I certainly hope he gets prison time in his sentencing on July 11th. But I’m not holding my breath.
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I walked up to a conversation this morning…
"Can you believe he had the nerve to call trump a liar?
I slowly backed away.
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That’s true, but last night wasn’t helpful at all. Biden and the entire Democratic Party, including voters, need to get real and start pulling out out all the stops (the legal ones, of course). This election should be a landslide victory for Biden, based on the successes of his Presidency. We have to find a way to get that truth across to more people. We have to.
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Did I say it was?
No doubt!
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You did not, but I’m seeing some people elsewhere trying to spin this as if it wasn’t bad. It was bad. It’s not fatal, but this is something Biden will have to recover from, not ignore.
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Just listened.
Fully agree with Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor. Their analysis is exactly on-point.
Damn.
This was not what Biden needed. And not the performance I wanted. And I do absolutely see it as Vietor saw it: “debate is performance.”
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This looked like a failure of campaign strategy to me. Biden clearly prepped with a huge amount of facts and policy details. You could see him trying to rush all that information into the restricted time, which impacted his stuttering. That may have been a good strategy for a real policy debate, but was clearly wrong for this.
Meanwhile, Trump just spouted lies and talking points with no details.
Anyone can say they’ll lower inflation. Biden tried to squeeze in all the policy details for how. Actual details for how he is dealing with inflation. Trump just said it’ll go way and offered no details for how or why. The few details he did offer don’t support lowering inflation and would instead make it go up significantly.
I saw a comment that they could have been replaced with a flash card, recorded question and a timer.
They quite literally did nothing we would expect of a journalist.
That’s where I finally had to “nope out” from watching. I swear I heard the CNN panel say “facts don’t matter”.
Apparently CNN had Dale on with fact checks 2 hours later. As if that’s just as good as the real time tweets he did. They should have had those real time tweets in a crawl live. Even better, they should have stopped real time and confronted Trump. The way CNN did it, they gave the CNN approval that everything was equal.
The Washington Post article had this quote “It’s no surprise at this point, but Trump’s performance included his usual stream of false and misleading claims.”. The article devotes barely any lines to this and instead focused on Biden. They’ve just normalized completely that everything Trump says is expect to be a lie and that doesn’t matter.
The Biden team can definitely correct from this. We’re still at the same place we were before, that Biden’s has actual accomplishments and policy and Trump does not. They just need to keep working on the campaign process to drive this home.
Assuming there is a second debate, Biden can completely change strategy too. Learn from this one that policy details don’t matter. Just go at Trump repeatedly and force him to implode. I kept hoping Biden would just use his rebuttal to say “How are you going to do that batshit thing you just said?” and watch it get more and more unhinged from Trump.
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One of the most painful parts for me was when they pointed out that Biden just handed the GOP a bunch of new video clips and soundbites that make him look old and incoherent without requiring that they be taken out of context or have any deceptive editing done, unlike with a lot of the earlier GOP attacks. Even though this debate took place so early, and might otherwise be mostly forgotten in November, you can bet that the GOP will use those clips for the rest of the campaign.
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Madman Always GishGallops Aggressively
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Though in Fetterman’s case voters had every reason to believe his communication skills would continue to improve over the coming months and years rather than decline. I doubt many can honestly say they believe the same of Biden.
Whoever wins this election I think both parties are going to be pretty wary about nominating an octogenarian candidate moving forward.
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I had already turned off the TV, but from social media posts it sounds like Biden improved immediately after and was significantly better in the post debate room. I saw a whole bunch of “why wasn’t he like this in the debate 5 minutes ago” type messages.
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I said last year now would be the perfect time to put in an upper age limit. Say 70 on election day. It would have forced both Biden and Trump to retire and then we would have a whole new mess of things to deal with. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked, but I think there were enough Republicans who wanted to get over MAGA that it might have.Frame it as stopping Biden.
Expand that to include congress and we could get some new blood in the place.
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Why do you say that? They have the chance to not nominate these, the convention hasn’t happened yet.
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Not really. The conventions aren’t what they were 50 years ago. For the most part, most states are locked in to whoever won the primary in their state. The conventions are just used for speeches and to energize the base.
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[this–which was T’s primary punching bag throughout the debate; apologies for length of this pullquote but it’s a fair sample:]
…
ImmigrationTrump says Biden “allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions.”
Pants on Fire! Immigration officials arrested about 103,700 noncitizens with criminal convictions (whether in the U.S. or abroad) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, federal data shows. That accounts for people stopped at and between ports of entry.
Not everyone was let in. The term “noncitizens” includes people who may have had legal immigration status in the U.S. but were not U.S. citizens.
The data reflects the people that the federal government knows about, but it’s inexhaustive. However, immigration experts said despite the data’s limitations, there is no evidence to support Trump’s statement.
Biden: “I’ve changed (the law) in the way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally.”
Mostly True. The Department of Homeland Security announced that illegal immigration encounters dropped by 40%, to fewer than 2,400 each day, in the weeks after Biden announced a policy largely barring asylum access for people entering the U.S. at the southern border. The policy was announced June 4.
But immigration experts caution that it’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason for any change in border crossings. For example, other factors, such as hot weather, can affect migration patterns.
Since the policy was announced only a few weeks ago, it’s unclear whether the drop in illegal immigration will continue.
Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told PolitiFact the policy could have a short-term deterrent effect. But Adam Isacson, defense oversight director at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research group, told PolitiFact, that no crackdown in the past decade has had a lasting impact.
Trump: “We had the safest border in the history of our country.”
Mostly False. Illegal immigration between ports of entry at the U.S. southern border dropped in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, compared with previous years. Apprehensions then rose, and dropped again in 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic started, immigration dropped drastically worldwide as governments enacted policies limiting people’s movement.
In the months before Trump left office, illegal immigration was rising again. A spike in migrants, especially unaccompanied minors, started in the spring 2020 during the Trump administration and generally continued to climb each month.
Illegal immigration during Trump’s administration was higher than under both of former President Barack Obama’s terms.
Biden: While talking about a bipartisan border bill, “by the way, the Border Patrol endorsed me, endorsed my position.”
Half True. The National Border Patrol Council — the U.S. Border Patrol’s union endorsed a bipartisan border security bill in February. But it didn’t endorse Biden.
Here’s what Brandon Judd, the union’s president, said about the bill in February:
“While not perfect, the Border Act of 2024 is a step in the right direction and is far better than the current status quo. This is why the National Border Patrol Council endorses this bill and hopes for its quick passage.”
Biden also supported the bill and said he would sign it into law if it passed. The bill failed in the Senate on a 49-50 vote.
However, Judd and the Border Patrol union have been critical of Biden and his immigration policies and endorsed Trump in the 2020 election.
“To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden,” the National Border Patrol Council said in an X post during the debate.
Trump: Biden allowed in “18 million people.”
False. Immigration officials have encountered immigrants illegally crossing the border 9.7 million times under Biden’s presidency. When accounting for “got aways” — people who aren’t stopped by border officials — the number rises to about 11.4 million.
But encounters don’t mean admissions. Encounters represent events, so one person who tried to cross the border twice counts for two encounters. Also, not everyone encountered is let in. Many encounters result in deportations. The Department of Homeland Security estimates about 4 million encounters have led to expulsions or removals. …
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I’m sure he’ll continue to have good days (or moments) and bad ones, but I don’t expect he’ll be sharper and more energetic overall at age 85 than he is at age 81.
If this had been a race against a traditional pre-Trump candidate like 2008 Mitt Romney a lot of Democrats would be writing off the election already.
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What’s the punishment if they don’t? We see how much has been run on expecting the rules to be followed.
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There’s also the issue that even if delegates were willing to break the rules neither party has demonstrated any interest in fielding a different candidate.
Besides, American confidence in the electoral process is low enough already without one or both of the major parties saying “Actually, remember those primaries and caucuses you voted in a few months ago? We decided to ignore the results because our guy didn’t look as good on TV as we’d hoped so we’re gonna just pick a new candidate for you.”
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A month ago I thought there was essentially a zero percent chance that Biden would or should decline the nomination and the convention would have to choose another candidate. That number is no longer zero.
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