The Other Donald Trump in Florida

If you believe that Donald Trump is the worst, most grandiose liar in American politics today (or ever), you're correct. But someone is gaining on him.

me, this morning, writes piece about how conservatism is fucking weird

byron donalds, at exactly the time i hit "publish": https://t.co/6mUjcniaN5

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) June 13, 2023

If Representative Donalds of Florida believes- as he does not- that "you just can't walk through Mar-a-Lago on your own accord," he needs to take American Government 101.

Much of the time, Donald Trump is not at Mar-a-Lago. And even if he were there whenever the club is open, Donalds' statement would be false. Secret Service agents are not security guards.  They are not there to protect a resort, a private residence, or any building. They protect an individual, in this case an ex-President. Moreover, not any Tom, Dick, or Harry- or Susan, Jane, or Sarah- waltzes in to Mar-a-Lago.  One must be sponsored by a member, subject himself or herself to an interview, be investigated and if approved, pay an initiation fee (plus annual dues), which as of 2017 was $200,000.  Members are likely treated with great respect and afforded some freedom of movement.

Even in the unlikely event that Donalds didn't understand that once inside the building, individuals are not closely monitored, he should have remembered a well-publicized incident last August, in which The Guardian reported

According to an article from the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a Ukrainian woman posing as a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty is under bureau investigation after infiltrating the private members club under a false pretense.

Inna Yashchyshyn, 33, allegedly lied to members that she was a Rothschild heiress and mingled with Trump, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and others at Mar-a-Lago functions.

OCCRP, in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Gazette, reported that Yashchyshyn had demonstrated “the ease with which someone with a fake identity and shadowy background” could bypass security at Trump’s club.

Nonetheless, you ain't seen nothing yet. No GOP liar who hopes to ascend to leadership in the Republican Party and beyond can be satisfied with one isolated lie. Preceding the above tweet, he hit the jackpot:

WOW, watch this "objective" analysis by CNN's Jake Tapper and proven leaker, now disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

What they FAILED to mention about Hillary Clinton:
👉🏿HRC PERMANENTLY DELETED 30K+ emails
👉🏿HRC had staff DESTORY phones
👉🏿HRC LIED to Federal… pic.twitter.com/hqkkf34vRo

— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) June 12, 2023

Hillary Clinton did not herself delete the emails in question. The request went from the ex-Senator to her attorneys in 2014 but were not deleted for several months, by Paul Combetta of Platte River Network, who had initially forgotten to excise them. Not all were deleted permanently; more than 17,000 were retrieved by the FBI.  

The claim that Mrs. Clinton had staff destroy- or rather, "destory"- phones almost is accurate. On "two instances" the individual who "helped set up the private email account" Clinton used as Secretary of State, set up her new devices and synchronized them to the server, "destroyed Clinton's old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer." So Clinton did ask that two phones, one or no phone, be destroyed with a hammer or broken in half. Here, Donalds is in near proximity to the truth, yet they were phones to be replaced, presumably with a newer model.

Donalds claims Clinton "lied to federal investigators." He was not specific, so it is difficult to determine whether at any time Clinton did so. However, FBI director James Comey told the House Oversight Committee in July, 2016 "we have no basis to conclude she lied to the F.B.I."

Nor is it accurate that the ex-Senator "sent classified emails to Anthony Weiner," then the husband of HRC aide Huma Abedin.  In May of 2017, the FBI sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee reading

Although we do not know the exact numbers, based on its investigation, the FBI believes it is reasonable to conclude that most of the emails found on Mr. Weiner’s laptop computer related to the Clinton investigation occurred as a result of a backup of personal electronic devices, with a small number a result of manual forwarding by Ms. Abedin to Mr. Weiner.

Some of the emails were backed up on Weiner's computer. Others were forwarded to Weiner by wife Huma Abedin. Clinton sent no emails to Anthony Weiner.  Representative Donalds' point- and actual wording- was that Hillary the Devil sent emails to the disgraced ex-congressman. She did no such thing.

Although Representative Donalds argued Clinton "had server W/CLAS DOCs in her BATHROOM" (emphasis his), she did not. The server was in the lady's basement, not in her bathroom. That's a critical distinction because FBI photographs have shown many boxes of apparently pilfered documents in one of the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago. Moreover, "BATHROOM" appeals to the prurient interests of Donalds and fellow Republicans.

According to Politico, having the server and computers in the basement "helped segregate the family's personal and political work from the" Clinton Foundation. Nefarious! By all indications, Hillary Clinton was a technologically illiterate Luddite.  Fourteen or so years ago, that was not uncommon among us of an- ahem- mature age.

To be fair to him, Byron Donalds can be said to have been nearly accurate upon charging Clinton with having had someone smash a phone or two, obviously of little consequence when the phone was to have been replaced. Donalds received a few votes from the GOP's reckless wing during the vote in January for Speaker of the House, eventually won by Kevin McCarthy. In retrospect, he was an obvious candidate. Bellicose and dishonest, this guy has a real future in the Republican Party.  

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Lives Which Would Have Been Saved

There is still much we don’t know about #COVID19 origins in China but it’s already clear COVID-19 was the greatest crime of the 21st century to date. Twenty million people are dead from a totally avoidable pandemic. It’s time for an international tribunal. https://t.co/lFFE5BROwd

— Jamie Metzl (@JamieMetzl) June 11, 2023

As a result of its investigation, The Sunday Times of London explains that in 2016

researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.

Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.

They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”

According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.

They believe this led to the creation of the Covid-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” one of the investigators said

.

Mainland China has obstructed investigation into the origin of SARS-CoV-19, engaging in a reprehensible pattern of behavior which makes more likely another worldwide pandemic. Wherever- probably in a laboratory- the coronavirus originated, its impact in the USA could have been curbed substantially with a little planning. 

As it happens, a former United States senator was thinking about this upon proposing in August of 2016 a plan to "ensure that our government has strong leadership and is organized to better support and work with people on the ground facing public health challenges." The federal government would

create a Public Health Rapid Response Fund, with consistent, year-to-year budgets, to better enable the CDC, HHS, FEMA, state and local public health departments, hospital systems, and other federal agencies to quickly and aggressively respond to major public health crises and pandemics.

Additionally, Washington would 

need to do more to boost our preparedness for biological threats and bioweapons; to support research for new diagnostic tests, therapeutic treatments, and vaccines for emerging diseases; to build capacity in public health departments; to train the next cadre of public health professionals and ensure that public health and environmental health practices are standard to the educations of medical students; and to provide resources for states and local governments to plan for complex, multi-faceted public health threats, like the impacts of climate change, and build more resilient communities.

The plan was very far-sighted but more importantly, the individual had transferred to her private server one email which contained a lower-case "c"- a classified marking.  That individual was Hillary Rodham Clinton and after Loretta Lynch, James Comey, and the media failed their test miserably, she was cast aside for Donald John Trump. Hundreds of thousands of additional deaths ensued, but, hey, what about those emails?

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G.O.P. Weapon

This may be a dangerous instance of  transforming "projection from a psychological phenomenon into a political strategy."

Luna: The FBI has moles within the FBI that are actively leaking information to the Biden family. It was brought to our attention that there was a mole within the FBI by the name of one eye pic.twitter.com/M8JZAnJPoh

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 6, 2023

  

Much of the Republican Party wants voters to believe that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a wing of the Democratic Party. It's easy to forget a report from November 6, 2016 that

On October 28, 2016, (James) Comey wrote to members of Congress, telling them that although he had previously announced the conclusion of an FBI probe into the Democratic nominee’s emails, “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” It later became clear that the “unrelated investigation” was a inquiry into whether Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, had sexted a teenager.

The FBI said on Sunday it stood by its earlier finding that no criminal charges were warranted against Democrat Hillary Clinton for using a private email server for government work, lifting a cloud over her presidential campaign two days before the U.S. election.

A legal cloud, yes; a political cloud, not by a longshot.  “We’re glad this issue is resolved but for the record, this could easily have been learned before 1st letter was sent,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon wrote on Twitter. It could have been, but wasn't, and thereby turned the election.

Nate Silver, then a data analyst at 538, concluded that the letter of October 28 probably cost Clinton the election because

At a maximum, it might have shifted the race by 3 or 4 percentage points toward Donald Trump, swinging Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida to him, perhaps along with North Carolina and Arizona. At a minimum, its impact might have been only a percentage point or so. Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 point, the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.

Comey inadvertently swayed voters further by restoring the issue to the public consciousness when on November 6, he said in effect "oops, the emails were unrelated."  Silver noted

the controversy was an unwelcome one for Clinton, since it involved voters seeing words like “Clinton,” “email,” “FBI” and “investigation” together in headlines. Within a day of the Comey letter, Google searches for “Clinton FBI” had increased 50-fold and searches for “Clinton email” almost tenfold.

Moreover

Exit polls showed that undecided and late-deciding voters broke toward Trump, especially in the Midwest. A panel survey conducted by FiveThirtyEight contributor Dan Hopkins and other researchers also found shifts between mid-October and the end of the campaign — an effect that would amount to a swing of about 4 percentage points against Clinton.5 And we know that previous email-related stories had caused trouble for Clinton in the polls. In July, when Comey said he wouldn’t recommend charges against Clinton but rebuked her handling of classified information, she lost about 2 percentage points in the polls. Periods of intense coverage of her email server had also been associated with polling declines during the Democratic primary.

Yet two days before Comey startled the country with his claim that the FBI had uncovered emails "pertinent to the investigation, "the New York Times published an article with the headline "Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia." It reported that the director "would not even confirm the existence of any investigation of Mr. Trump’s aides when asked during an appearance in September before Congress."

This may be the greatest irony in American history, now that we know that Clinton, at most, acted irresponsibly while that same Donald J. Trump has been indicted for taking and harboring dozens of documents involving military, nuclear, and intelligence secrets, as well as obstructing investigation into it.

So now there allegedly is a pro-Biden mole in the FBI? The agency's director in 2016 actively- albeit unintentionally- assisted the Trump campaign in a material, probably determinative, way. He notified voters of an investigation into Hillary Clinton but not of the one into connections- proven too late- between the Trump campaign and the Russians. The Bureau, as one agent described it, was "Trumplandia" and Comey was worried about a leak about Clinton.

Yet, we are presently to believe, and be horrified by, the possibility of a pro-Biden mole in the FBI and that the agency is a veritable arm of the Democratic Party. The demonization of the Bureau, and of federal law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies generally, is intrinsic to what Steve M recognizes as the GOP's big "idea: We must stop the weaponization of government." He explains

This is a much bigger idea than I, Donald Trump, the world's most innocent man, am the victim of a witch hunt. This idea encompasses the zombie lie that the Biden Justice Department targeted right-wing parents as "domestic terrorists" if they spoke up at school board meetings (DoJ was concerned only about threats of violence), as well as the notion that January 6 prisoners are suffering politcal persecution (while alleged FBI provocateurs who were at the Capitol remain free), and the belief that DOJ has gone easy on Hillary Clinton and "the Biden crime family."

The "weaponization of government" idea hasn't spread beyond the right, but it has the potential to drive base turnout even if Trump is convicted or drops out of the race, which is why so many Trump rivals, including Ron DeSantis, are invoking the weaponization narrative. DeSantis on Twitter:

"We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?"

Republicans want "weaponization" to be what the Dobbs decision has been to Democrats -- an outrage that drives turnout. One difference, of course, is that the Dobbs decision actually was an outrage. The "weaponization" idea is nonsense, but it can be useful to the GOP even if Trump is forced out of the race. The next Republican president can use it to genuinely politicize the Justice Department, as Ron DeSantis has promised to do. There isn't much limit to what a GOP president could do under those circumstances, especially with a rubber-stamp Congress and Supreme Court.

Republicans have invented a crisis of weaponization. Trump is using the idea to win the 2024 primaries, and he and his rivals are using it to try to win the general election. We have to turn out to ensure they don't succeed.

Not only is a Republican president likely "to genuinely politicize the Justice Department," he probably would deeply politicize the FBI.  We saw what happened in 2016, and a GOP president would find fertile ground trying to weaponize government in the same manner Republicans now irresponsibly imply Democrats have done.

 

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The Inside Game

A lawyer who belongs to a conservative legal organization has posted this (mildly) interesting tweet

 

Senator @HawleyMO: "Do you think it's wrong to discriminate on the basis of religious faith?"

Biden’s district judge nominee for D.C Loren AliKhan: "Absolutely."

Senator Hawley: "Then why did you argue that religious services and religious people pose a greater risk of… pic.twitter.com/lqMPt3Q8x4

— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) June 7, 2023

There was a particular risk of spreading SARS-CoV-2 because of the singing and spoken prayer which take place.  Yet, many churches, including the one I attend, rest on a piece of property suitable for organized outdoor worship and moved their services outside. Synagogues and mosques generally could do likewise, if they chose.

There is widespread disagreement, and too little research, pertaining to whether the George Floyd/black lives matter protests sparked a significant rise in the spread of Covid-19. Also permitted were such events as huge, mega- motorcycle rallies. In August, 2020, The New York Times reported

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, tens of thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts converged over the weekend outside the small South Dakota community of Sturgis for the 80th annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

The sounds of screeching tires and engines revving echoed across the Sturgis Buffalo Chip, a 600-acre campground that will be home for the next week for the majority of attendees. This year, many said they were not concerned about the virus, as they walked around without masks and took helicopter rides and attended outdoor concerts and motorcycle shows.

Some of the bikers were here for the first time. Others have been attending for decades, and said they were unwilling to miss what they consider an annual tradition.

Officials said about 250,000 enthusiasts were expected this year — about half the number who attended last year, but a figure that would still make the rally one of the country’s largest public gatherings since the first coronavirus cases emerged in the spring. Here are some of the attendees, their thoughts and their rides.

This was no ACLU convention, Planned Parenthood retreat, or Critical Race Theory seminar.  They weren't a bunch of liberals or progressives or "People of Color." It was a motorcycle rally, believed- accurately or inaccurately- to be relatively safe from the scourge of Covid-19 because it was held outdoors.

The understanding of the difference between outdoor and indoor permeated the reasoning of federal authorities and of many state officials, such as in New Jersey, where the beaches were open as normal. Albeit with many exceptions throughout the country, outdoor gatherings large and small were permitted, sometimes even celebrated, while serious precautions were far more likely to be prohibited. This distinction applied to the racial protests and church closings.

Hawley's interrogation of the district judge nominee did, however, serve two purposes. It enabled a Republican to maintain the GOP effort to block President Biden's nominations to the federal judiciary. Additionally, it gave the Republican Party another opportunity to establish the myth of a nexus between the Democratic Party and the "defund the police" campaign. That would be the movement which was virtually unchallenged three years ago when it was riding high, but denounced today by courageous Republicans now that it is nearly moribund.

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Money Talks for Trump

If only the document(s) was taken merely for fun, then it would be less significant that

Attorneys for Donald Trump turned over material in mid-March in response to a federal subpoena related to a classified US military document described by the former president on tape in 2021 but were unable to find the document itself, two sources tell CNN.

Prosecutors issued the subpoena shortly after asking a Trump aide before a federal grand jury about the audio recording of a July 2021 meeting at Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. On the recording, Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran.

Prosecutors sought “any and all” documents and materials related to Mark Milley, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Iran, including maps or invasion plans, the sources say. A similar subpoena was sent to at least one other attendee of the meeting, another source tells CNN.

If only:

In this clip I called our former president a “nihilistic moron.”

Upon reflection, I recognize that this comparison was deeply unfair to nihilistic morons, and for that I sincerely apologize. https://t.co/HDtLGkYjB2

— George Conway 🇺🇦 (@gtconway3d) June 6, 2023

In mid-November, President Donald Trump was

joined by his son Eric Trump and the top executive of a Saudi Arabian real estate company to sign a deal that creates new conflict-of-interest questions for his just-launched presidential campaign.

The deal is with a Saudi real estate company, which intends to build a Trump-branded hotel, villas and a golf course as part of a $4 billion real estate project in Oman. The agreement continues a practice that had been popular for the Trump family business until Mr. Trump was elected president — selling branding rights to an overseas project in exchange for a generous licensing fee.

The Trump Organization also hosted the Saudi-government-backed LIV Golf tournaments at the family-owned golf clubs in New Jersey and Florida. The Saudi government’s $620 billion Public Investment Fund has financed the LIV Golf effort, which then paid venues like Trump National Doral in Miami and Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey to host two of its tournaments this year.

The Trump administration, including Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, had close ties with Saudi Arabia during Mr. Trump’s tenure in the White House. Mr. Kushner has also received financial support from the Saudi government, a $2 billion investment in his newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners.

Only this year, the relation between Riyadh and Tehran has started to normalize. However, during the last presidential Administration

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain supported U.S. President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, which included over 1,500 new sanctions and belligerent rhetoric, all aimed at isolating and weakening Iran.

The Trump family had a serious and lucrative financial arrangement with Saudi Arabia. At a time of maximum tension and belligerence between Riyadh and Tehran, President Trump apparently squirreled away a document pertaining to a possible attack on Iran.  This doesn't quite prove that a document about Iran, then a mortal enemy of the Kingdom, was taken as a quid pro quo or payment to Saudi Arabia. But as Mark Felt famously advised, "just follow the money."

            

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Rambling, Strategically

A couple of months ago, Bethany Mandel, conservative commentator and co-author of "Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation," appeared on the podcast co-hosted by Brianha Joy Gray and was asked to define "woke." Apparently and incomprehensibly taken by  surprise, Mandel replied in part

Woke is something that's very hard to define and we've spent an entire chapter defining it. It's sort of the understanding that we need to totally re-imagine and redefine society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Um-sorry, it's hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.

Ouch. That must have hurt. The only thing worse than being unable to define a concept you've written about and criticized is describing it, haltingly, in terms which undermine your position. One of the precepts of "woke" is not to recognize differences among ethnic minorities, to "create hierarchies of oppression," but to lump blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, tribal members, and anyone else not of strictly white European heritage into the category of "people of color."  Presumably, they are all equally oppressed.

When Mandel pled "it's hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite," Gray told her to take all the time she wanted but the co-host broke in to bail Mandel out, sort of. 

Privileged to run for President and thus not to be led into a sound bit but to spend one minute and 34 seconds to get her talking points out to a nationwide audience, Haley faced no such limitation.  The perspective of one journalist and MSNBC host:

 

Not only does Haley not define ‘woke’ but she chooses to define critical race theory as if a girl is in kindergarten and she is “white you’re telling her she’s bad.

That’s a total, brazen, shameless lie, on so many levels, and Haley knows it. https://t.co/mfYmaI2XhL

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) June 5, 2023

I'm not sure this doesn't happen, though not as directly as telling a 5-year-old that she's "bad." However, Hasan did recognize that the ex-governor and ex-UN ambassador did choose not to define "woke," which both underscores the horrid nature of the "town hall" and the strategic brilliance of the response. Given more than a minute-and-a-half to blather on, Haley remarked

There's a lot of things, I mean, you want to start with- biological boys playing girls' sports. That's one thing. the fact that we have gender pronouns in classes in the military now. I mean, all of those things that are pushing what a small minority want on the majority of Americans. It's too much; it's too much. I mean the idea that we have biological boys playing girls' sports- it is the women's issue of our time.

I'll leave it to others to explain why keeping boys out of women's sports is not what the women's movement was meant to be or is. Nonetheless, referring not once, but twice, to girls having to compete against boys is a strong tactical move when vying for votes from conservatives. And appealing to the conservative sense of victimhood- "it's too much, it's too much"- works with the many conservatives who complain about liberals claiming victimhood while they themselves frequently do so.

"The majority" cited brings to mind the notion Richard M. Nixon's "silent minority" of an (alleged) elite minority imposing its views on the rest of us. You'll notice that Haley returns to this theme at the end when she refers to "pushing what a small minority want." That's pretty slick coming from a woman who stated during the event her opposition to red flag laws, a  gun safety measure supported by a majority of Americans.

The guest continued

My daughter ran track in high school. I don't even know how I would have that conversation with her. How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in the locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year? We should be growing strong girls, confident girls.

"I am woman, hear me roar.!"  Expected to be the only woman in the GOP presidential sweepstakes, Haley wants to claim that lane, though her anti-feminist macho girl routine probably won't work.

The percent of teenage girls who contemplated suicide in 2022 is thought to be a little lower, approximately 30%,  than one-third. Far worse, obviously, is that she is blaming suicide ideation on transgenderism., which has has far less impact on this than has the pandemic or, more so, social media. Nonetheless, in a party in which the leading candidate probably would have said "most" are considering suicide and blamed it on Joe Biden (or "the Democrats"), this was not Haley's worst sin of the night, and possibly not even of the response. And yet again, Haley goes to girls' sports- which strokes the conservative id- and better yet, personalizes her remark by referring to her daughter.

Haley added

There you go and talk about building a strong military. How are you going to build the morale n a strong military when you're doing gender pronoun classes? Why is-is (applause)- why is it that you have, you know, kids undergoing critical race theory where if a little girls is in kindergarten, that she goes into kindergarten- if she's white, you're telling her she's bad if she's brown or black, you're telling her she's never going to be good enough and she's going to be a victim.

All of these things have gone to where they're pushing- and you know, transgender- the whole issue of transgender. It's not that people in America don't think you should live the way you want to live. I want every body to live the way they want to live . But stop pushing your views on everybody else. That's the problem, that they're starting to push their views on the rest of us.

Don't underestimate the strategic importance of "they," as in "where they're pushing" and "they're starting to push..."  Early in her rant, it was worse (or better) as the ex-governor stated "all of those things that are pushing what a small minority want..." 

All of those things that are pushing? Do things- or people- do the pushing?  Of course, the phrase is not supposed to make sense because the candidate wisely wants to keep it vague. If she mentions any names, a separate issue, such as whether the individual(s) actually did or said what she is claiming, emerges.

The "town hall" format is designed to give a public official opportunity to turn toward the audience in the hall and beyond; to babble as he or she pleases, saying whatever the intended audience wants to hear; to avoid answering whatever questions the guest wishes to sidestep. It is as intended by the network: a 60-90 minute campaign ad.  Haley's response to a request that she define "woke" was uninformed, imprecise, haphazard, and dishonest.  For a Republican primary electorate, that's one adjective better than a trifecta.

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For Now, O.K. But Only For Now

Self-described conservative but very anti-Trump, former Republican U.S Representative- turned- Independent  has an opinion which is hard to disagree with.

The leader of one party tripped & fell down.

The leader of the other party led a violent attempt to overthrow an American election; stole classified docs & obstructed the search for those docs; and criminally interfered with Georgia’s election.

I’ll take the guy who fell down.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) June 2, 2023

Yes, I will, too.  But the issue is whether others will. And, the tweet below misses the point.

To the ignorant people who are calling for President Joe Biden to be removed from office via the 25th Amendment because he tripped, here is a reminder that Franklin D. Roosevelt was confined to a wheelchair for his presidency.

Old people fall.
Young people fall.
Smart people… pic.twitter.com/iOwTELPVZo

— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) June 1, 2023

Virtually no one, if anyone at all, is calling for the President to be removed from office via the 25th Amendment. Moreover, the tweeter is not 80 years old (I assume) and not running for re-election as President of the United States of America. Visuals matter, far too much. And it's no accident that we periodically see something like this, Joe Biden as youthful, engaged, and a "man's man," which appeared less than two weeks before Election Day in 2022: 

 

President Roosevelt's confinement to a wheel chair was hidden from the public. President Kennedy's scoliosis was kept secret.  But media has changed dramatically in this country (and worldwide, aside from North Korea and a couple of other places) and a slip and fall becomes a hot item on social, even traditional, media.

Determined to vote for the incumbent President, you'd vote for Biden even if he appeared infirm approaching November of 2024. If dead set against him or a dedicated conservative, you'd vote for the challenger, whatever the incumbent's health or accomplishments. 

Yet there are not only many independent and/or undecided voters in the electorate, there are many who don't like either Biden or Donald Trump and wouldn't approve of whomever wins the GOP nomination. Biden's strength in current matchups against the likely candidate, Trump, reflects the huge advantage he currently holds among voters who don't like either individual.

The President can slip and fall (almost) all he wants now, seventeen months out from the presidential election. However, if he demonstrates a frailty, physical or otherwise, after Labor Day of next year, with the intense focus on the race, his advantage with the group which distastes both nominees would dissipate considerably. Moreover, there probably would be a drop in enthusiasm, reflected in both activism and turnout, among Democrats. And if either of these ensues, Joe Biden likely would become a one-term President.

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