French President Emanuel Macron is quite pompous. He also may may have been figuratively caught with his pants down.
So here we have French President Emmanuel Macron while asking for sacrifices from the French people, when he suddenly realizes he is wearing a very expensive watch.
And voila, just like a magician it disappears under the table...... 😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/lCfqkYRJCw
The watch was much less expensive than claimed by Macron's critics and leaving it on the table in full view suggests that he wasn't trying to hide it. In either case, as for being the "epitome of a centrist elitist," as one lefty podcaster labels him, well, the French are pikers when it comes to elitism.
In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the
United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing
to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar
-- a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new
Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of
the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation,
sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.
The gift had been expected to be announced next week, when
Trump visits Qatar on the first foreign trip of his second term, according to
sources familiar with the plans. But a senior White House official said the
gift will not be presented or gifted while the president is in Qatar this week.
In a social media post Sunday night, Trump confirmed his
administration was preparing to accept the aircraft, calling it a "very
public and transparent transaction" with the Defense Department.
Trump had previously toured the plane, which is so opulently
configured it is known as "a flying palace," while it was parked at
the West Palm Beach International Airport in February.
ABC News adds
The highly unusual -- unprecedented -- arrangement is sure
to raise questions about whether it is legal for the Trump administration, and
ultimately, the Trump presidential library foundation, to accept such a
valuable gift from a foreign power.
That's a major question- but it must not be the only question. For a President who stole classified, even top-secret, documents from the federal government, a gift from Qatar comes with troubling possibilities.
The relationship between the USA and Qatar, as described here by the Trump-friendly New York Post, is, for better or worse (both, mostly the latter) complex and complicated. On May 7, Amine Ayoub, a foreign policy analyst based in Morocco for the hawkish, pro-Israel Middle East Forum, wrote in response to President Trump's three-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, beginning on May 12.
Ayoub argued that Trump "understands the cost of being used by regimes that speak the language of partnership while pursuing their own agendas behind closed doors. The President's base expects candor, not ceremony." (O.K., political psychology is not his forte.) He added, while unaware that "disruptive clarity" should be replaced by "chaotic opacity"
This moment gives Trump a choice: lend his brand to a carefully choreographed narrative, or reaffirm the disruptive clarity that has defined his foreign policy. Qatar needs Trump more than Trump needs Qatar. That leverage should be used not to flatter, but to demand more- more transparency, more accountability, and more alignment with the values that the US claims to defend.
Fat chance of that happening now, as in "slim chance." There are roughly 400 million reasons that leverage won't be used, with the jet valued at a little under a half billion dollars, according to "aviation industry experts."
Not only has Trump been bribed- not exactly the first or second or even third time in recent history- but with potentially catastrophic consequences. Not only will he be tempted to deliver intelligence information, but there is a serious possibility that the aircraft will be efficiently outfitted with spyware by Doha.
That won't necessarily occur and the Qataris, sensitive to public relations, may even reconsider their "gift" to a guy who can never surround himself with enough gold nor accumulate enough wealth. However, this matter stands as another example of the adage that there is "no such thing as a free lunch.
This could be a comedy routine. However, Karoline Leavitt must be deadly serious when she states
I think it's frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit. he left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service not just once, but twice. And again, the American public re-elected him back to the White House because they trust him to act in the best interests of our country and putting the American people and the public first. This is a President who has actually lost money for being President of the United States.
Karoline Leavitt shot back at a reporter’s “frankly ridiculous” question about President Trump meeting business contacts in the Middle East, reminding the reporter that he “left a life of luxury” for public service. pic.twitter.com/qFsKx9skIR
She might be serious but is probably, and wisely, kept ill-informed. CBS News on May 2 reported
President Trump's venture into crypto products has increased
his family's wealth by billions in the last six months, according to a new
report, as his administration continues to loosen the federal government's
regulatory approach to the digital currency industry as a whole.
The group State Democracy Defenders Action estimated in a
new report that the president's crypto holdings now represent nearly 40% of his
net worth — or approximately $2.9 billion. That increase is due in part to his
release of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, in addition to a large stake in
World Liberty Financial, a crypto exchange affiliated with the Trump family
that launched in October 2024. State Democracy Defenders Action identifies
itself as non-partisan, but it is overseen by frequent critics of President
Trump, with an agenda focused on "the autocratic threat to our
nation."
The president's net worth is expected to get another bump,
with World Liberty Financial's announcement this week that a Abu Dhabi-backed
firm will invest billions of dollars in the Trump family-affiliated crypto
fund. The Emirati firm, MGX, will purchase $2 billion in a stablecoin product
offered by World Liberty, the company said in a statement to CBS. The currency,
called "USD1" will then be used to invest in Binance, one of the
world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges.
World Liberty has ties to the president and his sons. The
fine print on the company's website says an entity affiliated with Mr. Trump
and his family members own a 60% stake in the company.
According to the company's public reports, a Trump family
entity also holds 22.5 billion of the $WLF tokens –- and takes an additional
75% in net revenue from future token purchases.
This is on top of the unprecedented corruption of the first term, much of which probably constituted was a violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, . A report last year of the House oversight Committee and analysis by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington revealed that President Trump "likely benefited form $15.6 million in payments from foreign governments" during that term.
On King Trump's birthday on June 14, the USA Army will stage a celebration, complete with "a spectacular fireworks display, a parade, and a daylong festival on the National Mall." Including the parade with 6600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, and 50 helicopters, the gala will salute the American military and Donald Trump, cost tens of millions of dollars, and rip up tens of millions of dollars to roads in the District of Columbia and Virginia.
The issue should not be whether Donald Trump does anything for his own benefit. Rather, it should be whether he ever does anything to benefit anyone else or the "disgusting" country he's bent on wrecking.
Former President Joe Biden said in a new interview that the
timing of his pullout from the 2024 election wouldn’t have made a difference,
suggesting that Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump was inevitable. (Watch the
video below.)
“Should you have withdrawn earlier?” the BBC’s Nick Robinson
asked in the interview, shared Wednesday.
“I don’t think it would’ve mattered,” Biden replied. “We
left at a time when we had a good candidate. She was fully funded.”
Chris Cillizza disagrees with Biden's first claim, that it would have not mattered); presumably agrees with the second that "we had a good candidate", and ignores the third point, that "she was fully funded." He argues (at 4:39 of the video below)
There was no primary. Biden gets out Harris gets in, that's it. She gets zero actual votes from Democrats to be the Democratic nominee for President. It just got handed off to her. I think that rankled a lot of voters, including a lot of Democrats.
I think- let's imagine Biden gets out a year before. Let's imagine he gets out in June- July 21, 2023. We had a robust primary process at that point. Kamala Harris is in. There probably are other people who run. She might still wind up being the nominee. But it seems to me that that process would have yielded someone who could say "I won this. I campaigned for this and I won the nomination as opposed to it was handed to me by a guy who is not popular and I'm now going to have to own that guy and his record for the entire campaign."
So, all of those things plus the fact that again, an intangible, but it's really hard to set up a presidential campaign on July 21, July 22, whenever Kamala Harris started and try to win an election on November 5, right? It's just a massive undertaking and to do it that late, you are trying to do everything while sprinting and that's never easy. So to me, it's just Joe Biden in a state of denial.
Yet, in early morning on Tuesday, March 5, 2024, Andrew Feinberg of The Independent appeared to capture the zeitgeist, and did capture the vibe, of the campaign when he wrote
Harris, who just a few weeks ago appeared to have run out of
the momentum she’d quickly gathered after President Joe Biden ceded the
Democratic ticket to her this past July, is surging thanks to a series of
late-game missteps by Trump and his allies. Those missteps include the
disastrous decision to include a comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of
floating garbage” in the lineup at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally late
last month.
On Saturday, renowned pollster Ann Selzer released her
annual survey of Iowa voters which showed Harris with a three-point lead, 47
per cent to 44 per cent, in the Hawkeye State based on an incredibly strong
showing with female voters. Harris, who’d trailed Trump by a four-point margin
among Iowans in September, had also inherited a whopping 18-point deficit when
she took over the Democratic nomination from Biden.
Another national poll released by NPR and Marist College on
Monday showed Harris garnering support from 51 per cent of respondents,
compared with Trump’s 47 per cent — a lead greater than the survey’s 3.5-point
margin of error. And the final NBC News poll of the election cycle showed Trump
hemorrhaging support from Black and Latino voters, while Harris was shown to be
garnering support from 87 per cent of Black voters.
The Harris campaign appears to have met the moment and is
finishing strongly with what it describes as the largest coordinated
get-out-the-vote event in history on Monday.
The campaign is running simultaneous events across all seven
battleground states, including rallies featuring Harris and Minnesota governor
Tim Walz, plus programming tying the events in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan,
Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin together as part of a
national livestream program.
Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters on
a call on Monday afternoon that the coordinated event is intended to “capture
the grassroots enthusiasm that we are seeing everywhere, to focus on mobilizing
our voters heading into Election Day tomorrow”.
“Tomorrow, we’ll have elected officials and performers and
speakers that really reach such a wide network across all social media
platforms, helping to make sure that our message is breaking through in these
final hours to voters that maybe are harder to reach or less engaged. These
events will serve as a massive mobilization and volunteer engagement
opportunity,” she said.
Privately, Democratic sources who spoke to The Independent
are projecting confidence, with one swing-state party chair noting what they
described as “a serious crossover vote among Republicans” and “explosive”
turnout in early voting among key constituencies, including Latinos.
Trump’s response to a Biden gaffe in which the president
appeared to call the ex-president’s supporters “garbage” in return seemed to
have only prolonged the news cycle stemming from Hinchcliffe’s racist diatribe.
His decision to stage a photo op with a garbage truck looks to have failed to
shift the focus back to Biden and instead reminded Latino voters of what had
touched off the controversy to begin with.
And while the Trump campaign had hoped to make hay out of an
Associated Press report revealing that the White House communications team had
tried to doctor the official transcript of Biden’s remarks to make it look as
if he hadn’t said what he’d said, Trump stepped on his own campaign’s messaging
over the weekend with a series of bizarre and unhinged appearances. At one
rally, he even appeared to fellate a malfunctioning microphone.
One Democratic operative suggested that the stars had
aligned to bring about the ex-president’s collapse at the exact time Harris has
been surging.
“Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have written it better,” they said.
Meanwhile, Trump and running mate JD Vance closed out their
electioneering with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s the same place
where Trump closed out his victorious 2016 run against Hillary Clinton, and
it’s where Trump ended his re-election race against Biden four years later.
Not only is Michigan a key swing state — and Grand Rapids a
historically strong Republican area — but Trump is notoriously superstitious
and has insisted on closing out both of his post-2016 campaigns there for no
reason but vibes, even as he was forced to open his day in North Carolina, a
reliable GOP stronghold that he might well lose to Harris.
At Trump’s appearances this past weekend, the arenas he
visited looked noticeably emptier and the candidate himself looked lost at
times, vacillating between bewilderment and menace. He suggested that an
assassination attempt against him would need to shoot through a packed media
contingent to have a chance at hitting him, in one particularly concerning
moment.
Harris "quickly gathered" momentum "after Joe Biden ceded the Democratic ticket to her this past July. While Democrats were "projecting confidence," Trump "stepped on his own campaign's messaging.... with a series of bizarre and unhinged appearances." Harris was "surging" and combined with "the largest coordinated get-out-the-vote event in history," one Democratic operative boasted "Aaron Sorkin couldn't have written it better."
Democrats were well-funded, organized, disciplined, and confident while the Trump campaign was well-funded and not much else. Nonetheless, Cillizza would maintain
So, all of those things plus the fact that again, an intangible, but it's really hard to set up a presidential campaign on July 21, July 22, whenever Kamala Harris started and try to win an election on November 5. Right? It's just a massive undertaking and to do it that late, you are trying to do everything while sprinting and that's never easy.
It may have been hard but it was done, and impressively, as everyone recognized at the time.. Perhaps the Democratic Party may have won the presidential election if Joe Biden had dropped out a year earlier. However, that would have given the GOP time than it eventually had to batter whomever the presumptive Democratic nominee would have been.
It would have been a better situation for the party's nominee only if the process had yielded someone other than Kamala Harris. That is far from certain, though, and for reason(s) unrelated to the quality of the candidate. In September of 2023- over a year before the November, 2024 election- three NBC reporters noted
A quirk of the 2024 presidential cycle is the chasm that’s
emerged between the party establishment and rank-and-file voters. For
Democrats, more than half don't want to see Biden run again, an April NBC News
poll found.
But those rank-and-file voters counted for little compared to party insiders who were intimidated. The reporters added
Biden allies have not been shy about getting the word out
that it would be self-defeating for ambitious white male candidates like Newsom
to try to snatch the nomination away from Biden and Kamala Harris, who made
history as the first woman and person of color to become vice president….
“When you had people who were trying to test the waters” for
a presidential bid, “the party rose up and made it clear to those individuals —
who were mostly white men — that to disrespect the vice president would not be
well received by women and people of color within the party,” said Karen
Finney, a longtime Democratic strategist. “They got a little bit of a smack in
the face.”
So let's be clear in the manner which can be understood by Cillizza and the other pundits chiming in on the failure to capitalize on the unpopularity of Donald Trump. The Democrats did not lose the White House because Kamala Harris did not have enough time. She came out surging and ran an effective campaign until individuals realized they were being asked to vote for, well, Kamala Harris, an extremely qualified, unlikable person.
The party establishment wanted to anoint her in part in part because she was the sitting vice-president, hence the closest thing to a default candidate. However, the times did not call for nominating someone because it would be easy but for the individual most likely to win. Harris had flamed out in her initial run for the presidency, as a candidate for the nomination in the 2020 cycle, and there was great suspicion that she would not turn out to be a strong candidate.
That turned out to be the case but not for the reason Cillizza claims. Assuming Feinberg of The Independent was not making things up, Harris ran a nearly flawless campaign, one which most people admired at the time, and which was better than could have been expected.
Nonetheless, she lost the general election and the words of Karen Finney, an admirer of Harris, gives more than a clue of why. A challenge to the vice-president, were it to have come from a white male (from any white, more likely) would not have been "well received by women and people of color within the party." Finney wouldn't acknowledge it, but a challenge even from a white female would have been problematic.
This severely narrowed the range of possible alternatives to Biden, which would make Vice-President Kamala Harris the odds-on favorite were the President not to seek a second term. Top Democrats got their preferred candidate, even though nearly everyone suspected she was nowhere near the individual most likely to defeat Trump.
If it makes Cillizza and others feel better, they can continue to blame the November, 2024 loss on Joe Biden. If it impels them not to challenge the prevailing wisdom of the Democratic Party that an individual's value is to be determined in part by the inherited characteristics of race and gender, even better. Ignoring reality can be satisfying to oneself, though destructive to a political party.
Who is right? A former all-pro offensive tackle for the New York Giants or arguably the most charismatic sports personality in the nation? As a sort-of friend from my youth would say, "you have three guesses- and the first two don't count."
This guy is a clown. The corruption is OFF the charts but he bends the knee to a con job. https://t.co/CfGiWzxQ1E
For months, Mr. Trump’s forays into crypto have created
ethical conflicts with little precedent in presidential history. As he markets
digital currencies to the public, Mr. Trump has also appointed regulators who
are scaling back crypto enforcement and called for legislation that would boost
the industry’s prospects in the United States.
As news of the dinner invitation spread on social media, the
memecoin’s price surged more than 60 percent, suggesting that investors were
rushing to accumulate enough coins to qualify for a dinner seat.
“This is really incredible,” said Corey Frayer, who oversaw
crypto policy for the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden
administration. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.”
A business entity linked to Mr. Trump owns a large tranche
of the coins, meaning the president personally profits every time the price
increases, at least on paper. Mr. Trump and his business partners also collect
fees when the coins are traded, a windfall that amounted to nearly $100 million
in the weeks after the coin debuted in January.
Victoria Haneman, a law professor at Creighton University,
said the offering raised concerns about the ways Mr. Trump and his businesses
“may maneuver to profit off the presidency."
Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, suggests (emphasis his) the possibility "we (n)ever saw anything as blatant as this meme coin dinner "not sure we ever saw anything as blatant as this meme coin dinner." The Times explains
The flashy online announcement called it “the most EXCLUSIVE
INVITATION in the World,” a chance to have “an intimate private dinner” with
President Trump at his members-only golf club in Virginia, followed by a tour
of the White House.
A seat would be reserved for each of the top 220 investors
in $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency that Mr. Trump launched on the eve of his
inauguration.
In an astonishing escalation of the Trump family’s efforts
to profit from crypto, a website promoting $TRUMP, the president’s so-called
memecoin, announced on Wednesday that the coin’s largest buyers would be
invited to meet him. The effort was, in effect, an offer of access to the White
House in exchange for an investment in one of Mr. Trump’s crypto ventures.
“Have Dinner with President Trump and the $TRUMP Community!”
the invitation said. “Let the President know how many $TRUMP coins YOU own!”
However, Bookbinder warns
... unfortunately, for the most part, our ethics laws outside of
the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution don’t apply to the president. Those
clauses bar the president from receiving profits, gains or advantages from
foreign, state and federal governments. Unless a state, federal or foreign
government purchased the $TRUMP coins, there’s very little we, or anyone, can
do.
But because the buyers behind crypto transactions are
generally not disclosed, foreign governments could in fact be buying these
coins, meaning that Trump could be violating the Constitution without the
public finding out. Individuals or special interests could also be buying the
coins in the hopes of directly influencing presidential decisions that will
affect all of us. Here, too, the public likely wouldn’t know.
Nonetheless, the man whose colleagues enjoy calling "Stephen A." says
Whether you're an elected politician or someone who likes to do business with him, you're going to have to recognize you're going to have to appease him to some degree....
And that's what you're going to have to learn about him, if you don't already know. If you want to do business with him, you're going to have to make sure that you're ready to engage at some level of capitulation.
Appease and capitulate? Joe Scarborough/Mika Brzezinski tried that. Bill Maher recently tried that. But the man is a politician and actor. As a successful politician, he knows the importance of making you feel appreciated or respected. As an actor, he pulls it off without a hitch.
Al Gore also spoke nicely to Trump, when the month after Trump was first elected "I had a lengthy and very productive session with the president-elect. It was a sincere search for areas of common ground.... I found it an extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued."
After continued discussions, Gore woke up, as the former vice-president realized "I think he has made it abundantly clear that he's throwing his lot in with the climate deniers."
Yet, Smith wants to appease, and capitulate to, President Trump. It worked so well for a British prime minister 85-90 years ago. Why not try it again?
Scott Jennings is a GOP strategist who appears regularly on CNN's News Night with Abby Phillip and is a potential entrant into the 2026 Republican primary to replace retiring Senator Mitch McConnell. There are other likely candidates for the nomination but it would be foolish to sell Jennings short because he is a favorite of Donald Trump, whose Administration he defends exceptionally well at every turn.
He's very skilled, on television and on X Twitter, at selling an alternate reality.
Donald Trump gave a completely incoherent response to a
question about his crackdown on Harvard University and ended up ranting about
fictional riots.
During a phone interview with NewsNation Wednesday, Stephen
A. Smith, the firebrand sports pundit turned political commentator, asked the
president to expand on a comment he’d made about Harvard University, which has
seen $2.2 billion in government grants frozen by the current administration.
Smith asked Trump what he would say to those who view his
attacks against the Ivy League school as “an attack on academic freedom, rather
than a defense of fairness.”
“Well, I say this. We had riots in Harlem, in Harlem, and
frankly if you look at what’s gone on—and people from Harlem went up and they
protested, Stephen, and they protested very strongly against Harvard. They
happened to be on my side,” Trump said.
“You know I got a very high Black vote. You know that? Very,
very high Black vote. It was a very great compliment to me,” Trump continued.
The president appeared confused about the subject of the
question, ranting about Harlem instead of Harvard and inventing a fictional
riot in support of his war on higher education.
Trump’s stumped response is particularly disturbing because,
crucially, Smith repeated the word “Harvard” three times in asking his
question, and was responding directly to something Trump had just mentioned.
Halfway through the question, Trump seemed to realize his mistake, but then
felt it necessary to comment on the support of Black voters, which was at that
point entirely off topic.
There have been concerns over Trump’s cognitive decline
since he first started to deliver weaving, nonsensical stump speeches on the
presidential campaign trail. Now his divorce from reality manifests mostly in
his disastrous economic policy, as the president is more or less kept away from
making lengthy addresses.
Last October, a senior lecturer at Cornell University's Psychology Department and Weill Cornell Medicine Psychiatry Department remarked
What’s alarming is how the rate of Trump’s
bizarre speech and political decisions have been increasing. He gave an answer
about childcare to the Economic Club of New York so incoherent that even his
supporters were concerned. Last week he got cognitively lost in a rally and
began to talk about the ‘eight circles’ that Biden filled up with journalists.
No one on his staff has been able to explain the reference.
Trump has shown evidence of dementia for the past year as
indicated by his strange gait, phonemic paraphasia—when he begins a word and
can’t finish it—and decline in the complexity of his words and concepts. This
limited capacity explains his poor debate performance, but there are two more
disturbing signs of his decline.
Since when? In February, 2017 the NYC, NY office of Donald Trump's doctor, Harold Bornstein, was raided by Trump's personal bodyguard, a lawyer at the Trump Organization, and a third man, and the president's medical records were stolen.
On Saturday, November 16, 2019 President Trump was suddenly whisked away to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a still-unknown reason.
the public is still in the dark
over the extent of his injuries, what treatment the Republican presidential
nominee received in the hospital, and whether there may be any long-term
effects on his health.
Trump’s campaign has refused to discuss his condition,
release a medical report or records, or make the doctors who treated him
available, leaving information to dribble out from Trump, his friends and
family.
In an interview five weeks ago, psychologist Dr. John L. Gartner explained
When we’re diagnosing dementia, what we need to see is a
deterioration of someone’s own baseline of functioning. What we see that a lot
of people don’t appreciate is that when Donald Trump was younger in the 1980s,
he was actually quite articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs; now he has
difficulty even finishing a sentence. His thoughts were logical and related:
now they’re tangential. He goes off on these ramblings where he is
confabulating things – weird things in which he’ll talk about Venezuelans and
mental hospitals, and then he’ll talk about sharks and batteries or the late,
great Hannibal Lector and Silence of the Lambs. And why is he talking about
Hannibal Lector – a fictional character who was not great; he was a murderer, a
serial killer. It makes sense in Trump’s mind but these are really random
associations. And there is an accelerating rate of decline….
He is losing his capacity for coherent speech. We’ve
collected dozens and dozens of Trump’s phonemic paraphrasias, in which you use
sounds in place of an actual word (a
hallmark of brain damage and dementia).
What happens is that someone is trying to say a word and then they get
the first part out but they have to end it or create one because they can’t
remember the rest. Trump will say something like ‘mishiz’ for missiles, or
“Chrishus” for Christmas, because he can’t complete the word. Then we see also a
lot of semantic paraphrasias, in which he uses a word incorrectly, as in “the
oranges of the situation” because it rhymes with “the origins of the
situation.” This is not within normal limits; his basic ability to use language
is breaking down.
So there is that verbal deterioration. And then there is the
physical deterioration. He used to be quite graceful, and now he uses a
wide-based gait typical of frontotemporal dementia, sometimes he swings his
right leg in a semi-circle. He also has trouble getting up the ramp; he has
trouble doing physical things.
And sometimes Trump is lucid or articulate. On other occasions, he is baffling or incoherent. It's that way with an individual suffering from an ailment, whether physical, mental, or psychological. It was that way with President Joe Biden, also; it's why General Mark Milley in October of 2023 could maintain "I engage with him frequently, and (Bidenis) alert, sound, does his homework, reads the papers reads all the read-ahead material, and is very, very engaged in issues of very serious matters of war and peace and life and death."
Biden probably declined from that point to his June, 2024 debate with Donald Trump. However, his bizarre performance that night probably was due to an individual in decline- as Trump clearly has been- who had a very bad night, which was interspersed with many good days. For some reason, President Trump's diminished state has not received 5% of the scrutiny which President Biden drew.
It is highly unlikely that Donald Trump is running the country in the manner Scott Jennings wants us to believe. However, it is not his responsibility as a shill of the President to reveal the true state of the politician he publicly venerates. Moreover, Jennings knows that much of the source of the spell Trump has cast on the public derives from the perception of Trump as strong and powerful and whether right or wrong, always in charge. It's time for the Democratic Party, which must oppose this dangerous man, or an inquisitive media to tear down this myth..
This Pam Bondi wasn't stupid, and neither is this one. As reported in The New York Times shortly after Donald J. Trump was elected to his second term
Reports of deceptive practices and fraud by Donald J. Trump
and his Trump University business unit had been piling up for several years in
states across the nation, including in Florida.
The state attorney general in New York moved in, filing a
lawsuit in 2013 that accused Mr. Trump and his for-profit trade school of
“engaging in persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct,” even though
by that point Trump University was already out of business.
The Florida attorney general’s office, which Pam Bondi had
taken over in 2011, handled it differently.
She publicly acknowledged that her office was examining
complaints about Trump University, but it decided against a formal
investigation.
The decision came soon after Mr. Trump, through his family
foundation, sent a check for $25,000 to a political action committee associated
with Ms. Bondi, who was running for a second term.
(It appears also that Kamala Harris received $5,000-$6,000 donation from Trump after Harris took office as California Attorney General- that is, far less money for political moves in a significantly larger state.)
In 2016, Bondi would tell the Tampa Bay Times "I never, nor was my office, investigating him. Never. I would never lie. I would never take money. I've been obviously devastated over this." (She has recovered from her devastation quite nicely.) That's the same Pam seen in the video below boasting that seizures of fetanyl by "your DEA agency" has "saved "258 million lives." Credit the Attorney General with coming up with a very odd number, thus adding a whiff of credibility to a truly incredible number.
Since then, Pam Bondi was nominated (and ultimately approved) as Attorney General of the USA with a mandate from the most powerful President in history to go after his enemies, and hers if she wishes. One suspects that the intersection of that Venn diagram is conveniently quite large.
But stupid? I'll show you stupid. This is a portion, beginning at 8:02 of the video below, of the May 1 episode of The View in which Joy Behar, Alyssa Farrah Griffin (who evidently likes Moore a lot) and the three other women chatted with Democratic governor Wes Moore of Maryland:
What is wrong with NFL owners, are they STUPID?” Trump wrote
in a post on Truth Social. “Deion Sanders was a great college football player,
and was even greater in the NFL. He’s also a very good coach, streetwise and
smart! Therefore, Shedeur, his quarterback son, has PHENOMENAL GENES, and is
all set for Greatness. He should be ‘picked’ IMMEDIATELY by a team that wants
to WIN. Good luck Shedeur, and say hello to your wonderful father
Alex Kirshner of Slate explained "the industry consensus on Sanders was that he was something like the 20th or 40th best player in the draft, depending on one's evaluation of him." However
Any other quarterback will join a team as a backup trying to
work his way up, and Sanders did not distinguish himself in the pre-draft
process. He reportedly came off disinterested in interviews with teams. He
passed up numerous chances to work out in front of scouts. His celebrity father
used his megaphone to promise Shedeur would be a top-five pick and to threaten
to manipulate the draft process so that Shedeur would only go to a team the
Sanders family wanted him to go to, Ã la Eli Manning in 2004.
In other words: Sanders is good enough to be at least a
second-round pick, but teams don’t want the pain in the ass of a development
quarterback with the capacity to create drama.
Nonetheless, this goes way beyond the story of yet another greatly talented, spoiled athlete and even beyond an unusually spoiled athlete. It goes to Donald J. Trump and the reason for his assessment of the value of Shedeur Sanders to an NFL team. Last October, ethicist Daphne O. Martschenko wrote
In a recent interview with conservative radio talk show host
Hugh Hewitt, Donald Trump drew a link between immigration, violent crime, and
genetics, stating, “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Comments such as these are not new. Claims
regarding genes and human behavior have long been used to perpetuate social
harm. Understanding this history shows just how pervasive and harmful the
former president’s comments are. They also illustrate how influential they can
be in shaping social policies.
Trump’s interview with Hewitt wasn’t the first time the
former President made disparaging comments about migrants. During his October
presidential debate with Kamala Harris, for instance, he claimed that Haitian
immigrants were eating pets – harmful misinformation that has left many members
of the Haitian community fearful for their safety. The Hewitt interview also wasn’t the first
time Trump vocalized false ideas about genes. In 1988, for example, he was
recorded on the Oprah Winfrey Show saying to its host, “You have to be born
lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” Later, while running
for president in 2016 and throughout his tenure in the White House, Trump was
captured in video recordings making statements like “some people cannot
genetically handle pressure.”
The former president’s latest comments about immigrants
bringing “bad genes” into the United States are part of a longer, racialized
history in which claims about genetic difference have been used to further
social divisions, explain social inequalities, and justify racial violence.
Specifically, such claims have been used to resist the abolition of slavery,
prohibit interracial marriage, forcibly sterilize the poor and communities of
color, restrict immigration, and even rationalize mass-shootings.
Donald Trump's second term thus far has been marked by many things: siding with a brutal dictator in his war of aggression in eastern Europe; a disastrous economic policy; a shakedown on law firms; lawsuits against media outlets; invocation of "DEI" in an effort to bring down major universities and critical funding of medical and scientific research; impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress; arbitrary, wholesale, and dangerous cuts to the federal workforce; corruption, and so much more.
And an extremist immigration policy. When Trump spoke to Hewitt about immigrants, he argued "you know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now." Then- Presidential press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded in part "this comes from the same vile statements that we've had, that we've heard about migrants being poison, poisoning the blood- that's disgusting."
Jean-Pierre was being generous. She probably did not want to use the word "racist" for fear of being slammed as just another liberal accusing good, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth conservatives of being racist. "Racist" or not, the previous December
“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people
into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re
poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told the crowd at a rally in New
Hampshire. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and
prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or
four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into
our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
Trump then repeated the use of “poisoning” in a post on his
social media website Truth Social, saying overnight in an all-caps post, that
“illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from
prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”
The term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in his
manifesto “Mein Kampf,” in which he criticized immigration and the mixing of
races. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally
creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote.
President Trump's immigration policies are a mere reflection of his creed of eugenics. Now, he has stressed- with capital letters so that no one can misunderstand the dark place he's coming from- that Shedeur Sanders is "all set for Greatness" because he has "PHENOMENAL GENES.:
Sanders is only a football player and whatever happens to him is far less important than the potential impact in America and abroad of Trump's belief in nature rather than nurture, that good and bad are inevitable outcome of genetic makeup. Whether cause or effect of the perspective Trump holds, in mid-October, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated of autistic children "These are kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted."
As Politico found, this belief is very much flawed. However, as Jennifer Grose wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times, "the grimmest part of what he said is not about the ability to play baseball; it's that he started this litany with paying taxes and having jobs. That implies that those who are not able to be gainfully employed are somehow lesser citizens- that they're destroyed."
This fellow who believes that some citizens, for reasons beyond their control, are lesser than others will be in charge of the nation's response to a pandemic. He will share responsibility with a president who himself believes that some citizens are lesser than others. He reportedly told Trump Plaza Hotel and casino manager Jack O'Donnell in the 1980s "laziness is a trait in blacks"- a trait. In 2007, he remarked to Larry King "But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot."
Call it racist, fascist, or "hateful" and "disgusting" as Jean-Pierre politely did in response to Trump's comment to Hewitt. Whatever the characterization, danger lurks with leaders who believe that some "poison the blood" while some have "phenomenal genes" and thus are set for greatness. Draconian immigration policy may be only the first, and far less significant, manifestation of the presidency of a man who believes that the most important measure of a person may be the sum total of his or her chromosomes.
