inflation caused by Biden's out-of-control spending and his psychotic proxy war in Ukraine.
5. Trump's COVID bill was to save jobs and help Americans get through the pandemic, which worked. Biden's reckless spending after overheating the economy didn't start going up until Biden's deranged bills passed.
Yeah, likely not an RFK voter, and I don't think either candidate is actually "afraid of him" in the sense that RFK might win, but I do think he should be on the stage.
RFK has no shot to actually win because the mainstream media on both the right and the left will NEVER give him a fair platform or really any coverage at all.
But I think the left is underestimating RFK’s appeal to Center-Right voters, especially suburban soccer moms in those Midwest swing states.
Based on the recent primaries, there’s clearly a large contingent of Republicans that really don’t want to vote for Trump and RFK would/will earn some of those votes, purely on the basis that he isn’t Trump.
IF i vote in this election, and that’s a big if, it will be for RFK, simply on the basis that he isn’t Trump or Biden.
I get it. Party realignments often result in weird 3rd party candidates. I think RFK is kind of a blue-blood kook personally, but I don't dislike the guy. However, I expect once this realignment shakes out (unless the GOP balks and nominates Nikki Haley or someone else from the old fusionist coalition in 2028) they will all fade away.
Ross Perot managed to eke out a double digit percentage in 1992 on the same basis: the evil empire was gone, the world was in flux, the parties were scrambling, and there were 2 weak candidates. But his Reform Party never went anywhere because the 2 mainstream parties adjusted to new the political reality (Clinton's famous "triangulation") The GOP and the Dems aren't idiots. They can both read the writing on the wall (although probably only 1 of them knows what "the writing on the wall" refers to.)
I’m with you on the “practice run debate in June” theory: if it goes poorly, he drops out - as he should have done last fall.
A nine point drop in support for Biden between 2020 and 2024 - which is where the polls are now, and have been, for months- is not consistent with another Electoral College victory. As crazy as a contested convention might be, the Dems are entering Hail Mary territory. We haven’t had a race like this in more than 100 years, so an exceptional move in an exceptional election does actually make some sense.
Good analysis. I wonder if there’s some real chance for upside in the Biden camp though, and they see a chance to play offense instead of just defense.
A couple weeks ago(?) I saw a clip of Trump at a rally praising(?) Hannibal Lector. This is odd because 1) he’s fictional 2) he’s a murderous character. I mean, Trump has always shot from the hip and said odd things but that clip felt like it was more bizarre than we are used to.
I’ve come to believe that while Biden did get a lot of press about being old and senile, Trump may be getting there too and no one realized it because he’s loud and still presents as more alpha/masculine. If the gaffes are big enough, we may get something akin to a “McConnell freezing at the podium” type mental moment from Trump that the Biden camp could crystallize until the ejection.
I say this as a friend, you may need to touch grass.
I posted my comment at 5:41. You posted yours at 5:50. Which means a couple of things: you, in 9 minutes or less, were able to pull 33 media hoaxes (some of which were legitimate hoaxes!!!) straight from the dome. I don’t even get the wordle in 5 minutes. I get less words Boggle then you get media hoaxes, in less than 9 minutes sometimes. OR you have a list that you just spam post on Substack OR you’re a bot?
Truthfully, any of the three are FASCINATING. I simultaneously want you to stop responding out of concern for your mental health but simultaneously also want you to continue to respond because I need to know more about you.
It's none of those, but instead a fourth option. This is a very well-known list of anti-Trump media hoaxes, particularly associated with the popular cartoonist Scott Adams. Anyone who knows that (most people on the online right, I imagine) could find the list on Adams' social media and copy-paste it here in far less than 9 minutes. And it's not just “spam” because it's directly relevant to the discussion.
So you have to reply with ad hominem instead of responding to the points? Whether or not this guy is terminally online doesn't make any of them less true
ER, thanks for that. Everyone needs a reminder of just how divorced from reality the media has become. Seeing al these all in 1 place is truly terrifying.
I heard something yesterday that the decline in media truthfulness and objectivity may be related to the change from an advertiser to a subscription revenue model. 30 years ago, the NY Times cared mostly about keeping advertisers happy -- subscribers were secondary. Saks 5th Ave wants lots of eyeballs on its ad. And ideally a diverse set of eyeballs that is a cross-section of New York. But today's NY Times derives 2/3rds of its revenue from subscriptions instead of advertising, and thus they now care more about keeping subscribers happy. How do you do that? You stop trying to appeal to a broad, city-wide set of eyeballs who just want the news and focus on appealing to those who are willing to pay for what you say. The big, broad tent goes away. And a narrow but wealthier and more ideologically committed tent takes its place.
This was the basic story that Nellie Bowles told yesterday in a radio interview. I'm not sure this is accurate, but when I heard it yesterday, I thought it was an interesting idea. And Nellie is one who would know.
No, no, don’t thank ER for that comment. Your comment is fascinating Brian, and makes me think. ER’a comment was diarrhea of the keyboard.
And this isn’t a hoax. There are many media hoaxes, several ER listed. But I heard Donald Trump say, verbitam, “The late, great Hannibal Lector is a wonderful man”. Fictional people can’t be “late”. I can be “late”, you can be “late”, fictional people cannot be “late”
Oh, Sean, I wasn't commenting on your claim about Trump at all. I don't doubt that he said it. It's exactly the kind of thing Trump would say, either as a metaphor or just in ignorance. To be fair though, I tend to cut politicians of both parties a lot of gaffe slack on the basis that most of us, given microphones in our faces for 12 hours a day, would probably say some stupid stuff. I don't think the GOP's constant harping on Biden's gaffes is really fair either: the man is 80+ years old.
I do think seeing the list of exaggerations or outright lies that Trump Derangement Syndrome has led previously respectable journalists to embrace all in 1 place is useful though, if only as a reminder that these people should not be relied upon for anything important.
He was comparing Lector to released mental patients illegally entering the United States from foreign countries. He's accusing foreign countries of pulling a Cuba/Mariel boat lift and emptying their jails and insane asylums by shipping the inmates to the US.
Essentially "Remember the great Hannibal Lector? What a guy! Now there's millions of them in the US from other countries who have entered illegally."
To be clear, Trump is making all of this up about prisons and asylums being down so other countries can ship illegals to America. I know of nothing that indicates this is true. But that's Trump. People take him literally but not seriously and instead he needs to be taken seriously but not literally. I wish he wouldn't do this sort of stuff, but that's who he is.
Yes, and the entire point of the anecdote is that Lecter is a very bad person. The ludicrous pretence that Trump was praising him is only sustainable for someone who hasn't seen the full clip. Which the media has, but which they know, through selective editing, they can stop the majority of people from seeing.
This is a perfect example of the genre. Of course fictional people can be referred to as “late” within the context of their setting. If I say, “James Kirk is the Captain of the Enterprise”, it would be embarrassing for you to say, “fictional people cannot be captains”. “Romeo died by drinking poison”—“fictional people cannot die or drink”. “The cow jumped over the moon”—“fictional animals cannot jump”. It'd be ludicrous to say such things. You know this, I'm sure of it. So why disengage your critical faculties to make an equally embarrassing response to Trump's perfectly anodyne comment? It does you no credit at all.
It's not that he can't be dead because he's fictional. It's that he isn't dead in any of the relevant works of fiction. If you said "James Kirk is the captain of the Nebuchadnezzar" the reactions of Trekkies and Matrix fans everywhere would be swift and just.
Oh, is that all people are complaining about? That he got the details of the fiction wrong? Oh, that's a lot less serious. As someone who hasn't watched any of the franchise either I assumed he died at the end too.
You'll be interested to know that Trump was not praising Hannibal Lecter, and that you have fallen victim to a media hoax. The entire point of his reference to Lecter was that Lecter is archetypally bad, and not the kind of person anyone would want to immigrate to their country. So the media has directly and deliberately changed the entire direction of Trump's comments through selective editing. As a rule, if you watch the full context of Trump's remarks, not just the short edited sections played by the media, you will find that this is usually the case.
He was comparing Lector to released mental patients illegally entering the United States from foreign countries. He's accusing foreign countries of pulling a Cuba/Mariel boat lift and emptying their jails and insane asylums by shipping the inmates to the US.
Essentially "Remember the great Hannibal Lector? What a guy! Now there's millions of them in the US from other countries who have entered illegally."
Here is the latest from his rally in New Jersey “He often times would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? ‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner,’ as this poor doctor walks by. ‘I’m about to have a friend for dinner.’ But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations, the late, great Hannibal Lecter…”
Strong agree on mediocre hand. The absolute strength of the Biden hand as deployable in a debate weakens over time with reasonable confidence (major free variable there would be some exogenous event that strengthens Biden, e.g. an unexpectedly quick Israeli "success" in Gaza that reduces the salience of those events for internal factional performativity in the US).
What I am far less sure about is the expected absolute strength of the Trump hand** in a debate versus time: from a variance perspective, what is the time dependency of the odds of Trump saying something so unhinged, even by Trumpian "standards", that some tiny fraction of the Trump disliking but "anything other than a Democrat" double haters break a bit further loose from voting Party of Trump.
** references to sizes of Trump's various appendages and his sensitivity regarding the same not obviously relevant to the extended poker metaphor, although if Trump were involved he would presumably have some factually challenged insult to deploy on the topic.
I might be wrong, but I think you're all reading too much into this.
I had a close relative with dementia. I keep noticing how much Biden sounds like him. The random bursts of anger, the same verbal hiccups, the propensity for making up random facts and numbers and claiming them with absolute confidence, even when they are clearly impossible... There's no way they can put him somewhere where he needs to answer questions off the bat - unless there's a drug combination that temporarily works a miracle (which sounds impossible to me, but I'm not a doctor).
So, barring any miraculous medical intervention, the questions will have to be determined in advance, and Biden will be getting a text feed on a screen somewhere to read. I assume the only reasons they don't want many debates are that they are worried that 1) Trump or somebody secretly disloyal might see the feed and tell about it, or that 2) Biden will wander off script and start talking on his own, which is a real possibility in his current state. None of this would probably be a dealbreaker to anyone who is currently planning to vote for Biden despite all the evidence of his mental decline, so they can take the risk, even if they prefer to slightly minimize it.
Conditions that the Biden camp put on the debates:
1. No live audience
2. Cut the microphones off when one candidate's time is up
3. No third party candidates
4. Only ABC, CNN, CBS or Telemundo allowed to host the debates
Conditions that the Trump camp put on the debates:
None
Typically the side that has to swallow all the demands from the opposition while getting none of their own is desperate. Of course, Trump is leading in the polling. Shouldn't Biden be the desperate one?
My conclusion is that Trump is desperate to get Biden on the stage because Biden has aged so drastically that his team believes there is a real chance for a fatal mistake from the incumbent.
I also conclude that Biden's team believes the exact same thing. Getting rid of the live audience and muting the microphones is a gambit designed to minimize distractions to Biden and try to head off any "senior moments".
It's not true that the Trump camp had no conditions for the debates -- they had already rejected the traditional commission on presidential debates model.
>I think it’s correct to attribute most of the blame for norm-erosion to Republicans, and in particular to Trump.
Donna Brazile of CNN fed Hillary Clinton debate questions during the 2016 Democratic Primary. This isn't just a Trump allegation, she admitted to doing so https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donna-brazile-passing-debate-questions-clinton-camp-mistake/story?id=46218677 . Claims that US political debates can be biased have merit.
And more importantly, Donna Brazile denied vehemently for over a year of having passed debate questions to Hillary Clinton.
In plain English, she lied brazenly to the American public for over a year ... before turning her attentions to Trump's lies
Surely you mean that US political debates can be “fortified”.
The age factor is just not going away and by virtually hiding from giving serious interviews the Klein theory is still in play.
The rules Biden insisted on mean he will be delivering a series of canned talking points, without interruption. And he can be assured the moderator will undercut Trump (or any Republican candidate). Not a bad set up for him. Also, as we saw with the state of the union, when expectations about cognitive ability are so low, just being able to stand up for while and yell out a few disconnected sound bytes can look good
So, what you're saying is that Trump. long before he was declared the Republican candidate caused Donna Brazille, a long time Clinton apologist to throw the Dem debates to Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders.
Maybe Silver considers cheating to be the norm.
And Ailes fed Trump debate questions during the 2016 Republican primary debates.
Interesting take, especially the option value comment. How about another type of option value: By agreeing to the debates now, Biden can then use a hypothetical guilty verdict in the hush money case as an excuse to walk away from the debates, saying “I’m unwilling to appear on the debate stage with a convicted felon” — but he still gets moral credit for having agreed to the debate before walking away on principle…
Eh, I think this is a lot simpler than Nate and many others are making it out to be. He just barely waves a hand at it by referencing the Axios "Biden Team in Denial" story; the simple explanation is that the Biden team believes they are in the stronger position in this election and are playing the debate game as we would expect from them in that case. That isn't the Biden team being "in denial" about the polling. It's simply them believing that there are a number of factors that will lead to his performance in November being better than his polling right now. You many or may not agree...but it's not a crazy concept, and it's not denial.
Oh yeah, and also, the "optionality" thing doesn't really make sense at all, because it's Biden's team playing these tactics. Biden's team wants to elect Biden, not some other (hypothetical!) Democrat.
Whether or not you think it would be in the Democratic Party's interest to preserve that optionality, it's definitely not a goal of the team who is pursuing these debate tactics.
It’s worth remembering that the Biden campaign theory is that many voters are not paying much attention yet, and will ‘come home’ when they start to.
Perhaps they’re betting that earlier debates will cause an upswing in ‘paying attention’, which likely happened for a while after the State of the Union this year. Would it last? No? Maybe a bit?
Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for that. They could definitely use a narrative shift early. A clear debate win (which I tend to think is more likely than not) in June just as the media is really starting to cover the election in "happening now" mode could change the whole trajectory. Then having accomplished that there's less utility in the later debates.
Of course both things could be true. The Biden campaign could think that potential upside is there *and* there's a risk of catastrophic failure. They may just assess based on how they feel the narratives work that the failure would be easier to recover from if it's early, whereas the success could be easier to build on.
No debate meltdown could possibly get Biden off the ticket anyway. For Biden to be replaced he would either have to be literally deceased or be in such bad condition that he has to be spoon fed by a nurse.
Yeah, I agree. The Somebody Else concept is has always been a fantasy, and the later it gets the more ridiculous it becomes.
this is where my understanding of national politics breaks down. I understand that Biden somehow has total control over whether he's the nominee, but I don't understand why/how. It seems that in the rare occasion when nearly every member of the party doesn't want the incumbent to be the nominee again, they would simply put up another candidate and have an actual vote. You know, democracy and all?
"It seems that in the rare occasion when nearly every member of the party doesn't want the incumbent to be the nominee again, they would simply put up another candidate and have an actual vote."
Well yes, that would roughly be how that would work. Your misunderstanding isn't how the thing works...just the idea that "nearly every member of the party" doesn't want Biden. That's not true and never has been. Biden *only* had (nearly) "total control over whether he's the nominee" because most Democrats want him to be the nominee. If he had been unpopular with Dems, a serious primary challenger likely would have emerged.
I can see how you'd get the idea that nobody wants him. That's certainly the narrative. Sadly, it's a false one.
I guess when I generalized about nearly everyone not wanting Biden, what i'm really saying is that given the choice "Biden or Someone Else" most everyone can come up with 'Someone' they'd rather be the nominee. While I agree with you that most democrats want Biden, I suggest that's only because there isn't a 'Someone Else'.
You have a fundamental failure to understand how the world works. "they" Is not an agent. It's a huge collection of individuals with no means of coordinating. And who is this mythical candidate that "they" would democratically select? You have the cart before the horse. There has to be a candidate before people can democratically vote for them.
I mean, that's precisely what I don't get...what/who is preventing there from being another candidate?
The first person out with a dagger pays a huge price. Careers end like that. That's why.
Yes - I suspect this is the reason
We are closer to that than many acknowledge
No we aren't.
I understand your point about Biden’s team pulling for their guy and not some other democrat, and you’re correct, but I think you’re underestimating the role that the party plays in a candidate’s campaign.
The public got a chance to see that dynamic play out within the Republican Party in 2022. One of the chief complaints during the midterms was the outsized role Trump continued to play within the GOP. Republican candidates were (accused of) running elections that amounted to loyalty tests and the Party was unable to coordinate strategy and keep tight control of the talk tracks like they normally do.
All of this is to say is that yes, a candidate’s team is primarily concerned about getting their guy elected, but I suspect in modern America the Parties have a bigger say in what a campaign does than we would assume.
It's weird that you say I'm underestimating the role the party plays in the campaign, and then offering as evidence the fact the GOP party apparatus couldn't do anything to influence the 2022 campaign.
The evidence of the last few cycles strongly suggests that incumbent Presidents have near total control over their parties, not the other way around. The Trump situation just about speaks for itself...just straight up installing his daughter-in-law at the head of the national party takes it to new absurdist heights. But don't count out Biden in this regard either; moving up SC in the primary was a big deal, and everything else the party has done has been in lockstep with Biden's interest. In particular the party has made exactly zero moves that suggest they have even considered exploring another nominee, let alone exert some kind of force on the campaign to keep "optionality" for some other candidate open.
But of course all of this is kind of tangential to the main thing about the Democratic Party and Some Other Nominee, which is that the whole concept falls apart when you try to attach a real name to it. None of the options commonly discussed actually poll any better than Biden. And all of them would start out with a party torn asunder by whatever happened that resulted in them being the nominee. That's doubly so for anybody not named Kamala Harris...which is a shame cause her polling looks worse than pretty much everybody else's. And all of that is leaving aside the miracle it would take to solve the collective action problem of picking the new nominee in the first place. So yeah...it's a pipe dream, and it always has been.
Yes, it's strange: he's acting like a man who knows with absolute certainty that factors external to the act of voting will guarantee his victory regardless of what the electorate wants. Luckily we have all been assured by the media that it is impossible for there to be election fraud in the US, and the media would never lie to us.
Yawn. Yeah, and the Chiefs projecting confidence going into the Super Bowl when the 49ers were the Vegas line favorites is proof the NFL is rigged. Shut up troll.
Everything in that comment and everything else you believe is wrong.
Thank you for your contribution.
It has the advantage over yours that it isn't fundamentally dishonest, stupid, and wrong.
I agree it may just point to them thinking they're in a strong position and wanting to be cautious on that basis, but if the Axios story is accurate then it does seem like they're in denial. The arguments from the Biden camp were not that they still have a lot of time and a good plan to overtake Trump. It was that the polls were just wrong and couldn't be trusted, and that he is currently more popular than they indicate.
Well, I suppose this is encompassed in "if the Axios story is accurate" but I would just say that a couple of "people familiar with the matter" blind paraphrases are not a whole lot to try to base such a fine distinction on. Certainly whatever those people said to Axios was much more detailed and nuanced than the bullet points version that came out the other end. And even their story closes out by noting that Biden is clearly well briefed on the actual polls, saying he "often goes deep into the cross tabs." So to the degree Biden and team think the polls are wrong or just not representative of the future situation, even Axios isn't claiming they're ignoring them or off in some other universe somehow.
Bottom line: that story tells us a lot more about how Axios (excellent proxy for DC conventional wisdom) likes to frame things than how the campaign actually views things. Every campaign ever that trailed in polls said things a lot like this. Republicans in particular always, 100% of the time, project certainty they're going to win anyway, including by directly saying the polls are wrong or biased for any/no reason. That's apparently never news, but a Democratic candidate thinking they're OK when they're 1 point behind in the RCP average 6 months out is incredible denial worth writing about!
Obviously we expect some public spin on the polls from the campaigns. It would be a huge blunder for any candidate or a spokesperson to publicly agree with polls showing them losing and I'd completely expect Biden or any other candidate to downplay the polls or claim they're not interested in them.
The more concerning part of the Axios story (again, assuming it's accurate) is that for Biden and his closest advisors, this is not just spin, it's what they actually sincerely believe even in private, and they are persuing a conservative campaign strategy as a result. The crosstab diving isn't much of a reassurance either and reads more like the desperate Republican poll unskewing of 2012 where they are just trying to sniff out anything positive, even if it's not with a representative sample.
Wow ok, so not only do you buy their framing uncritically, but when you read them say "the preceding blind quote wasn't just spin...we promise that's exactly what the team sincerely believes" you don't snicker automatically?
Seriously, it's like the reporter is going "no seriously they didn't even like wink or elbow me when they said it! Totally not spin!"
I did not buy their framing uncritically (hence the caveats about the accuracy) but your completely unnecessary condescension doesn't make me want to continue this any further.
Both are true. They believe that their standing will improve over time. They also explicitly say that they don’t believe the polls. See the below quote from Evan Osnos’s New Yorker piece on the Biden campaign. As others stated, the Axios piece similarly states their belief that the polls are wrong.
Behaving like a front runner because they believe they are currently ahead and doing so because they believe they will pull ahead in the future is a distinction without a different. The issue is that they have an intuitive theory of the campaign and find ways to contort data to support their intuition.
It’s also a very concerning failure of campaign tactics. Let’s say that they’re right and they have secret internal polling data that would convince all of us that they are way ahead. It’s still the best approach to message that they are behind. Energize donors, energize voters, and avoid complacency.
“A series of senior aides told me that they doubt Biden is trailing Trump as much as some polls have suggested. “Polling is broken,” one of them said. “You can’t figure out how to get someone on the phone.””
If he agrees and then walks away voters will see it for a ruse. If this was the case they could have just said we’re waiting fir the trial to wrap up
Your braindead Witch Trials have only made Trump more popular, and that will continue. Go watch MSDNC and cope all you want.
Low IQ troll.
I thought that too. The media and every left winged pundit would co-sign it as well.
That's makes sense.
First off, it does seem that Trump receives less scrutiny for his various gaffes than Biden does for similar missteps. I think this changes the game theory to some degree in the debate vs no debate decision. The upside for Biden from a Trump gaffe is lower than the upside for Trump from a Biden gaffe. Even if you think your candidate is a better debater and has a lower percentage chance of a severe gaffe, it still makes sense to minimize exposure because the incentive structure is -EV. This same incentive structure did not exist in the 2020 debates because Biden wasn't perceived to be senile at the time.
In addition, Democrats are now setting the terms for the debates, Republicans are in a responsive mode. Terms like no live audience and mics cut would seem to benefit Biden. It also effectively eliminates RFK from participation.
Finally, I believe it's possible that Democrats want to pursue a conservative debate schedule in fall because by then they plan to be trying to hit hard on Trump trials/abortion/whatever other narrative they might have in store for the final months prior to the election. If they have a gameplan already which they expect to poll well, why put the candidate in multiple disadvantageous situations with a chance to derail the media narrative they're pushing?
These are all extremely good points. The first one in particular is critical; lots of people (and especially Nate) have been hollering that Biden needs to be out in front of cameras more, and I've said for some time that this demand ignores the reality of how the media covers his interactions. There is plenty of material out there. And watching any Biden press conference or interview *in full* gives the clear impression that this is a guy who generally understands policy and government and thinks deeply about them. But you don't see or hear that reported...all the focus is on the few seconds when he forgot something or mixed up some words. The Biden team should assume that future media engagements will be covered the same way.
Any debate will likely most fairly be described as "Biden behaved as a perfectly normal, knowledgeable and competent but not very eloquent, politician...and Trump behaved like a raving lunatic who knows nothing about politics or policy, lies so constantly it's hard to tell whether he even sees a distinction, regularly spews hateful fearmongering, and can't really form sentences." But that's not how it will be described even if that's exactly what happens. The Biden team understands that and acts accordingly.
It becomes impossible to sustain the claim that Biden gets more scrutiny for gaffes when one considers that the media simply makes up “gaffes” for Trump that never even happened.
Look at this very thread, with people gullibly referencing the supposed Hannibal Lecter “gaffe”, which was just Trump making a sarcastic reference to him as the kind of mental patient he doesn't want as an immigrant, but the media pretended that Trump was praising him when the whole point of the reference was that he is archetypally bad. The media simply lied, changing the very direction of his words, and that was lapped up as a gaffe by the naïve. There were many such cases during his Presidency too, perhaps most often during the covid hysteria, such as the lie that he suggested people inject themselves with bleach.
Overall then it's not plausible to claim that Biden gets more scrutiny for gaffes when you observe that nearly all of the Trump “gaffes” are media confections.
Bwahahaha, yeah ok, that Hannibal Lecter thing was totally manufactured. You really need us all to hit the sweet spot of just enough context but not too much. Enough to say "well he mentioned Lecter because he was talking about mental patients immigrating" but not so much that we get all the way to "wait, maybe the more important thing is that Trump regularly falsely claims that other countries are conspiring to send all their mental patients to the US, and uses that bogus claim to bolster his calls for concentration camps." The Lecter parts were the funny part, but the context is at least as crazy.
I would encourage anybody who wonders whether Trump was actually making sense to go watch the whole speech. It's bonkers start to finish. And certainly the whole piece around "mental patients as illegal immigrants" was unmitigated lying fearmongering. The media just liked the Lecter parts because they're entertaining in a way his random lies aren't.
I don't disagree with you per se. To the extent that Trump was making a dubious factual claim—about foreign countries emptying their asylums into immigration—that is absolutely open to critique and fact-checking. But the media claims that he was “praising Hannibal Lecter”? That's just a lie by the media.
Btw you say that I “need you to hit the sweet spot” as if I am a Trump partisan trying to advocate for him in general. I'm not even an American, I'm just a neutral outside observer despairing at the American media blatantly lying, and doing so consistently, about a candidate for the Presidency who is also being persecuted by the legal system as if the Arsenal of Democracy is some Third World junta.
Yeah yeah, just a totally neutral observer. No politics at all, just so sad to see the legal system persecute a poor unfortunate lifelong criminal. How dare they put him on trial for a few dozen of his obvious crimes? He's running for President for chrissakes, and he only tried to overthrow the republic once so far!
You mean “obvious crimes” like a loan the lender agreed to, which he repaid in full, and the lender testified on his behalf at the trial that there was no problem with it and the whole proceeding was ridiculous? That kind of “obvious crime”?
Candidates for the Presidency suddenly being swamped with court cases for minor regulatory infractions going back decades is a characteristic hallmark of authoritarian regimes. You're letting your personal distaste for Trump block you from seeing that.
And of course I have politics, in my own country. The most recent political party I was a member of is the UK's centre-left Labour Party. Not exactly Trumpian. But I can see the situation in the US, and the Democrats' slide towards authoritarianism, under the pretext of “stopping Trump”, is clear.
"You mean 'obvious crimes' like a loan the lender agreed to, which he repaid in full, and the lender testified on his behalf at the trial that there was no problem with it..."
No...
I mean "obvious crimes" like telling the IRS your apartment is 3x the size it actually is.
I mean "obvious crimes" like stealing a giant trove of classified documents, storing it insecurely including in a bathroom, refusing to give it back when the archives asked, stiffing the DOJ on a subpoena for it, then giving some of it back and signing a sworn statement that it was all returned when it wasn't.
I mean "obvious crimes" like engaging in a multistate conspiracy to create "fake electors" in swing states to subvert the election, including coordinating with said electors to make fraudulent statements and forge documents.
I mean "obvious crimes" like soliciting corrupt behavior from Georgia state elections officials in another attempt to subvert the election.
I mean "obvious crimes" like directing illegal campaign expenditures on hush money payments and then creating fraudulent business records to cover it up.
I mean "obvious crimes" like refusing to let black people rent his apartments 50 years ago, or defrauding his university students, or all the times he stiffed contractors. Or lawyers.
Oh yeah, there's also all the rape.
So neutral that you repeat every single one of Trump's lying talking points.
The loan the lender agreed to after false pretenses. Let me explain what you are trying to say. If I ran a amusement part ride that is potentially dangerous and I lie to the regulators about where I got the parts, but I get caught before there is an accident, then I should not be prosecuted because there were no victims and all the passengers agreed to go on the ride. Or I just ignore speed limits to get an unfair advantage on my delivery company and bribe the cops to look the other way, then if I get caught I should be prosecuted because I didn't cause an accident and the customers said their parcels were delivered on time and the police was happy to be bribed. Trump took a risk with other people's money. This time it worked ok for him. During his multiple bankruptsies he did the same thing and stiffed his investors and lenders. Yet you think he should be allowed to keep doing that, because you want to vote for him.
You're not a neutral observer, you're a pathetic liar.
Another fine example in the media today of a made-up Trump “gaffe”: an intern reposted a fan-made video that quoted from Wikipedia about Bismarck's “unified Reich”, and the media are pretending that Trump was saying he wants to be Hitler. Because apparently Democrats are now the party of demonising foreign words as suspicious and alien? Do they even have any principles any more?
I agree that fairly frequently a Trump statement will be taken out of context to sound more ridiculous than it actually is for a nice headline.
Where I disagree is that I think it's actually an advantage for Trump. As Hunter mentions, the full context of what Trump says is rather extreme, but the focus is on his Hannibal Lecter joke, and he's able continue to claim (somewhat correctly) that you can't trust the media because they warp his words.
EDIT: Hunter wasn't actually inconsistent, someone else was. I still disagree with him on a bunch, but he was consistent.
But notice that Hunter went seamlessly from asserting that the praise for Lecter was genuine to saying that ackshually what was important was the wider context. His approach, deriving as it does from the media's, is non-falsifiable: whatever Trump does he will find cause to criticise it, and the actual particulars are so unimportant that he doesn't even flinch when he has to change story mid-flow.
Excuse me. I did not at any point assert that Trump was genuinely praising Hannibal Lecter. Please point out any place you think I did.
What I did say is that considering that whole piece of his rally in its full context, it is absolutely nutbar crazy. And I stand by that.
Let's pause for a second to take it all in: Trump says, regularly and having never produced any evidence, that psychiatrists in Latin America don't have any work anymore, because their countries are sending all their mentally ill to the US as illegal immigrants. Are you trying to say that's not an insane accusation?
Ah, you're right, it was someone else saying that: I take that back. That's what comes of trying to have political discussions when I should be working lmao.
Well I hear you on that, guilty myself. But the larger point is probably worth examining, cause really who is out there claiming straight up that he was being serious and saying he thinks Hannibal Lecter is a great person?
I have seen a few headlines that said he praised him. But not one of the stories underneath those headlines reported it as though he was seriously saying he thought Lecter is a great person. Most of them reported out that it was a new addition to his rally standard piece on criminals and mental patients as illegal immigrants. The ones I went and found at MSNBC and the like (in hopes of seeing what you're talking about) went further and broke down how crazy the whole thing is. But they didn't try to convince anybody he actually meant the Lecter thing...it was just a "how crazy is this" hook to hang stuff on.
Now I expect it's easy to find tweets that play it straight up like that. Or a comment here. But that hardly matters. And maybe if I searched hard enough I could find some story somewhere in real media that treats it that earnestly. But that's not the normal tone of coverage, even in leftwing media. So I think you've kinda got a strawman here.
It only becomes impossible for people who are dishonest to the core.
Biden does get more scrutiny for verbal gaffes, but he also gets more credit just for seeming competent. He got a lot of praise for his state of the union address, mostly just on the grounds for not coming across as senile.
One of the biggest things going against Biden is the perceptive that he is well and truly dysfunctional due to his age. If Bidens team believed that perception to be wrong, then they would benefit greatly from more debates. I think it's pretty clear that Bidens team does not have a great deal of confidence in him.
I think the gaffe value difference narrows somewhat for bipartisan events like debates. Under normal circumstances, full speeches and public appearances are generally only seen by committed partisans. Negative partisans will clip and reshare the gaffes, and which ones break through is more about which side has a better coordinated apparatus. On these kinds of events though, some people who don't normally pay much attention tend to tune in and there's not really any hiding bad moments from either side.
I agree to a point, but it depends on just how unaware the viewers are. "Is Biden too old?" is a major talking point which has been in the media for months and so viewers are going to be extra sensitive to anything that suggests that he is.
This isn't to say that Biden isn't old/doesn't look old. But if you took someone with absolutely no prior knowledge of Trump and Biden and let them view both candidates I think you'd get "wow, both of these guys are pretty old" and a comparison would be made with that as the baseline. Instead the baseline is "Biden might be too old."
But only one of them is fat and orange
Trump making "similar missteps"? You're joking, right? They're not even in the same galaxy.
Biden is incoherent even with a teleprompter and constantly exhibits spacial disorientation, to say nothing of constant falling and tripping. The poor guy has dementia, period. I know, because I have seen my father go through that.
Trump is a blowhard who is prone to exaggeration and bluster, but he is 100% cognitively there, whereas the other guy is not.
No comparison, at all.
Lying trash.
It reveals he fell right in to Trumps hands. Biden HAS to debate because he can only win. He can’t lose because he was already lost.
It’s essentially a Hail Mary. The economy is getting worse. The tech industry is shedding jobs. Red Lobster just closed over 50 locations along with dozens of other restaurants and other industries. The GDP has come to a crawl.
If you pay bills and don’t make over $300,000 a year you remember fondly how much better it was precovid.
Biden has zero successes to brag about to working class people.
If Trump is in a strong position, why is Trump wanting to debate? He didn’t debate during the primary to show he didn’t have to.
Trump wants to debate because his opponent is Joe Biden. There’s a real chance ol’ Joe refuses to shake Trumps hand and then tries to shake an invisible hand (again).
There’s a chance Biden says “illegal alien” (again) on stage and then walks it back (again) in reference to a murdered woman. He might sniff some young girls hair (again, again) on his way to the stage. Or he might fall on his way up again. Or not find his way off again.
Or Trump might screw another porn star the week before the debate and reaffirm that there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville
Because a debate solidifies his win. Biden will not be able to effectively debate unless his questions are rehearsed. That’s exactly what Trump wants America to see.
Yes, it was reported in "Potomac New" that on May 5tat two Middle Eastern men, who had illegal crossed the Southern Border, had enter the Marine Base at Quatico, VA, claiming to be Amazon staff delivering packages. When the guard stopped them, they sped off, but were stopped by the road barriers. Why didn't the national news outlet report this story? Had they not been stopped, could they have been carrying WMDs? What does this say about our open borders and the potential for terrorist attacks?
You right wingers do nothing but lie. The economy has made record gains, the DOW passed 40K. Red Lobster had crap food and a terrible business model.
It's just bizarre that the Biden is considered the only one at risk here given that Trump has in the last few days alone praised the "late, great Hannibal Lecter" and mistaken Jimmy Carter and Jimmy Connors from the campaign stump.
He was comparing Lector to released mental.patients illegally entering the United States from foreign countries.
Yeah, and apparently not just the ones from mental institutions, they're even sending some from insane asylums! I didn't realize those were different things, but Trump helpfully explained that insane asylums are "like mental institutions on steroids."
Anyway, you're justifying his bananas Hannibal Lecter riff by pointing to the context of his "other countries are emptying out their insane asylums across our boarders" riff...which is itself quite bananas. So I'm not sure that's really helping.
In his inartful way Trump may be on to something. There is a clear historical precedent in Cuba/Mariel where Castro emptied his prisons by shipping all the convicts off to the US to claim asylum. When Trump points out that a number of countries are seeing surprising drops in the populations of prisons and asylums the natural question is where have the inmates gone.
No, the natural question is "is any of that true?" because mostly things he says aren't.
Do you have evidence that Latin American psychiatric populations have experienced a sudden recent decline that's out of step with patterns elsewhere in the world?
Meanwhile knock it off trying to launder his baseless fearmongering through Tuckeresque "just asking questions" doubletalk. He didn't ask questions. He flatly asserted multiple times, falsely and without any evidence whatsoever, that there is a coordinated campaign in other countries to "release all [their] mental patients into the United States." He usually tells the story as something a doctor in one of those countries told him. One of those "sir" stories he loves to tell which are so transparently made up. It's just a lie.
"Bloodbath".
The issue is that you were deliberately misconstrued what he said. Now that you've been called put on it you want to talk about the issues?
Also, just an aside nobody outside your bubble knows what you guys are talking about when you say "bloodbath" like that's a whole sentence. It's kinda like how you all thought "Benghazi" was a killer indictment of Clinton contained fully in just one word, but the other 70% of America the whole time was like "uh Benghazi what?"
When did I misconstrue what he said?
But a number of countries are not seeing surprising drops in the populations of prisons and asylums. He's just pulling that out of his ass.
What does "a number of countries" mean? Japan? India? The real question is what's happening in places like Venezuela.
OK, so what's happening in places like Venezuela then? Knock off the innuendo...if you have evidence that ANY of this nonsense is true please let's see it.
If you watch the clips, he barely makes any effort to tie the two together. It's just a random aside that's seemingly tossed in, like a Family Guy cutaway joke. And, as Hunter points out below, it's all made-up nonsense!
So now you're admitting that you deliberately misconstrued what he said?
No. As I said, the Lecter aside comes off as a random throwaway. Even if he were trying to say "illegal immigrants = Lecter", the phrasing "late, great", "congratulations", "wonderful man" all make no sense. It's Trump's usual argle-bargle that has to get explained away later.
He was clearly making the point that criminally insane inmates like Lecter are entering the country illegally. Have you even listened to the tape?
OK but see the problem is that criminally insane inmates like Lecter ARE NOT entering the country illegally. He was lying, and demonizing immigrants, and saying weird things about Hannibal Lecter.
Once again, you're trying to thread an impossible needle. You want it to be a huge issue that somebody somewhere said something about the Lecter thing without tying it to his larger point...but you completely refuse to consider at all the fact that his larger point is a dangerous lie.
I'm guessing your DNC programming did not include a sarcasm and humor aspect. Hopefully, with advanced AI DNC bots, we will be able to get these features in the future.
"The media has mostly gone along with the White House narrative" Gee, I wonder why?
I'm equally shocked by the Biden people's sudden change on this: "Debates will just platform a racist election-denier" to "Why aren't you debating us, Donald?" in 5 minutes or less. So yes, clearly they're more worried than they're letting on.
However, regardless of Biden's problems unscripted (and they are many), he performed well in 2020. And Donald Trump has his own unscripted problems. Biden makes stuff up because he's senile and can't remember what he had for breakfast. Trump makes stuff up because he truly doesn't know or care what the truth is. Bottom line: neither of these guys are going to do well. And it's probably to both their advantages for debates to be early and therefore largely washed out long prior to voting.
Your theory about a pre-convention debate is a good one. I still believe Biden will not be the nominee.
>Biden makes stuff up because he's senile and can't remember what he had for breakfast. Trump makes stuff up because he truly doesn't know or care what the truth is.
Best summary of the two I've heard here. Sums up most of the other comments here as well, if you just listen to what most partisans say about the OTHER guy.
>Your theory about a pre-convention debate is a good one. I still believe Biden will not be the nominee.
I still have a lot of trouble buying this however, unless Biden shows some unmistakable sign of decline that is much worse than the worst we've seen so far. He appears totally confused at a debate, for example. Or he has a severe stroke. Otherwise, with every day that passes, the harder it is to move off the path of Biden as nominee.
Biden himself seems like a man who very much wants to run. People have been trying to dissuade him from running for a long time to no avail. And the nature of this sort of decline is that it generates lot of denial; he's going to become LESS aware of his shortcomings over time, not more. Meanwhile all the important voices in the Democratic Party have made it clear and invested their reputations in saying that in his present state, he's a great candidate. I don't see a path to profitably launching a coup against him unless he's basically a nonentity.
I hope you're right, Thomas, since I believe almost any Democrat not named Kamala Harris could defeat Donald Trump. And that's the problem for the Dems: their default backup is even less popular and more batty than their lead. But she's a black woman and therefore (by their own internal logic) can't be pushed aside for someone young and pretty and experienced like Gavin "Hairgell" Newsome.
You have late-stage TDS, you lunatic.
Trump destroys literally every Democrat he's polled against, but your small brain can't comprehend that he's a strong candidate.
I don't think it'd be that hard to call for more debates last minute if necessary. Just call your opponent a coward if they refuse all debates in October. I'm expecting Biden to perform well at the debates. I'm not sure how much Biden has degraded, but watching his speeches I don't think it's *that* badly. Meanwhile looking at Truth Social I think Trump has gone into a conspiracy echo chamber and will expose mainstream America to levels of insanity even greater than what he's said in the past.
Many early stage dementia patients have normal lucid moments and forgetful moments, the ratio of which can often seem random - though it deteriorates over time. I think most people don't think that Biden is completely senile, but are concerned about the possibility that he's heading that way and may have a "moment" during an important world crisis or delicate diplomatic event.
I agree that he's probably mostly okay, but it seems likely he's having real moments with memory problems and understanding. In a normal election with normal candidates, he wouldn't even be thinking of running and the people around him would work hard to keep him out. Think about the campaign commercials asking about whether we can trust our president to take a crisis call at 3am. Biden is definitely not the person everyone is hoping takes that call. Politics in the US have gone crazy since 2008, though, and many people are even more worried about Trump getting that call (even during normal business hours with lots of sleep!).
You touched on a point that Nate Silver nearly reached near the end of his column, while noting the Biden campaign's possible A+++ rated tactic of going with an early debate for its option value.
You pointed out, and most would agree, that Biden's cognition is in decline. We can debate about whether he is officially senile or his degree of decline, but everyone can see he's not as lucid as, say, in his 2008 campaign.
Hence the value of a June debate. He'll have three fewer months of decline on his back vs. at a second September debate. If he can yell at Trump as effectively as he yelled at his teleprompter at the State of the Union speech, he just might book an early win. Those odds can only decline going forward.
Personally the further I read of Nate's opinion on the 2020 election I just think he dislikes Biden, and dislikes the Democrats, and is trying to position himself as the smug "I told you so" pundit at the end of the election. There's also little downside: if Biden wins, who cares? Nate's position is not that different than before. If Biden loses he can propel himself further in the pundit realm.
What’s there to like about Biden’s performance as president?
For most people, including my upper-middle-class household, life has not improved in the past 3.5 years.
Then I look at Biden’s foreign policy and all I see if train wreck after train wreck.
Do I need to go into the border and the Biden admin’s never-ending attempts to find new ways to violate the 1st amendment via backroom deals with social media and search companies?
Even the CHIPs act was ruined by absurd DEI requirements.
We were promised responsible adults and instead we got Joe Biden and his merry band of activists and incompetent loyalists.
"For most people, including my upper-middle-class household, life has not improved in the past 3.5 years."
This is demonstrably false in every way we have to measure it. Real incomes are higher than pre-pandemic and so is employment. And when people are polled about *their* economic situation they are very positive right now. It's only when they're asked about "the economy" that their answers turn negative. And perhaps unsurprisingly, peek into the crosstabs and it's clear partisanship explains the whole effect. Both parties' views of the economy are skewed by who's in the white house, but the effect is much, much larger for Republicans.
Meanwhile the rest of your stuff is just a bunch of talking points. None of it bears any resemblance to reality and it's not really supposed to, so not much point rebutting it.
So many industries are having massive layoffs. Industries with well paying jobs.
The largest job growth is in government jobs, low paying hospitality jobs and health care.
Good paying blue collar jobs are not being created. Look it up. The economy does not with from “the middle out”.
Biden restructured corporate taxes, they raised prices to make up the losses and Biden taxes the middle class by default with inflation.
The working class is running from Democrats as fast as they can. Every polls shows it. The 2020 election showed it. Biden lost the working class and has lost many more with his anti middle class policies.
I expect Trump Deranged people to delusional but not it’s just denial of reality.
OMG just stop, we just posted our 40th consecutive month of positive job growth. During Biden's tenure the lowest quintile of the income distribution has had higher real income growth than any other segment. And inflation is currently lower than when Reagan gave the "Morning in America" speech.
Meanwhile the idea that the post-covid inflation spike is all due to Biden's policies (fictitious corporate taxes or otherwise) is pretty hard to square with the fact inflation was at least as bad in Europe at the same time.
Most of that was people going back to work after blue states overreacted to Covid.
Then for a short while the benefits of Trumps renegotiation of NAFTA was still having an effect on manufacturing but after the “Inflation Reduction Act” we have seen private sector hits left and right.
The job creation is not good paying jobs. Go to the department of labors site and see for yourself. It’s mostly Govt and low paying hospitality jobs. That’s the two largest growing industries.
The job market is horrible. Gen Z is on every social media platform talking about it. There’s no good paying jobs out there.
Even in blue states with insane minimum wage laws are losing because companies started closing or having less staff because of the laws.
It’s a wrap on Biden. It’s time for the adults to come back in to the room. He may have mean tweets but times were much better.
"Most of that was people going back to work after blue states overreacted to Covid."
Labor force participation has been *above* the precovid peak for 15 months now. During that time alone the economy added ~4M jobs. You are wrong.
"The job creation is not good paying jobs. Go to the department of labors site and see for yourself."
Stop following blatant falsehoods with "go look it up." I'm familiar with the actual BLS stats. They do not say this.
When you let in over a million people a year and create a few hundred thousand jobs a year, that's not a net positive.
And even then the figures show that the growth in “jobs” is entirely in part-time and casual jobs, including double-counting people who have to take multiple jobs to take ends meet.
Now you're just making stuff up. It's a few hundred thousand jobs created per *month* not per year...there were 3M more people employed at the end of 2023 than the start. And your assertion that all jobs growth is part time and casual is simply false.
The stats aren't that complicated: Biden came into office with unemployment at 6.4%, got it under 4% before his first year was finished, and it has stayed there ever since. Meanwhile the labor force participation rate among prime age workers is the highest it's been in 2 decades. The jobs situation in this country is excellent right now, that's a plain fact.
It's demonstrably true in almost every way we measure it that doesn't involve massaging the numbers and eliminating categories that create inconvenient numbers.
From March of 2021 through February of 2023 inflation significantly outpaced wage growth, and those prices have never come down. Since February of 2023 wage growth has slightly outpaced inflation, but that doesn't account for the continued rise in prices that wipes out every bit of wage gain.
Thanks for showing your economic illiteracy by not understanding that price rises are cumulative, and rises in the cost of fuel and energy make the cost of everything else go up.
Food, fuel, electricity, rent, cost of borrowing have all risen dramatically. The overinflated housing prices lead property taxes to go higher, and that valuation adds a couple of hundred per month to your home insurance bill.
Want to buy a car? Have fun with those interest rates blowing up your monthly payment.
Want to buy a house? Better have mommy and daddy putting down a huge cash deposit if you want to outbid Blackrock.
But no, the proles need to stop believing their lying eyes and their lived experience and trust the economic data presented by the Biden admin. That guy doesn't have a track record of lying about his accomplishments.
You're smoking rope:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/trump-versus-biden-the-substantial-fall-in-real-wages-for-most-workers-under-biden.html
You can blather about on this but you make zero sense. My life has improved dramatically from being able to actually leave my house and travel, with vaccines which were free and easy to get: Covid is gone! That's a huge accomplishment, which Biden accomplished. My income is up, my company is doing well, the economy has recovered and compared to our peer countries we're doing dramatically better than you could expect. He also signed the most substantive gun safety bill in years.
Biden also managed to completely avoid a financial crisis to the point people completely forgot it happened.
From a personal standpoint: gay marriage is now both constitutionally protected by the Supreme Court, and legislatively protected by Congress. That's a big deal in my book.
Foreign Policy has been a dramatic improvement; our alliances are in far better shape, he's currently got Russia stuck in a quagmire in Ukraine (and destroying the Russian military complex at a minimal cost). This is helping restore American industrial preparedness by creating a ton of demand for American weapons. We're making more artillery shells than we have in years.
Investment in American manufacturing is also increasing, entirely due to the CHIPS act and Biden's infrastructure bill. He also made the largest investment in green manufacturing to live up to our climate commitments.
So yea, while I don't like all that's happened, I really don't have that much complaints. Your first amendment violation complaint is laughable.
Are you a real account?
Because almost everything you just said is inaccurate.
The vaccines that didn’t stop the spread of Covid-19 were rolled out in December of 2020. Biden had nothing to do with that.
If you lived in a state governed by sane people, you could leave your house, eat at restaurants, and go to the gym by late May of 2020.
Ukraine is currently getting crushed. The Russian economy beat growth projections this year and they’re currently out producing all of NATO when it comes to war material. Particularly artillery shells and anti-air missiles.
The CHIPS act has failed because they could not resist putting in unworkable DEI requirements and the chip manufacturers are looking to potentially build in Germany, Vietnam, Poland, and Spain instead. It's easier than dealing with federal DEI compliance officers who don't understand that most of the people capable of building bleeding edge technology products are straight white and Asian males.
You seem to believe all the talking points the Biden admin has published, hook, line, and sinker. That’s why I’m asking if you’re a real person.
If your life is going awesome, great for you. For most people, life is a much bigger struggle now than it was pre-covid, and Biden’s policies have exacerbated their suffering.
You're just a fool then
Good luck
A fool would be someone who listens to a politician's PR team and believes their portrayal of the politician's performance.
I get it. No one wants to admit they voted for an incompetent man, despite having 44 years (now 48) of poor track record to judge him by beforehand. Still, most of those people who plan on voting for Biden again aren't big enough fools to go around posting his campaign team's horseshit talking points about his nonexistent accomplishments.
Voting for an idiot doesn't make you an idiot. Repeating the words of the idiot does, though.
Horrible response. You don’t sound like an adult who pays bills.
Also you can thank Mike Pence for the vaccine. He ran the operation.
Biden didn’t get rid of COVID no more than Donald Trump spread. Covid is still here. It just did what all viruses do.
Wow that response was the most delusional thing I have ever read on here.
It's called an "anecdote" or colloquially "anecdata". There's always a minority but I would guess that majority opinion is far different given the polling.
He uses his critical thinking ability unlike a lot of people on the left. The left literally smears people who aren’t a part of the hivemind and dares says anything that offends it.
It throws the left for a loop that someone can think independently and be on the left. The left wants everyone to think in unison.
"The left literally smears people who aren’t a part of the hivemind and dares says anything that offends it."
This is quite impressive projection.
The right disagrees on a lot of things. Ukraine and Israel. No abortion vs abortion with common sense restrictions. Trumps vaccine vs those that don’t trust multi billion dollar pharmaceutical companies.
Not the left though. They just tap in to the hivemind to see what their belief is this month and how mad they should be about it.
Still projecting.
You're kidding right? The democratic party is literally a big tent party. The exact opposite of what you're describing.
That's an interesting claim: could you list some of the policy areas where you believe that the entire right-wing, stretching from staid Boomercons to the extremely online alt-right, has hivemind-like total uniformity of opinion but the left allows a free and open debate?
Please re-read what you wrote...
"the entire right-wing, stretching from staid Boomercons to the extremely online alt-right"
"the left"
...and tell me why I should think you're engaging in good faith.
I don't mind adjusting the phrasing: I wrote it as I did because your claim was about the right being part of a hivemind, not the left. Try this:
That's an interesting claim: could you list some of the policy areas where you believe that the entire right-wing, stretching from staid Boomercons to the extremely online alt-right, has hivemind-like total uniformity of opinion but the entire left-wing, stretching from normie centre-left dads to radical socialists, allows a free and open debate?
Can you provide any examples? If not, my suggestion is that there is no projection going on, and your claim was false.
So you agree that "both sides" are in actuality a wide spread of various identifying groups with varying policy ideas and beliefs and therefore by definition not hive-minds? And thus you also agree that the premise of the original comment is false?
You have evidence for this ?
The banal explanation is Biden is an arrogant politician who thinks that these are the same people who never liked him. They didn’t like him in 2008, wanted Obama to replace him in 2012. Didn’t want him to run in 2016, counted him out in 2020, and then dismissed his plans to be a bipartisan deal maker after he won.
Biden was a good VP who helped his president win. He probably beats Trump in 2016 had they backed him, he DID win in 2020 despite their misgivings, and HAS been a successful president in spite of all these pundits saying he was going to fail. Biden has always viewed himself as the underdog nobody liked so it’s unsurprising to me that he thinks so now.
Now, that doesn’t mean I think his strategy is good or that he’s being wise. I don’t think that, but do I believe this malarkey that Biden is actually scared to debate Trump, they’re trying to hide him, etc? No. I don’t. I think that’s hyperbole and silliness on Nate’s part. He isn’t alone.
Gore and Kerry were better candidates than Bush and they lost. Hillary 2008 was much better than Trump but I believe she was sick in 2016 and so she was limited as a candidate…but she still should have won based on the fumes of the Obama presidency. Just because Democrats nominate a better candidate than Republicans doesn’t mean they will win the race.
And as a follow up. The reason why Biden hasn’t interviewed with the NYT is because he dislikes them and think they’re being petty elitist jerks. I don’t think it has anything to do with fear
I don't think he particularly likes him, but I expect he still wants him to win (or at least for Trump to lose). His writing has been negative, but the angle always reads like he's concerned rather than happy about it
This is exactly my read. Certainly Nate is on record as a pretty solidly Democratic voter, though his policy views are more idiosyncratic than just down the line mainstream D. He clearly doesn't like Biden as a candidate, and that's fine. Biden has real weaknesses, no doubt about it.
That said, I have begun to wonder whether Nate's genuine concern has started to shade into concern trolling, and it has occurred to me more than once that he might be at least in part positioning himself. The cynic in me suspects he figures in a Biden loss he will have a nice stock of "I told you so" for sale, whereas in a Biden victory there will always be plenty of "Thank heavens they listened to me" to go around.
But of course none of that is mutually exclusive. I think Nate believes what he says, and he thinks that if they do what he recommends Democrats will have a better chance of winning.
No mention at all of RFK, Jr.? That's who both candidates fear.
RFK's recent video - narrated by Woody Harrelson - got 34 million views - and it was shadow-banned by Facebook. Aaron Rodgers just did a 2-hour interview with Tucker Carlson where 20 percent of his comments are Rodgers bragging about Kennedy ... and that video already has more than 24 million views on X.
So, a political candidate with the last name Kennedy - someone that tens of millions of Americans are clearly very interested in - and who is doing better than any independent since Ross Perot in the polls - can't even be mentioned in a debate story.
What a great "democracy" we have here. (CNN and ABC are real big on promoting "democracy.")
I mean, a bunch of porn bots "viewing" a video doesn't say a lot.
The Biden campaign specifically said "No RFK" as a condition for the debates.
Those aren't "porn bots" that are watching those videos. Those counts include many of my Substack subscribers. For example, This article on Rodgers was very popular.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/aaron-rodgers-our-super-star?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Are you claiming 34 million readers? If not then this is an irrelevant point.
Whatever your numbers of readers actually are, they are miniscule in comparison to the number of fake accounts that "view" and spread misinformation on Twitter. Which is such common knowledge combating it was a specific point in the reasoning of the current owner buying the company.
That alleged misinformation that was spread on Twitter was actually important truths. The vaccines did NOT stop infection or spread. They are not "safe" to everyone (even the NY Times now admits this). There was no "pandemic of the unvaccinated." Kennedy said all of this and so did I. (I've been banned and shadow-banned just like Kennedy). Even if some of those 34 million views were "bots," all of them weren't or most of them weren't. I watched the interview. I'm a real person and was counted as such.
Nate believes in polls, or some polls. Take a couple of polls of American citizens and ask respondents if they think RFK, Jr. should be allowed in the presidential debate. Don't ask CNN's owners or the two candidates of the two political parties. Ask a sample of American citizens ... you know, the people who make up a "democracy."
"The vaccines did NOT stop infection or spread. They are not "safe" to everyone (even the NY Times now admits this). There was no 'pandemic of the unvaccinated.'"
So three claims, and three statements so misinformed as to be not unreasonably declared false.
You might want to take Nate's "bubble" claim to heart beyond clearly believing it about everyone else.
He should be included and I think he could hurt Trump in some places.
Sure, it's Trump he'd hurt even though it's the Biden team that made “no third parties” a pre-condition of doing any debates at all.
If RFK would hurt Trump, the Biden team would be all for giving him the oxygen of publicity.
RFK's campaign no doubt hurts Trump and Biden in that he would take away voters for both candidates. Who he'd hurt more is up for (no pun intended) debate.
But this doesn't matter. All that should matter is that he is a serious candidate who already has significant support. He'd probably get a lot more support if he could just present his ideas in a nationally-televised debate (against a man who has dementia and another candidate who just specializes in juvenile insults).
Serious candidate? He’s not a serious person. Even his family thinks he’s an embarrassment.
He wrote two best-selling books, each more than 400 pages and each with more than 2,200 footnotes. That's a serious person to me. He started a non-profit (CHD) based on seriously-held principles and convictions. He's filed scores of lawsuits and represented hundreds of plaintiffs in environmental lawsuits, Covid lawsuits and censorship lawsuits. That takes a serious person.
Running for president as an independent takes a very serious person as there are 1,000 hurdles that have put in front of him and he's still making progress.
It's true most of his family wants to disown him, but how does that prove he's not serious or that he is an "embarrassment"? What if he is right and they are wrong?
The fact he did all these things - knowing most of his family members would consider him an embarrassment - speaks highly of his character and courage. Wouldn't it have been easier to NOT fight for the things he's fighting for? Taking the road less travelled isn't always easy.
Plus, regarding myriad Covid issues, He was right on everything he said and his family members were wrong. So was Fauci, Birx et al.
Being a prolific, best-selling writer doesn’t mean a whit to me about being a serious person. The author of The Secret isn’t a serious person, they just sold snake oil to rubes.
Many of his “seriously-held” beliefs are falsifiable. Believing things that are demonstrably false doesn’t make someone a serious person - quite the contrary.
Running for president takes money - he wasn’t leaping those hurdles himself.
He used his diagnosis of a brain parasite to claim in a divorce case that his earning power was greatly diminished due to memory loss and other neurological issues. Yet he now claims to be perfectly mentally fit to be president. These are not the actions of a serious person.
I won’t engage with discussions about COVID or vaccine science, because we are unlikely to agree what is factual on those topics.
I remain unconvinced on his seriousness as a person. If his last name weren’t Kennedy, he’d just be a random conspiracy theorist. His name recognition gives him a platform.
You can't write books as complex and dense as The Real Anthony Fauci and The Wuhan Cover-up without being a serious person IMO. You might not agree with his conclusions, but that was extremely serious research. He wasn't just making random claims or stating opinions. He cited credible sources over and over and developed his arguments. His family, that thinks he's an embarrassment, probably didn't even read the books. They haven't spoken to the thousands of mothers who think their children were harmed by vaccines. Kennedy has. He once didn't believe this, but as a serious person, he listened, did his own research and changed his views. Whether his siblings or cousins disagreed with him or not didn't matter.
(Galileo probably had family members who were embarrassed by him. Socrates, I'm sure, had family members who told him, "Hey, man, stop asking those type questions.")
Future historians will tell us if Kennedy was right or not. So far, nothing he's said has been debunked.
What we need is a big study of the Amish and see how many of the Amish died from Covid or any of the diseases they are not innocculated against.
We need a real debate on topics we're told are off-limits to debate. I'm leery of people who are not willing to debate. Fauci wouldn't debate Kennedy, probably for the same reasons Biden and Trump won't either.
I think RFK might benefit from *not* being on stage with these two, the rate things are going. We will see.
I’d love to see Kennedy invited. I think Trump would welcome it. No way Biden would. Kennedy is too far left for Biden to debate. He would take so much support from Biden after the debate.
I am not an rfk guy but he should be included, just read he is the Texas ballot . That alone means 10,000s may 6 figure votes . Let people see and decide
He needs to be polling at 15%. He’s like at 9% I believe. He won’t get one electoral vote. Having said that I agree.
The 15% rule belonged to the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization that this deal explicitly replaces with a private agreement between Biden and Trump that specifically excludes the possibility of including a third party candidate, no matter how they’re polling in the upcoming months. That’s the real story Nate is ignoring. These two candidates are running on a platform of the other being an existential threat to democracy, and yet the one thing they can agree on is that they’d rather people not have a third option. When it comes to the actual norms that define our politics, Trump hasn’t changed a thing.
"These two candidates are running on a platform of the other being an existential threat to democracy, and yet the one thing they can agree on is that they’d rather people not have a third option."
I mean...blame James Madison? It's not like the logic of spoilers is some kind of grand conspiracy. Biden is absolutely right that JFK is a threat, 0% because JFK might win, 100% because JFK might throw the election to Trump. There's no contradiction there...they think Trump is a mortal threat to democracy and they think JFK might help get him elected.
CNN, which I believe is hosting the June debate, says that they will be abiding by the old CPD rules of polling at 15% and on the ballot in enough states to conceivably win in the electoral college. ABC, which is hosting the September debate, has not disclosed the rules for inclusion yet.
One of the conditions that the Biden camp put on the debates was no third party candidates.
The WSJ is reporting that both networks are requiring that candidates receive 15% support in 4 national polls and be on the ballot in enough states to reach 270 electoral votes. That currently excludes Kennedy and I don't know if that was a stipulation of the Biden campaign but it is possible Kennedy could meet those metrics before the September debate
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/biden-proposes-presidential-debates-with-trump-but-without-debate-commission-ccb58515?mod=mhp
PS I’m not really an RFK guy either
If he pulled in 9 percent without being the debates or on the ballots of every state it would be an achievement
Trump literally posted on Truth Social yesterday that he would have no issue with RFK attending the debate, but Orange Man Bad must always be the narrative.
I haven't seen that. I'll check it out. If he did say that, it was probably for appearances sake ... because he knows it's not going to happen.
There's nothing stopping him from debating Kennedy 1-on-1. In fact, Kennedy just challenged Trump to a debate. It turns out they are both speaking at a libertarian event and so they are going to be in the same town at the same time - go ahead and have a debate.
Why would he have a 1v1 debate? It's stupid and pointless. You just have TDS. Trump said he has no problem with RFK being in the June debate, so go cry for Biden and his goons instead of crying about Trump.
Trump might have said, "I have no problem with Kennedy being in the debate," but I don't believe that for a second. Biden's not going to grill him about the lockdowns or the warp speed "vaccines" - because Biden supported (and continued) the lockdowns and, if you haven't noticed, is a huge fan of the "vaccines."
In contrast, Mr. Kennedy did not support the lockdowns and is not a big fan of the Covid vaccines and would have challenged Mr. Trump on why he thought both were so necessary. That inevitable debating scenario would be a nightmare for Trump as he would have no good answers.
Kennedy would score points on the trillions of dollars flushed down the toilet and the massive inflation that resulted from Trump and Biden's Covid policies. And he'd score points with anyone who still cares about civil liberties. Etc. Etc.
The last thing Trump wants is RFK, Jr. on a debating stage. That's also the last thing Biden wants and, apparently, Biden set the terms of this debate.
1. Your 'MUH BOTH GUYS BAD' argument falls flat when Trump has no opposition to your guy being in the debate.
2. RFK was not a relevant political party until recently.
3. Trump was against vax mandates. Trump didn't force the vaccine on anybody it was not mandatory unlike the democrats that tried to push vax mandates everywhere. Trump pushed for an end to the lockdowns. Also, you're acting as if the President has control over such wide-ranging policies when he doesn't. If if Califoania wanted to have lockdowns for 10 years, there's not much Trump could have done about it outside of a drawn-out lawsuit that would have ended only years later.
4. Trump left office with 1.4% inflation; he had nothing to do with the mass inflation caused by Biden's out-of-control spending and his psychotic proxy war in Ukraine.
5. Trump's COVID bill was to save jobs and help Americans get through the pandemic, which worked. Biden's reckless spending after overheating the economy didn't start going up until Biden's deranged bills passed.
Yeah, likely not an RFK voter, and I don't think either candidate is actually "afraid of him" in the sense that RFK might win, but I do think he should be on the stage.
RFK has no shot to actually win because the mainstream media on both the right and the left will NEVER give him a fair platform or really any coverage at all.
But I think the left is underestimating RFK’s appeal to Center-Right voters, especially suburban soccer moms in those Midwest swing states.
Based on the recent primaries, there’s clearly a large contingent of Republicans that really don’t want to vote for Trump and RFK would/will earn some of those votes, purely on the basis that he isn’t Trump.
IF i vote in this election, and that’s a big if, it will be for RFK, simply on the basis that he isn’t Trump or Biden.
"Never-Trump" and "Never-Biden"? :-)
I get it. Party realignments often result in weird 3rd party candidates. I think RFK is kind of a blue-blood kook personally, but I don't dislike the guy. However, I expect once this realignment shakes out (unless the GOP balks and nominates Nikki Haley or someone else from the old fusionist coalition in 2028) they will all fade away.
Ross Perot managed to eke out a double digit percentage in 1992 on the same basis: the evil empire was gone, the world was in flux, the parties were scrambling, and there were 2 weak candidates. But his Reform Party never went anywhere because the 2 mainstream parties adjusted to new the political reality (Clinton's famous "triangulation") The GOP and the Dems aren't idiots. They can both read the writing on the wall (although probably only 1 of them knows what "the writing on the wall" refers to.)
The right-wing media gave RFK all the spotlight he asked for, but he's a rogue leftist, so he only showed why he shouldn't get support.
I’m with you on the “practice run debate in June” theory: if it goes poorly, he drops out - as he should have done last fall.
A nine point drop in support for Biden between 2020 and 2024 - which is where the polls are now, and have been, for months- is not consistent with another Electoral College victory. As crazy as a contested convention might be, the Dems are entering Hail Mary territory. We haven’t had a race like this in more than 100 years, so an exceptional move in an exceptional election does actually make some sense.
Good analysis. I wonder if there’s some real chance for upside in the Biden camp though, and they see a chance to play offense instead of just defense.
A couple weeks ago(?) I saw a clip of Trump at a rally praising(?) Hannibal Lector. This is odd because 1) he’s fictional 2) he’s a murderous character. I mean, Trump has always shot from the hip and said odd things but that clip felt like it was more bizarre than we are used to.
I’ve come to believe that while Biden did get a lot of press about being old and senile, Trump may be getting there too and no one realized it because he’s loud and still presents as more alpha/masculine. If the gaffes are big enough, we may get something akin to a “McConnell freezing at the podium” type mental moment from Trump that the Biden camp could crystallize until the ejection.
Are the odds small? Yes. But who knows.
How many recent mainstream media hoaxes did you still believe are true?
- Russia Collusion
- Trump called neo-nazis “fine people”
- Jussie Smollett
- Bubba Wallace garage pull
- Covington Kids
- Governor Witmer kidnapping plot
- Kavanaugh rape
- Trump pee tape
- COVID lab leak was a conspiracy theory
- Border Agents whipped migrants
- Trump saved nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago
- Steele Dossier
- Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan
- Trump said drinking bleach would fight COVID
- Muslim travel ban
- Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation
- Andrew Cuomo best COVID leadership
- Trump built cages for migrant kids
- Austere religious scholar
- Trump overfed Koi fish in Japan
- Build Back Better will pay for itself
- Trump tax cuts benefited only the rich
- Cloth masks prevent COVID
- SUV killed parade marchers
- Trump used tear gas to clear a crowd for a bible photo op
- Don’t Say Gay was in a bill
- Putin price hike
- Ivermectin is a horse dewormer and not for humans
- Mostly peaceful protests
- Trump overpowered secret service for wheel of “The Beast”
- January 6 was an insurrection
- BYU students hurled racist remarks at a Duke volleyball player
- Trump mocked a reporters disability
- Bloodbath Hoax
I say this as a friend, you may need to touch grass.
I posted my comment at 5:41. You posted yours at 5:50. Which means a couple of things: you, in 9 minutes or less, were able to pull 33 media hoaxes (some of which were legitimate hoaxes!!!) straight from the dome. I don’t even get the wordle in 5 minutes. I get less words Boggle then you get media hoaxes, in less than 9 minutes sometimes. OR you have a list that you just spam post on Substack OR you’re a bot?
Truthfully, any of the three are FASCINATING. I simultaneously want you to stop responding out of concern for your mental health but simultaneously also want you to continue to respond because I need to know more about you.
It's none of those, but instead a fourth option. This is a very well-known list of anti-Trump media hoaxes, particularly associated with the popular cartoonist Scott Adams. Anyone who knows that (most people on the online right, I imagine) could find the list on Adams' social media and copy-paste it here in far less than 9 minutes. And it's not just “spam” because it's directly relevant to the discussion.
So you have to reply with ad hominem instead of responding to the points? Whether or not this guy is terminally online doesn't make any of them less true
It makes no sense arguing with the figments of someone else's imagination.
Maybe he's just smarter than you.
ER, thanks for that. Everyone needs a reminder of just how divorced from reality the media has become. Seeing al these all in 1 place is truly terrifying.
I heard something yesterday that the decline in media truthfulness and objectivity may be related to the change from an advertiser to a subscription revenue model. 30 years ago, the NY Times cared mostly about keeping advertisers happy -- subscribers were secondary. Saks 5th Ave wants lots of eyeballs on its ad. And ideally a diverse set of eyeballs that is a cross-section of New York. But today's NY Times derives 2/3rds of its revenue from subscriptions instead of advertising, and thus they now care more about keeping subscribers happy. How do you do that? You stop trying to appeal to a broad, city-wide set of eyeballs who just want the news and focus on appealing to those who are willing to pay for what you say. The big, broad tent goes away. And a narrow but wealthier and more ideologically committed tent takes its place.
This was the basic story that Nellie Bowles told yesterday in a radio interview. I'm not sure this is accurate, but when I heard it yesterday, I thought it was an interesting idea. And Nellie is one who would know.
No, no, don’t thank ER for that comment. Your comment is fascinating Brian, and makes me think. ER’a comment was diarrhea of the keyboard.
And this isn’t a hoax. There are many media hoaxes, several ER listed. But I heard Donald Trump say, verbitam, “The late, great Hannibal Lector is a wonderful man”. Fictional people can’t be “late”. I can be “late”, you can be “late”, fictional people cannot be “late”
He was comparing Lector to released mental.patients illegally entering the United States from foreign countries.
Oh, Sean, I wasn't commenting on your claim about Trump at all. I don't doubt that he said it. It's exactly the kind of thing Trump would say, either as a metaphor or just in ignorance. To be fair though, I tend to cut politicians of both parties a lot of gaffe slack on the basis that most of us, given microphones in our faces for 12 hours a day, would probably say some stupid stuff. I don't think the GOP's constant harping on Biden's gaffes is really fair either: the man is 80+ years old.
I do think seeing the list of exaggerations or outright lies that Trump Derangement Syndrome has led previously respectable journalists to embrace all in 1 place is useful though, if only as a reminder that these people should not be relied upon for anything important.
He was comparing Lector to released mental patients illegally entering the United States from foreign countries. He's accusing foreign countries of pulling a Cuba/Mariel boat lift and emptying their jails and insane asylums by shipping the inmates to the US.
Essentially "Remember the great Hannibal Lector? What a guy! Now there's millions of them in the US from other countries who have entered illegally."
Ah, so that sounds more like Trump. Context matters, Sean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL0OWcvaG_Y In other words, this is another "bloodbath" hoax.
To be clear, Trump is making all of this up about prisons and asylums being down so other countries can ship illegals to America. I know of nothing that indicates this is true. But that's Trump. People take him literally but not seriously and instead he needs to be taken seriously but not literally. I wish he wouldn't do this sort of stuff, but that's who he is.
Yes, and the entire point of the anecdote is that Lecter is a very bad person. The ludicrous pretence that Trump was praising him is only sustainable for someone who hasn't seen the full clip. Which the media has, but which they know, through selective editing, they can stop the majority of people from seeing.
"Watch our tribute to the late, great Luke Skywalker":
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/secrets-star-wars-last-jedi-special-effects-one-major-characters-return-lukes-huge-moment-spoilers-151545529.html
I'm shocked to learn that Luke wasn't fictional!
This is a perfect example of the genre. Of course fictional people can be referred to as “late” within the context of their setting. If I say, “James Kirk is the Captain of the Enterprise”, it would be embarrassing for you to say, “fictional people cannot be captains”. “Romeo died by drinking poison”—“fictional people cannot die or drink”. “The cow jumped over the moon”—“fictional animals cannot jump”. It'd be ludicrous to say such things. You know this, I'm sure of it. So why disengage your critical faculties to make an equally embarrassing response to Trump's perfectly anodyne comment? It does you no credit at all.
It's not that he can't be dead because he's fictional. It's that he isn't dead in any of the relevant works of fiction. If you said "James Kirk is the captain of the Nebuchadnezzar" the reactions of Trekkies and Matrix fans everywhere would be swift and just.
Oh, is that all people are complaining about? That he got the details of the fiction wrong? Oh, that's a lot less serious. As someone who hasn't watched any of the franchise either I assumed he died at the end too.
As my father used to say about my mother, "Seldom right but never in doubt".
If I have to an 'bombshell report" from Rachel Maddow I'm going to vomit.
Our modus operandi with all elite media reports out to be shame on you the first
time, shame on me after that.
Coo coo
Coo coo
You'll be interested to know that Trump was not praising Hannibal Lecter, and that you have fallen victim to a media hoax. The entire point of his reference to Lecter was that Lecter is archetypally bad, and not the kind of person anyone would want to immigrate to their country. So the media has directly and deliberately changed the entire direction of Trump's comments through selective editing. As a rule, if you watch the full context of Trump's remarks, not just the short edited sections played by the media, you will find that this is usually the case.
It wasn’t one rally. He “praised” Hannibal Lector at three different rallies (that I saw on tape).
He was comparing Lector to released mental patients illegally entering the United States from foreign countries. He's accusing foreign countries of pulling a Cuba/Mariel boat lift and emptying their jails and insane asylums by shipping the inmates to the US.
Essentially "Remember the great Hannibal Lector? What a guy! Now there's millions of them in the US from other countries who have entered illegally."
He was comparing Lector to released mental.patients illegally entering the United States from foreign countries.
Here is the latest from his rally in New Jersey “He often times would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? ‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner,’ as this poor doctor walks by. ‘I’m about to have a friend for dinner.’ But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations, the late, great Hannibal Lecter…”
So try again
You're just demonstrating your own bias and dishonesty by not including the rest of the speech.
Feel free to post the transcript to the three (at least) speeches.
Strong agree on mediocre hand. The absolute strength of the Biden hand as deployable in a debate weakens over time with reasonable confidence (major free variable there would be some exogenous event that strengthens Biden, e.g. an unexpectedly quick Israeli "success" in Gaza that reduces the salience of those events for internal factional performativity in the US).
What I am far less sure about is the expected absolute strength of the Trump hand** in a debate versus time: from a variance perspective, what is the time dependency of the odds of Trump saying something so unhinged, even by Trumpian "standards", that some tiny fraction of the Trump disliking but "anything other than a Democrat" double haters break a bit further loose from voting Party of Trump.
** references to sizes of Trump's various appendages and his sensitivity regarding the same not obviously relevant to the extended poker metaphor, although if Trump were involved he would presumably have some factually challenged insult to deploy on the topic.
I might be wrong, but I think you're all reading too much into this.
I had a close relative with dementia. I keep noticing how much Biden sounds like him. The random bursts of anger, the same verbal hiccups, the propensity for making up random facts and numbers and claiming them with absolute confidence, even when they are clearly impossible... There's no way they can put him somewhere where he needs to answer questions off the bat - unless there's a drug combination that temporarily works a miracle (which sounds impossible to me, but I'm not a doctor).
So, barring any miraculous medical intervention, the questions will have to be determined in advance, and Biden will be getting a text feed on a screen somewhere to read. I assume the only reasons they don't want many debates are that they are worried that 1) Trump or somebody secretly disloyal might see the feed and tell about it, or that 2) Biden will wander off script and start talking on his own, which is a real possibility in his current state. None of this would probably be a dealbreaker to anyone who is currently planning to vote for Biden despite all the evidence of his mental decline, so they can take the risk, even if they prefer to slightly minimize it.
Let's game this out.
Conditions that the Biden camp put on the debates:
1. No live audience
2. Cut the microphones off when one candidate's time is up
3. No third party candidates
4. Only ABC, CNN, CBS or Telemundo allowed to host the debates
Conditions that the Trump camp put on the debates:
None
Typically the side that has to swallow all the demands from the opposition while getting none of their own is desperate. Of course, Trump is leading in the polling. Shouldn't Biden be the desperate one?
My conclusion is that Trump is desperate to get Biden on the stage because Biden has aged so drastically that his team believes there is a real chance for a fatal mistake from the incumbent.
I also conclude that Biden's team believes the exact same thing. Getting rid of the live audience and muting the microphones is a gambit designed to minimize distractions to Biden and try to head off any "senior moments".
It's not true that the Trump camp had no conditions for the debates -- they had already rejected the traditional commission on presidential debates model.
In 2020? How is that relevant?
The RNC pulled out in 2022 for this cycle.
I have no idea what you're talking about. What office was Trump running for in 2022?