Disclaimer: Lacking a reliable crystal ball, I don't know the answer to either question posed in today's headline. Sounds as if Trump had a pretty good claim to "more endangered" yesterday, though. I'll get to that, but first, via Ann Althouse, Maureen Dowd took to her NYT perch to urge President Dotard to hang it up:
At a moment when Joe Biden should be getting hosannas for his good work and becoming the party paterfamilias, his team is sniping at Democratic luminaries like Barack Obama and George Clooney.
The Biden crew is hectoring journalists to leave the president alone and explain how awful Donald Trump is. I have used every damning word in the thesaurus, thrice, about Trump. And I’ll invent some new ones if I have to. (Suggestions welcome.) But it is not my fault if 2016 Hillary Clinton and 2024 Biden are unable to prosecute the case against a candidate with as many psychoses and felonies as Trump. It’s theirs.
Ms. Dowd had experience dealing with her aging mother, movingly told.
Our weekly look at the betting odds, and calling them "volatile" is an understatement:
Candidate | EBO Win Probability |
Change Since 7/7 |
---|---|---|
Donald Trump | 65.7% | +7.2% |
Joe Biden | 16.4% | +1.5% |
Kamala Harris | 9.2% | -5.4% |
Gavin Newsom | 2.8% | -0.7% |
Michelle Obama | 2.6% | -2.1% |
Other | 3.3% | -0.5% |
Deskchair analysis: Biden's intransigence about staying in the race caused him to improve his odds vis-à-vis the other Democrats. Getting shot (or at least getting shot at) was a big boost for Trump.
So what about that shooting. Well, the WaPo had a "Republicans Pounce" article about it pretty quick: Trump allies immediately blame Biden, Democrats for their rhetoric.
Top allies of Donald Trump quickly accused President Biden and his supporters of using rhetoric that led to a shooting and potential assassination attempt Saturday at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pa., even as Biden condemned the attack and called on the nation to unite against political violence.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a potential Trump running mate, said in a statement on social media that the shooting was “not just some isolated incident.”
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Yeah, maybe, J.D. You have to go down a few paragraphs to find some perhaps-inciting rhetoric straight from the horse's … um, mouth:
[Trump advisor Chris] LaCivita’s [now-deleted social media] message pointed to words Biden had used earlier in the week when he told a group of donors about shifting his campaign to attack Trump’s policy record, including his record on abortion and Project 2025, a policy document drafted by some former Trump advisers. “So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye,” Biden had told donors in the private call, which was reported publicly.
Which brought to mind the famed effort by the NYT editors to blame Sarah Palin for the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords. A 2017 look back from the WaPo Fact Checker: The bogus claim that a map of crosshairs by Sarah Palin’s PAC incited Rep. Gabby Giffords’s shooting.
“Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs. But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.”
— New York Times editorial board, June 14
This quote is from a corrected version of a New York Times editorial that had falsely claimed that the gunman in the 2011 Giffords shooting was politically incited by Palin’s political action committee. Many readers asked about the uncorrected version, which initially claimed “the link to political incitement was clear” between the gunman’s actions and the map portraying crosshairs, including one over Giffords’s congressional district in Southern Arizona.
On Jan. 11, 2011 — three days after the shooting — The Fact Checker called this charge “bogus.” Alas, this debunked talking point still exists.
Note: that was from 2017, in response to the softball-field shooting of GOP Congressman Scalise. The NYT editorial led to a defamation lawsuit from Palin against the NYT which is apparently still ongoing, despite Palin's loss in U.S. District Court in 2022.
I suppose "Flight 93" storm-the-cockpit rhetoric will continue to come at us from all sides. I'm dubious that it causes dangerous wackos to grab guns, but maybe.
Also of note:
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A pretty good title for a bad science fiction novel. Martin Gurri reflects on Joe Biden and a Tear in the Fabric of Things.
Joe Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the tender age of 30. He looked like a president, he felt like a president and he fully expected to rise to the top. His formula for success was that of every ambitious politician deprived by nature of directing principles or opinions: Find the meandering mainstream of his party’s establishment, where the big fish swim, then wade in and drift. Biden was in turn strongly against and stridently for abortion, a righteous Vietnam dove and then a stern Iraq hawk, a friend of racist Democratic senators before becoming a promoter of compensatory quotas for racial minorities.
Virtually every time a vacancy arose, Biden, by his own admission, considered running for the presidency. In 1988, at the age of 46, he actually did so—and failed. Biden may look and feel like a president, but he has never sounded like one. Long before old age turned him into a bleary-eyed mutterer, he tended to get lost in his own verbiage. He told fantastic stories about his personal life that could be easily disproven. He plagiarized bits from Bobby Kennedy and an entire speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Biden, it seems, was as needy as he was ambitious. His campaign resembled a prolonged pratfall. He dropped out before the first primary.
Gurri's take on history and current events (pre-assassination attempt, at least) is well worth a read.
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A very bad title for a bad political novel. Kerry Jackson, writing at the Pacific Research Institute says that one of the guys in the betting table has, perhaps, overestimated odds: President Newsom, For The Power And The Glory
Biden’s troubling performance in the June 27 CNN debate fueled the ongoing discussions of who could and should replace him as the Democratic candidate. Of course every list included Newsom, who was a Biden surrogate at the debate and obviously has his eye on the White House even as he pretends to avert his gaze every time he’s asked about it.
The numbers, however, indicate that he’d be a poor choice. A CNN poll taken three days after the debate showed Trump by five points over Newsom. A Data for Progress poll taken the day after had Trump up by three.
Multiple polls have Trump also beating Vice President Kamala Harris, though the gaps are closer and in some cases within the margin of error. Interestingly, the gamblers like Harris, who is extraordinarily unpopular, over Newsom. The RealClearPolitics betting odds average shows Trump at 56 percent, Harris at 15.7 percent, Biden at 12.2 and Newsom at 4.7.
The explanation is pretty simple:
It was under Newsom and no other governor that California lost population. The same goes for the loss of a congressional seat. That happened on his watch. It’s no mere coincidence that the human flight from the state corresponded with some of the most harsh, pointless, counterproductive and we’re-just-guessing pandemic lockdown policies in the country.
… and more.
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Maybe the assassination attempt will change him, but… as of a few days ago, Jonah Goldberg was on target (or is that too assassin-encouraging now?): Trump Is Loyal Only to His Own Ambition.
Trump has always wanted the party to be his pool of Narcissus, reflecting his personal glory and dominance. That’s why he supported candidates who hewed to his lie that the 2020 election was stolen, preferring that the party lose with loyalists than win with truth-tellers. That’s why he no longer cares about the Federalist Society, which produced judges who rejected his false election claims. Oh, and last month, the guy who infamously called for a ban on Muslim immigration said he wants to give every foreign-born graduate of a U.S. college a green card.
The problem with the search for an intellectually serious Trumpism is that Trump has no use for ideas except as expedients of his ambition. The instrumentalism that paved the way for Trump sought to make him the right’s tool. Instead, it made a lot of right-wingers look like tools.
Sorry, Donald. But I earnestly hope you get better soon. In all senses of that term.