Notations From the Grid (Special Edition): Out & About in America
Our team pulled together a sampling of the week in America with thoughts courtesy of Crooked Media, the Coop Scoop & Heather Cox Richardson:
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Coop Scoop -- Biden: "Statesman and Politician. Hero and Fool"
The somewhat normal press conference not enough in these abnormal times
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July 11, 2024
By Marc Cooper
Let’s get right to the point. Joe Biden’s NATO talk and “big boy” press conference came off as fairly normal, boring, routine presidential stuff and if this took place a year ago there would be no controversy over Joe (not even confusing Putin for Zelensky and Trump for Harris).
And that means this was another FAIL. We cannot afford normal and routine when we are 119 days away from the possible election of an authoritarian idiot who is still running somewhat ahead of Biden. Further, Biden already screwed the pooch during the debate. It was, indeed, “one bad night” that dramatically confirmed the fears thart millions of Democrats and others have had for years. That memory will not fade in 4 months.
Bitch all you want about the media feeding frenzy. It’s not going to stop whether u like it or not. It’s an unfortunate fact of life. And just as we today are scrutinizing every word, twitch, step and movement of Joe Biden, that is going to continue to election day. And it is blotting out the disinfectant sunlight that would further expose Trump as the greatest threat to America since World War Two.
“There’s this general sense of just, unbelievable holding your breath every time he does an event, every time he’s with people,” one top Democrat in close touch with Biden’s inner circle of advisers told CNN. This person added that some of those advisers have privately acknowledged: “This is going to get worse.”
Yes, but…. a whole hour into the conference, Biden found about a minute or so of appropriate elevated emotional range to heartily denounce the epidemic gun violence killing children and how Trump will do nothing about it. And, unfortunately for the first time, Biden finally denounced Project 2025. We needed 75 minutes of that, not 75 seconds. Actually, we have needed six months of that behind us and four in front of us from Biden.
Instead, much of the presser was Biden fairly comfortably, with some slight hesitations, repeating the same Indispensable America rhetoric he has mouthed for 50 years. I am not trying to insult Biden, but asking him basic foreign policy questions after being Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee ain’t much of a test.
And, in my case at least, I have no concern whether or not Biden would be “fit” enough for the next four years to govern. I don’t care because if Trump wins there will be no more Democratic presidents in our lifetime. My only concern is that TRUMP BE DEFEATED IN NOVEMBER and Biden is looking weak against him. It’s about that simple.
I couldn’t care less if 2026 President Biden, passes out at the resolute desk and goes into a coma. I care If Trump takes power and uses the SCOTUS ruling to immediately begin construction of a presidential dictatorship. And sorry to say, I do not believe today that Biden will be re-elected. That might change but I don’t see any trend lines in that direction.
In this saga we are also seeing some other sides to Biden. In my opinion, a certain disassociation from at least political reality. When 80% of the electorate and 52% of your own party says it’s time to leave…guess what? It’s time to leave.
Biden showed real defiance in staying in the race. He says he would only leave the race if he was shown data from his party comrades that it is impossible to win.
That, by the way, is going to happen on Friday –maybe before you even read this. The trickle of Dem reps calling upon him to resign slightly increased in volume today to 9. There are reports that on Friday some 40 Democratic reps will step out and request he step down.
Behind the curtains there is a whole lot of movement among Democrats. We learn that George Clooney cleared his Biden-drop-out op-ed with Barack Obama who did not give Biden a heads up. There are reports that a significant number of Biden staffers are organizing to confront Biden.
And he got rhetorically bombed by some of Obama’s former top aides. His top speechwriter let loose with a doozie Wednesday that, again sorry, does resonate with some of the self-serving rhetoric of the last few weeks about how only Joe Biden and absolutely nobody else is the Chosen One.
From the Daily Beast:
“Wednesday, Jon Lovett, former Obama speechwriter and a podcast c0-host, wrote that Biden should leave the race now with his dignity and his legacy intact. “Or he can leave a stubborn old man who allowed hubris and insecurity to destroy his legacy and perhaps our democracy with it.”
“There have always been two Joe Bidens,” he continued. “The empathetic, decent, big-hearted leader, forged in loss and grief, finding the good in his friends and opponents, in love with America, arms wide and open with space for everyone. And there’s the blowhard with a chip on his shoulder, stubborn, something to prove, his fellow senators rolling their eyes as the finger wags harder and the stories get longer. Statesman and politician, hero and fool.”
During the press conference he was asked why he abandoned his 2020 pledge to be a one term president and would serve as a “bridge to a future generation of leaders.” His weak answer is that once he realized that Trump was so dangerous he felt his duty to “stay and finish the job.”
Don’t know about you but that sorta sounds like that Other Biden that Lovett was slamming.
If Biden stays in I will support and vote for him with great trepidation but I will do it. If he wins, he might inadvertently be a bridge to the future as it is probably a coin flip if has 5 more years of life expectancy.
My bigger fear is that winds up being a different bridge…a bridge to authoritarian rule. I guess that’s ok too if he gave it all as, after all, a bridge is a bridge and bridge is INFRASTRUCTURE! And what’s been more important to Biden than that?+++
Yesterday, Raw Story reported that Ivan Raiklin, Trump’s self-declared “Secretary of Retribution” has compiled a “Deep State target list” of 350 people he wants to see arrested and punished for “treason” if Trump is reelected. The list includes Democratic and Republican elected officials, journalists he considers to be Trump’s enemies, U.S. Capitol Police officers, and witnesses against Trump in his impeachment trials and the hearings concerning the events of January 6, 2021.
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story: “His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.” The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Raiklin said the list was just the beginning. “This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?”
Former president Donald Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has tried to distance himself from the radical extremist blueprint outlined in Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Today, videos surfaced of Trump cheering the project on from the start. At a Heritage Foundation dinner in 2022, Trump, slurring his words, said: “Our country is going to hell…. This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do...when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming.”
On a right-wing podcast yesterday, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said that Trump’s agenda and Project 2025 have “tremendous” overlap. “There are some quibbles and differences of opinion here and there, which not only is okay, but it's actually good,” Roberts said. “I mean, we're gonna be able to sort those out once the presidential administration declares what their priorities are.” He said that Trump’s attempt to distance himself from the project was “a political tactical decision.” Media Matters uncovered a video in which Project 2025 director Paul Dans said that Trump is “very bought in with this.”
The Heritage Foundation, the key author of Project 2025, is a sponsor of the Republican National Convention.
Today the Heritage Foundation preemptively accused the Biden administration of cheating in the 2024 election and warned that Biden might try to hold the White House “by force.” It said that Biden and his administration could “circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president.”
There is no indication that Biden, who has repeatedly said he will accept the election results, will try to launch a coup against the United States government. In contrast, Trump, who has refused to say he will accept the election result unless he agrees with it, has already done exactly what Heritage is trying to pin on Biden: Trump tried to stay in office against the will of the voters in 2021.
Trump is currently under criminal indictment for that attempt, although the Supreme Court’s eye-popping July 1 decision in Trump v. U.S. declaring that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” means Trump can challenge those indictments. Indeed, in the wake of that decision, Trump’s lawyers have filed a motion to vacate the jury’s conviction of Trump on 24 felony counts related to the falsification of business records in his attempt to skew the 2016 election, and to dismiss the indictment.
While the U.S. and our allies celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Erin Banco of Politico reported yesterday that Trump advisors have told foreign officials that Trump plans to scale back U.S. cooperation and support for NATO, including reducing the sharing of intelligence with NATO countries.
This seems likely to be related to the news that the U.S. intelligence discovered a series of Russian plots to assassinate executives from European defense companies that are supplying arms to Ukraine. Americans took that intelligence to Germany and foiled a Russian plot to kill the chief executive officer of a German arms manufacturer.
Trump has stayed home playing golf for the past two weeks, but on Tuesday he held a rally at his Doral golf club outside of Miami, where he kept the audience waiting outside in 90-degree heat before he showed up an hour late. His 75-minute speech was, as The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reported, “full of evidence-free claims that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent; baseless accusations that overseas nations were sending to the US ‘most of their prisoners’; and a laughable assertion that a gathering of supporters numbering in the hundreds was really a crowd of 45,000.” He also claimed that Biden had quadrupled the price of bacon and said, “We don’t eat bacon any more.”
Trump did not mention his vice presidential pick. For the first time since 1988, it appears the Republicans will go into their convention without knowing who that pick will be.
Luscombe reported that the crowd “appeared mostly subdued,” yawning and playing on their phones.
Today, the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Trump is “the only candidate in the race who is patently unfit for office—any office—and an imminent threat to democracy.” “If the [Republicans] had any decency left,” it wrote, they would dump him. Voters, the board said, must see the election as “a referendum on our 248-year democracy, and a choice between a trustworthy public servant who upholds American values and a serial liar who wants to push the country into authoritarianism.”
Almost two weeks after calling for Biden to step out of the 2024 race for the presidency, the editorial board of the New York Times also said that Trump is unfit to lead the United States of America, and urged voters “to see the dangers of a second Trump term clearly and to reject it.”
There was continued good news today about the American economy. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had collected more than $1 billion in overdue tax bills from millionaires. That crackdown was possible thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which funded an initiative to pursue high-income, high-wealth individuals who have an income of more than $1 million and owe more than $250,000 to the IRS.
Republicans have repeatedly tried to cut the funding that made this enforcement possible.
Today’s inflation report for June showed that inflation continues to cool, falling in June for the first time since the start of the pandemic. It declined in June by –0.1%, as gas and electricity prices dropped and as rent had its smallest monthly increase since August 2021. Statistics also show that workers’ wages continue to grow more quickly than prices.
Yesterday, the AFL-CIO executive council voted unanimously to reaffirm its support for President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, saying: “Unions have never wavered in our support of them because they’ve never wavered in their commitment to working people.” The Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers Union quoted that statement and added: “BAC is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters across the labor movement in supporting the Biden-Harris re-election campaign.”
In a press conference this evening, Biden championed the economic boom his policies created for the middle class and reminded attending journalists that “none of you thought that would happen.”
In that press conference, held after he presided over the three-day NATO summit and thus focused on foreign affairs, Biden answered press questions directly and fully, not only on his health but also on foreign affairs. He reiterated the importance of NATO and reminded reporters that he was key to reinforcing the alliance after Trump weakened it, then went on to talk about foreign affairs more broadly. He also noted that “I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping than any other president,” adding: “And by the way I handed in my notes.” This was a reference to the fact that in an unprecedented move, Trump infamously refused to disclose the notes from one of his conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
At the same time that Biden was holding a press conference that focused on NATO and foreign affairs, Trump was meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Putin ally Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. On social media this evening, Trump indicated that he is trying to conduct his own foreign policy, although the Logan Act prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments, and reiterated his support for Putin’s call for “peace” in Ukraine. Their plan calls for giving Putin the western regions of Ukraine that were central to his 2016 support for Trump; Trump’s 2016 campaign manager promised Trump would look the other way as Putin absorbed them.
Orbán, who has openly called for Trump’s reelection, posted: “Peace mission 5.0[.] It was an honour to visit President [Trump] at Mar-a-Lago today. We discussed ways to make [peace]. The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/
https://www.politico.com/news/
https://home.treasury.gov/
https://www.nytimes.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/
https://constitutioncenter.
https://www.latimes.com/
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