The Wheels Are Coming Off the Biden Spin Bus
Plus: Donald Trump skates while his flunkies take the fall.
Donald Trump’s trying out something almost unheard of this week: lying low.
The Times’s Michael C. Bender reports that Trump is holding off on announcing his running mate this week, hoping to offer as few distractions as possible from the Democratic struggle session over President Joe Biden’s post-debate immolation.
Of course, not even strategic imperatives can stop Trump from fulfilling his core role as pundit-in-chief: “A really bad day for Deranged Jack Smith, the wacko prosecutor used for Crooked Joe Biden’s attack on his Political Opponent,” he posted shortly after midnight. “Today, as in the past, the Supreme Court gave the Deranged One a high level SPANKING!”
We hope that mental image won’t prevent you from having a Happy Wednesday.
Is Biden Fit to Go On? The White House Can’t Say.
Team Biden has had a tough job since Thursday night, and they’ve made their share of mistakes. But it’s not obvious that even the most brilliant tactical maneuvers, executed at a Napoleonic level of cleverness and competence, would have helped much. At the end of the day, there are no maneuvers the campaign could have pulled off to make people un-see what they saw at Thursday night’s Waterloo.
It’s also fair to note that the Biden family hasn’t been helping a whole lot.
On Saturday, at a fundraiser in the Hamptons, Jill Biden claimed, “Joe isn’t just the right person for the job. He’s the only person for the job.”
Really? “The only person for the job?”
Leave aside the unseemly hubris. What about the vice president? Surely it’s the position of the Biden-Harris administration, and the Biden-Harris campaign, that Vice President Harris can do the job if necessary.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden is in town, and he’s apparently been dropping in on some White House staff meetings. Not campaign meetings, but White House meetings.
Does he have expertise to add? Does his presence encourage frank discussion of some of the decisions that have to be made?
We all complained—quite properly(!)—about Jared and Ivanka. Are we now, in the midst of everything else, supposed to defend Hunter participating in meetings at the White House?
The fundamental issue, of course, isn’t the campaign. It’s not the Biden family. And it’s not even last week’s debate. It’s the fitness of the president to be president—not for a few more months, but for four more years.
We all hope Biden is well. But we don’t know that he is well. And, in the face of an avalanche of well-sourced reporting suggesting that President Biden has been noticeably slipping in recent months, the White House has provided no assurances that he’s well.
In response to a barrage of questions at yesterday’s White House press briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was tight-lipped, evasive, and far from reassuring. All she seemed to be authorized to say clearly was that President Biden had his annual physical exam in February. She seemed to say that he had seen no specialists such as neurologists at the time or since then. Or maybe she was merely saying that she personally didn’t know of any such medical visits.
In any case, it was all murky. It did nothing to answer the “legitimate question” Rep. Nancy Pelosi brought up in an interview yesterday: “Is this an episode or is this a condition?”
When asked her own judgment about that, she responded, reasonably, “I’m not a doctor. I can’t say what happens three or four years down the road.”
Right now, the Biden White House is asking America—despite everything—to just trust them on this one. But that won’t work.
Fortunately, there are still options. There are other competent Democratic candidates. There are other Democratic office-holders who can be good presidents.
Donald Trump must be defeated. Biden should step aside to make that crucial task more achievable. I increasingly think he will.
—William Kristol
Trump Skates. His Mooks Don’t.
Donald Trump is currently experiencing a decade’s worth of Christmasses at once. The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision was an outcome more favorable than he could have dreamed. That decision hasn’t just thrown his ongoing prosecutions into a legal purgatory from which they may never escape, it’s even called into question the conviction he already received in his New York trial.
That’s because the Supreme Court gave the president such a cushion that even presenting official conduct as evidence in trials for non-official crimes is now verboten. Team Trump argues that, since such evidence was presented in his New York trial, the case must be retried. Judge Juan Marchan issued an order yesterday pushing Trump’s sentencing back from July 11 to September 18, “if such is still necessary.”
Notably, this is happening at the exact moment consequences are catching up to a few prominent folks in Trump’s orbit. Rudy Giuliani, perhaps Trump’s single most hapless hatchet guy, was disbarred in New York yesterday over his flagrant election lying in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Steve Bannon, the self-styled dark prince of MAGA populism, reported to federal prison Monday to begin the four-month sentence he earned flouting subpoenas from the House January 6th Committee.
Giuliani and Bannon are joining a remarkable list of Trump associates, current and former, whose work for him has gotten them in hot legal water:
Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about whether he’d met with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential transition. Trump pardoned him after the 2020 election.
George Papadopoulos, a 2016 Trump campaign adviser, also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with Russian agents during the campaign.
Roger Stone, Trump’s friend and 2016 campaign adviser, was convicted in 2019 of lying under oath and tampering with a witness in a House Russia investigation. Trump pardoned him as well in 2020.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal fixer, pleaded guilty in 2018 to charges related to his role in facilitating hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. (Obviously, Trump did not pardon him.)
Allen Weisselberg, the former CFO of the Trump Organization, served five months in jail last year after pleading guilty to supervising widespread tax fraud at the company—and this year pled guilty again for lying under oath in his testimony in Trump’s civil fraud case in New York.
Peter Navarro, Trump’s former protectionist trade czar, is currently serving a four-month prison stint for contempt of Congress à la Bannon.
Mark Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, is under indictment in both Arizona and Georgia for his attempts to help Trump hold power after the 2020 election, alongside Trump legal advisers John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, and a handful of others.
Twenty-four defendants have been indicted for parallel fake-elector schemes in Michigan and Nevada (although the latter case has been dismissed on a legal technicality pending appeal).
More than 1400 criminal defendants have been charged in connection with January 6th (although some number of these will be reprieved by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Fischer v. United States).
Not all of these people are going to prison. Some have already done their time. Some Trump has pardoned already; others he may pardon should he get the chance again. But all fit a pattern that has defined the Trump era. The Don manages to skate away clean; his mooks, not so much.
—Andrew Egger
Quick Hits
1. The deluge
We see it all over from the Biden ride-or-die crowd: Isn’t this reaction out of all proportion? The guy had one bad night on the debate stage, and we’re still talking about it a week later!
The trouble for Biden is that his demoralization of the Democratic coalition last week keeps creating new bad news for him, organically prolonging the cycle. Congressional allies keep inching away; a freaked-out White House is suddenly leaking like a sieve.
Meanwhile, Biden himself is barely in view, and what we have gotten from him hasn’t been particularly reassuring. At a donor event last night, he said it “wasn’t very smart” of him to “travel around the world a couple of times . . . shortly before the debate.”
“I didn’t listen to my staff,” Biden said, “and I came back and then I almost fell asleep on stage.”
If anything, this just raised fresh concerns: Biden was still recuperating last Thursday from an international trip he’d returned from 11 days before?
Of course, this is no less plausible than any of the other theories of the case Bidenworld has trotted out over the past week: He had a cold. He was prepped poorly. He was prepped too much. He started slow but finished strong.
All this has created an ongoing news cycle around Biden as chaotic and damaging as any we’ve seen. The number of credible, well-sourced reports doing fresh political damage to the president in just the past twenty-four hours has been unbelievable. Consider this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, or this, or this, or this, perhaps this, maybe this, or even this!
If he’s determined to ride it out, Biden needs to stabilize the narrative. And he has one lifeline: While he’s suffering in swing states, his post-debate polling nationally has so far shown only a slight dip. He’ll need a lot more of that if he wants the internal pressure on him to pass the torch to subside.
2. The fight for democracy
Up on the site today, Matt Johnson has a great piece about why Democrats must resist the urge to downplay talk of saving democracy in favor of kitchen-table issues like the economy:
Trump isn’t just leading in the polls despite his attempted coup—he’s on the offensive about the subject of American democracy and election integrity. During the debate, he said Biden should be “ashamed” that “peacefully patriotic” January 6th insurrectionists are in prison. A central theme of his campaign is that Biden has “weaponized” the justice system to prevent him from returning to the White House. Yet again, Trump has declared in advance that the election is “rigged” against him. When Trump was indicted in New York last year, he said, “This fake case was brought only to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election and it should be dropped immediately.” His supporters clearly believe this argument—when he was convicted in May, his campaign immediately received tens of millions of dollars in donations.
It would be a perverse abdication of responsibility for Biden or any other Democratic nominee to cede the subject of democracy to Trump. At a time when one major party is waging an information war designed to distract Americans from the most serious threat to their democracy in generations, it would be a catastrophic mistake for the Democrats to pretend like this is a normal election against a normal candidate. Despite a couple of perfunctory questions about January 6th and Trump’s criminal record, this is what CNN did with the first debate. And instead of challenging this new status quo—in which it’s normal for a presidential candidate to refuse to say whether he will accept the results of the upcoming election—Biden treated democracy like it was just another issue, along with inflation and immigration.
Cheap Shots
That Cheap Shot is absolutely chilling. So, the only way to avoid bloodshed is unconditional surrender to fascists? Great.
Enough on Biden dropping out. He is an excellent President and should have all our support. Responding to a lying bully was always going to be difficult.