GET READY FOR AUTOPEN-GHAZI

What will Congress do after the Big Beautiful Bill is signed into law? (Sadly, we all know it will be signed into law into some form, after a few tweaks; pay no attention to any GOP senator who claims to be a holdout now. Republicans always close ranks eventually, especially when tax cuts to the rich are involved.)

Once the BBB is in the statute books, why will members of Congress even need to show up for work? President Trump is running the country via executive order. Republican majorities in Congress and on the Supreme Court have no problem with this. So the House and Senate will need to fill a lot of time looking busy.

I expect that some time after the budget bill passes, congressional Republicans will turn to the burning question of ... Joe Biden's mental fitness during his presidential term. This won't just be an airing of grievances. I think Republicans expect it to have real-world consequences.

Republicans (thanks, Jake Tapper!) are reviving and refining an old narrative: that Biden wasn't merely impaired during his time in office, he was literally not functioning as president. According to this narrative, by the end of his term Biden didn't even know what went out over his signature, largely because it wasn't his signature at all -- the signing was all done by aides using an autopen.

On one day in March, this was the right-wing message of the day:

In the first two months of this year, the term ["autopen"] was mentioned a total of 49 times on television, radio and podcasts in the United States, according to data from the media tracker Critical Mention.

It was uttered 6,188 times on March 17 alone.

Then it faded into the background. But on May 16 -- as pre-publication publicity for the Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson book was peaking -- the conspiracy-minded chair of the House Oversight Committee announced an investigation:

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) today announced the panel will continue its investigation into the cover-up of President Biden’s mental decline and use of autopen....

“Key decisions made in the final days of the Biden presidency, including using autopens to issue blanket pardons for the Biden Crime Family, must be fully examined. There are serious concerns that President Biden lacked the mental capacity to authorize those actions. The American people are done being lied to. We’re going to bring the truth into the light, and starting next week, those involved in the cover-up will begin to be put on notice,” said Chairman Comer.

Trump weighed in on Tuesday, the publication date of the Tapper-Thompson book:

Vice President J.D. Vance piled on, obliquely, in his New York Times podcast interview with Ross Douthat:

Also, to be candid — and this is going to sound like I’m beating up on him — I really don’t know how much Joe Biden’s late evolution on abortion was that thought out. Far be it from me to defend Joe Biden, but I really think the more that we learn, the more that we see the policy of the Biden administration was driven much more by staff than it was by the elected president.

But the GOP's main focus in "Autopen-ghazi" isn't abortion or immigration. It's executive orders and pardons. Here's Comer the day the Tapper-Thompson book was published:

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chair of the House Oversight Committee, told Newsmax on Tuesday he wants to get to the bottom of who was running the country when Joe Biden was president.

Comer appeared on "Rob Schmitt Tonight" after President Donald Trump raised questions about Biden using an autopen to sign executive orders.

"Who would put the document in there?" Comer said. "Who gave that staffer the authority? Was it Joe Biden or was it another staffer? We don't believe Joe Biden knew what was going on." ...

"We don't believe that autopen was authorized by Joe Biden," Comer said. "We don't believe that using the autopen makes these executive orders and even these pardons legal. We're going to do this investigation. Hopefully it will benefit Trump in court as he tries to do what the American people want done. And that's drain the swamp."

Pardons and executive orders are also the focus of a piece published in The Hill by long-time right-wing hack Liz Peek:

Republicans want to investigate former President Joe Biden’s use of the autopen. Did he personally grant broad (and possibly unconstitutional) pardons for family members, members of the January 6 Committee and Anthony Fauci, or did someone else make the decision? Was he responsible for all the executive orders issued under his name, or did White House personnel make those decisions?

... Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a statement he plans to subpoena former Biden aides Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal and Ashley Williams, who he claims “ran interference” for Biden and may have overseen the use of the autopen.

If he did not personally sign various documents, are they valid?

I think they believe they can get some of Biden's executive orders invalidated, although I'm not sure what practical effect that will have. Maybe Mike Johnson just wants natural gas producers in his state to be able to sue the government for lost revenue. Peek writes:

The Wall Street Journal reported last June about a February 2024 Oval Office meeting between House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Biden. According to Johnson, the president denied that he had recently instituted a pause on further expansion of liquified natural gas exports, claiming instead that it was just a study. Johnson told six people about Biden’s confusion after the meeting, suggesting it indicated a slippage of Biden’s memory....

Speaking with Bari Weiss early this year, for her Substack podcast, Johnson [said he] ... asked the president why he had paused liquefied natural gas exports to Europe, pointing out that this action was enriching Russia and fueling Vladimir Putin’s war effort. Biden relied, “I didn’t do that.” When Johnson reminded the president of the executive order he had signed just weeks earlier, the president denied that the order mandated a pause.

Johnson has since said he walked out of the meeting shaken, thinking, “‘We are in serious trouble — who is running the country?’ Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.”

The attack on the pardons seems more worrisome. I had contempt for everyone who finger-wagged at Biden after he signed those pardons: Where was all that moral outrage when Trump pardoned his son in-law's father, Charles Kushner? You know, the guy Chris Christie is talking about here?

For that matter, where was the outrage when Trump appointed Kushner as ambassador to France?

Biden pardoned a lot of people who would otherwise have been subject to merciless lawfare by the Trump regime -- and Comer apparently wants Trump to have the opportunity to persecute them despite the pardons. And who knows? We're so far through the looking glass that this might actually happen.

I don't know what the timing would be. Assuming we have legitimate midterms, my guess is that Comer will want the hearings to peak just before voting starts in 2026, in the hope of increasing GOP turnout, with prosecutions to follow after the election.

Maybe all this will fall flat. Maybe the federal courts aren't so in the tank for Trump that they'll be willing to let Trump neutralize Biden's actions based on this he-didn't-control-the-autopen theory. But Republicans intend to go for this moonshot, and there's a non-zero chance they'll succeed -- or at least succeed in making the 2026 election at least partially a referendum on Biden.

IMAGINE NO FIRST-RATE UNIVERSITIES -- IT'S EASY IF YOU TRY

Long before Donald Trump entered politics, right-wing hatred of the opposition made T-shirts and bumper stickers with this slogan very popular:

Right-wingers in America don't just want to dominate politics -- they'd prefer it if their opponents didn't exist. They haven't started putting us in camps, but I think many of them want to.

The madness of our current Trump/Heritage Society dictatorship largely derives from the belief that all dissent can and should be neutralized, that no law passed by a previous Congress and signed into law by a previous president should remain in effect if it contradicts what Trump and Heritage want, and that no institution that displeases Trump and/or Heritage should remain intact. Among the institutions that should be eliminated from American life is elite academia, of which the most acclaimed institution is Harvard. Trump isn't attacking Harvard in order to change it. He's attacking it in order to destroy it. I'm not sure he knows that, but the leaders of the Heritage Foundation who have steered him in this direction certainly do.

The foreword to Project 2025's 900-page manifesto, Mandate for Leadership, makes this clear. It was written by Heritage's president, Kevin Roberts. He writes:

Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people. But under our Constitution, they are the mere equals of the workers who shower after work instead of before.

The educated elite betray the morally pure Volk at those high school football games in Waco by subjecting them to globalism and (of course) "wokeness."

They enthusiastically support supranational organizations like the United Nations and European Union, which are run and staffed almost entirely by people who share their values and are mostly insulated from the influence of national elections. That’s why they are eager for America to sign international treaties on everything from pharmaceutical patents to climate change to “the rights of the child”—and why those treaties invariably endorse policies that could never pass through the U.S. Congress. Like the progressive Woodrow Wilson a century ago, the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.

And while I agree that we need people without elite degrees in government, Roberts says that education is literally useless if you're in government.

Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity.

Also, universities are entangled with the Great Satan: China.

Through the CCP's Confucius Institutes, Beijing has been just as successful at compromising and coopting our higher education system as they have at compromising and coopting corporate America....

But these really are not many issues, but two: (1) that China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor, and (2) that America’s elites have betrayed the American people. The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat.

So what is the solution to these problems?

We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch.

Roberts appears to want all elite institutions removed from America, "root and branch."

The rest of the Manual for Leadership has much more targeted, if terrible, ideas about education, primarily an assault on diversity programs. But this is the real vision.

The madness of modern conservatism stems from the belief that right-wingers can simply do away with anything that annoys them and there'll be no negative consequences, at least for them or anyone they care about. Thus, George W. Bush chose not to regulate segments of the economy that almost dragged us into a second Great Depression. Conservatives refuse to fight climate change, on the assumption that no one they know will suffer great losses in floods or heat waves. Gun control? There haven't been any shootings at their kids' schools.

Now the right believes we can do without vaccines and without National Weather Service monitoring of natural disasters. The right believes we can live without adequate Medicaid funding (including funding of eldercare) and without an adequate air traffic control system (even though high-level right-wingers fly a lot).

In their madness, they've concluded that we don't need scientific research -- we don't need grants to universities, and it would be fine if the best-known universities ceased to exist altogether.

The people who are thinking this way have comfortable lives and apparently can't imagine any kind of setback in life that would make them dependent on programs and institutions they despise. They're also massively selfish -- many of them actually learned much of what they know about politics from the author of The Virtue of Selfishness -- and they don't care about anyone who benefits from whatever they're eliminating.

They think they'll be fine if elite universities simply cease to exist. And maybe they will be. But the rest of us will miss them when they're gone.

THE REPUBLICAN FORMULA FOR SUCCESS: GET YOURSELF BRANDED AS THE SOLUTION TO PROBLEMS YOU CREATE

The House has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (yes, that's its official name). It will go to the Senate, and there will be changes, but it will undoubtedly remain awful.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill would drastically cut federal spending on programs for the bottom 10% of Americans, while increasing federal benefits for the top 10%, all while exploding the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion....

The CBO also stated that the bill would trigger $500 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act.

Polls routinely show that voters worry about government deficits and debt. We're told that the Republican Party is full of deficit hawks, but nearly all the so-called hawks in the House voted for this, even though they know the bill is a budget-buster:

Figures from the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan referee, forecast that the GOP tax bill would push deficits to around 7% of gross domestic product in the coming years, an unprecedented amount of borrowing for a peacetime economy with a low unemployment rate.

Financial markets are sending up big screaming warnings about this:

Yields on government debt spiked on Wednesday as investors fretted that the bill would add roughly $3.3 trillion to the federal debt pile over the next decade. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which underpins mortgages and commercial loans, has risen nearly a percentage point since September, even as the Fed cut its benchmark lending rate by almost the same amount over that period.

The yield on the 10-year on Thursday stood at 4.61 percent, well above the “yippy” level it traded at last month that forced Trump into a tariffs rethink, and a 90-day pause on some of the biggest levies.

Investors appeared to tank an auction for 20-year Treasury bonds on Wednesday.

And that's going to affect ordinary people soon:

Higher bond yields mean the government has to pay more money to cover the interest on nearly $29 trillion in debt, raising the prospect that Americans will someday have to pay more in taxes or accept cuts in government services.

As long as Republicans are in power, "cuts in government services" will always be the preferred choice.

Consciously or unconsciously, the Republicans know that they're increasing government deficits and debt, not reducing them. They always do this -- and it works. Why? Because even though they routinely push America further and further into debt, they're perceived as the party that opposes debt. They sustain the problem so they can look like the heroes riding to the rescue to solve it.

This is similar to what the president did with tariffs, although we all saw it happening: Trump created an economic crisis, the markets freaked, then he (partially) cleaned up the mess he made -- and his poll numbers rebounded. He has an unearned reputation as an excellent dealmaker, so even though we've lost more than we've gained from his tariff dealmaking, half the country thinks he's our hard-nosed economic savior.

Republicans regularly benefit from unearned reputations for "touughness." Remember when George W. Bush was asleep at the switch in the weeks before 9/11, then became an almost universally admired president in its aftermath? That's because we all "know" that Republicans are strong on defense -- even though Bush was the exact opposite.

How do we turn this around? I don't know. It's hard to kill a myth.

J.D. VANCE THINKS IMMIGRATION MAKES AMERICANS STOP WANTING TO HAVE BABIES

J.D. Vance says a lot of awful things in his podcast interview with Ross Douthat. He also says a few ridiculous things. Here's an example of the latter. Vance is talking about immigration, the great obsession of this administration. He tells us that immigration is having a deleterious effect on ... American baby-making:

The point that I’ve tried to make is I think a lot about this question of social cohesion in the United States. I think about how we form the kind of society again where people can raise families, where people join institutions together. Where what I think Burke would have called the mediating layers of society are actually healthy and vibrant.

And I do think that those who care about what might be called the common good, they sometimes underweight how destructive immigration at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years is to the common good. I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.

That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.

(Emphasis added.)

Yes, honey, I would have kids with you, but remember that plumber we hired who spoke English with an accent? He sure didn't look like he was here legally. I couldn't possibly bring a child into this world when it might breathe the same air as someone who's undocumented.

Vance is "trying to preserve something ... where we are a unified nation"? Well, maybe he ought to consider resigning his job so he's no longer working for a president who hates half the country:

President Donald Trump argued that a GOP budget bill should help only Republican states instead of benefiting Democratic governors.

"We're going to make a couple of tweaks," Trump said of his "one big beautiful bill" during a Tuesday trip to Capitol Hill. "I mean, we don't want to benefit Democrat governors, although I would do that if it made it better, but they don't know what they're doing."

"We want to help all the states, but we have governors that are from the Democrat [sic] party, let's say New York, Illinois, big ones, and let's say Gavin 'Newscum,' who's done a horrible job in California."

"We want to benefit Republicans. They are the ones that are going to make America great again," he added. "The Democrats are destroying our country."

The GOP has hated Democrats for decades -- when James Watt, Ronald Reagan's first interior secretary, said in 1983, "I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans," he didn't think he needed to explain what he meant, because he assumed (correctly) that millions of Americans agreed with him. Obviously, that's not the main reason Americans are having fewer kids, though it might be part of the reason: Republicans, and particularly the current president, don't want to address the climate crisis, which will make the world worse for any child born now, and a significant reason they don't want to address it is that not addressing it owns the libs. Though to be fair, I think the main reason they don't want to address climate change is that billionaires control our politics, and most of those billionaires, especially the oil billionaires, don't want it addressed.

Billionaires also don't want young people to have sufficient time off work or the robust social safety net they need so their children can thrive. The rich have their hooks in both parties, but most of them prefer the GOP. Worsening economic inequality also makes it hard for America to be "a unified nation," and the Trump/Vance administration and Republican Congress intend to make that worse:

Tax cuts in House Republicans’ megabill would lead to increased assets for the richest Americans, while reducing them for the lowest-income households through cuts to federal spending on Medicaid and food aid, according to a new preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

... household resources would fall by about 2 percent of income for the lowest-income 10 percent of households by 2027, and 4 percent by 2033. That’s largely due to changes to Medicaid and SNAP policy that would lead to nearly a trillion dollars less in federal spending on those programs.

But the top 10 percent of households would see their household resources rise 4 percent by 2027 and 2 percent in 2033, “mainly because of reductions in the taxes they owe,” CBO said.

But yeah, blame low birthrates on immigrants. They're an easy scapegoat.

WHAT ARE YOU GONNA BELIEVE -- DECADES OF PROPAGANDA OR YOUR LYING EYES?

In The New York Times today, Thomas Edsall quotes Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia, who says (in Edsall's summary of her remarks) that "Trump's second term agenda ... is elite-driven." Rudman tells Edsall:

There is no indication that these new Trump voters, his winning margin, voted for demolition of the basic structures of governance in this country as DOGE has done, impeding the services, e.g., social security and Medicaid, and the jobs upon which they depend.

While there's no indication that swing voters who chose Trump in November voted for these cuts to basic services, or cuts to scientific and medical research, it's becoming clear that they aren't particularly outraged as these cuts are being made. Trump's poll numbers dropped significantly in the immediate aftermath of his "Liberation Day" tariff announcement, but now that Trump has partially suspended the tariffs, his poll numbers are improving dramatically -- at RealClearPolling he's at 47.1% approval and at 49.6% disapproval, a significant improvement over his 45.1%/52.3% split on April 29.

I have a theory about why swing voters who chose Trump in 2024 aren't up in arms about service cuts at Social Security, the VA, FEMA, and elsewhere: They think government services were always bad -- even when, in their own experience, those services were delivered well.

There's no place in America, liberal, moderate, or conservative, where people would nod in agreement if you said, for example, "The Social Security Administration is doing a really great job." We simply don't praise the government that way. No one does. That's true even though most Social Security recipients get their checks or their automatic deposits without fail every month. Most Medicare recipients get their claims paid efficiently. Most people like the U.S. Postal Service. But most people have also been told for decades -- even before Ronald Reagan's presidency -- that the government is a sinkhole of "waste, fraud, and abuse," and that government employees aren't very good at their jobs. (We use the phrase "close enough for government work" as a synonym for "not carefully done," even though it had the opposite meaning during World War II.) People have been conditioned to expect the worst of government, even if that's not their experience. And now they're getting what they expect.

I think this also why the Trump administration's blatant corruption isn't hurting the president in the polls. Maybe voters don't think Trump should accept that Qatari plane, but his poll numbers are going up in spite of the scandal. Voters don't seem particularly upset about all the crypto cash Trump is receiving, or about his real estate deals in the Middle East, or about stories like this:

Vietnam approves a $1.5 billion Trump golf resort project as tariff talks loom

As trade tensions between Washington and Hanoi escalate, Vietnam has approved a $1.5 billion investment from the Trump Organization to build golf courses, hotels, and real estate....

Vietnam, the largest U.S. trading partner in Southeast Asia, has long been a focal point of President Donald Trump’s tariff push.

I think I understand this. All my life, ordinary people have said the same thing about politicians: "They're all crooks!" So now when we have a politician who's clearly much more of a crook than any previous president, they appear to be shrugging it off. Even though they clearly aren't all this bad, voters think they are, so they don't seem to care much about how Trump is cashing in on the presidency.

I think this will change when there's an entrenched economic downturn, but I'm beginning to question whether there'll be widespread, sustained disillusionment with Trump before that. Voters' expectations of government are very, very low. Trumpism is extremely destructive, but the end result is a government that's as bad as the American people think government is, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

REPUBLICAN GHOULS WANT TO TURN JOE BIDEN'S CANCER DIAGNOSIS INTO A MASSIVE SCANDAL (updated)

Former president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. I wish him a speedy recovery, but he's fighting long odds -- the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body is 37%. But Biden's a tough guy. He really might hang on for a while.

President Trump surprised many of us by not going on the attack. His message at Truth Social: "Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery." Donald Trump Jr. was similarly restrained ... for a few hours. At 4:34 Eastern yesterday, he posted this:

Agreed 100% pic.twitter.com/ry4aifQtVx

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 18, 2025

A little more than three hours later, he decided he'd checked the "decent human being" box and could say what he really wanted to say:

What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another coverup??? pic.twitter.com/fSqtDmcX4p

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 18, 2025

This is now his pinned tweet.

Junior is stupid, but I don't think he's so stupid that he fails to comprehend the nature of the former First Lady's doctorate, which was in education, not science or medicine. Dinesh D'Souza, who used to be a semi-serious right-wing pundit before he became a conspiratorial hack, posted a similar tweet:

I wonder if “Doctor” Jill Biden was surprised to hear about her husband’s diagnosis.

Unless…could it be…just raising the possibility…let me know if I’m way off base here…she’s not a real doctor?

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) May 18, 2025

They know the nature of her doctorate. They also know that most of their followers don't know what they know. No modern Republican ever missed an opportunity to exploit the ignorance of the electorate.

But these ghouls don't just want to use Joe Biden's cancer as the subject of their latest Two-Minutes' Hate. They want to turn the announcement of the diagnosis into a scandal that changes the course of our politics. In this they're getting an assist, unwitting or otherwise, from Rahm Emanuel's oncologist brother. Here's a tweet D'Souza retweeted:

Dr. Zeke Emanuel on Biden’s Cancer diagnosis:

“He did not develop it in the last, 100, 200 days. He had it while he was President. He probably had it at the start of his presidency, in 2021… I don't think there's any disagreement about that.”

pic.twitter.com/OyFgunMaxy

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) May 19, 2025

D'Souza and his ideological soulmates want to send this message: Biden knew he was dying of prostate cancer when he was president and there was a massive cover-up. Here's a D'Souza ally (and top Trump adviser) on that subject:

The cover up of a terminally ill illegitimate President is grounds for the Democrats to never hold office ever again.

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) May 19, 2025

But as The Independent reports, there's no smoking-gun evidence of a cover-up:

PSA blood testing, a method used to test for prostate-specific antigen, can sometimes have abnormal results, prompting false-positive or false-negative results, according to the American Cancer Society.

Some prostate cancers grow so slowly that they would never cause any problems during a person’s lifetime.

Even if screening detects prostate cancer, at times, medical professionals can’t tell if the cancer is truly dangerous and requires treatment.

Dr. Daniel Petrylak, a prostate cancer specialist at Yale Cancer Center, told WTNH in Connecticut that despite his surprise that the president’s condition wasn’t established earlier, if Biden’s PSA levels didn’t spike during previous screenings, the alarm would not have been raised.

“One thing that may be a wrinkle in this case is the fact that PSA levels with a high-grade tumor may be lower than you expect. Because the high-grade tumors make less PSA per cancer cell than the low-grade tumors,” Petrylak said.

Even a Republican congressman who's a doctor doesn't think this story should be exploited politically.

North Carolina Congressman Greg Murphy, M.D., a surgeon, said, “While [I] definitely agree that Biden’s declining mental acuity was covered up, it is medically reckless to assume his prostate cancer was as well.

“I have treated prostate cancer patients for 30+ years. Let’s get the politics out of medicine,” he stated on X Sunday night.

Republicans are pointing to this moment from 2022:

President Joe Biden’s speech at a former coal-fired power plant in Massachusetts led to widespread claims on social media that he made a significant announcement not about climate change, but about his health....

At one point during his speech, he discussed the impact of environmental pollution from oil refineries near his hometown, sharing an anecdote about his childhood.

“And guess what? The first frost, you knew what was happening. You had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window,” Biden said, according to a White House transcript of his remarks. “That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up (with) have cancer and why can — for the longest time, Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.” ...

But Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, confirmed on Twitter that Biden was referring to the publicly disclosed fact that he had skin cancer removed before he became president.

Biden says that his mother using windshield wipers to "get literally the oil slick off the window" is "why I and so damn many other people have cancer." pic.twitter.com/YIoBlZadRJ

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 20, 2022

But right-wingers don't merely want to argue that Team Biden covered up a cancer diagnosis in a way that's scandalous. They're asserting an overall health cover-up and calling for legal consequences.

It seems obvious now they were lying about this.

We need investigations, answers, if necessary prosecutions. pic.twitter.com/4ia1LGWape

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) May 18, 2025

This letter was released after reports emerged of a neurologist's visit to the White House. D'Souza is tweeting this now because he wants all the questions about Biden's mental acuity and questions about Biden's cancer diagnosis to be scrambled in his followers' minds.

And the same is true for Jack Posobiec:

Only a President can sign a commission officially nominating a Supreme Court Justice

Not a staffer, not an autopen, a president with full mental capacity

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) May 19, 2025

It's no surprise that this scumbag wants to argue that the entire Biden presidency was a sham and should be wiped off the books because (as he suggests) Biden was a brain-dead dementia case and an autopen was used to simulate his judgment. Again, Posobiec knows this is bullshit, but he knows his audience doesn't know that. But why is he tweeting this now, and why is D'Souza retweeting it now? Because they want questions about a possible cancer cover-up to be mixed up in their readers' minds with questions -- thanks, Jake Tapper! -- about Biden's mental health.

We just found out about Biden's cancer and this is what these low-lifes are doing. Remember this the next time there's a mass shooting and the same ideological thugs tell us that it's "too soon" to talk about gun control. And remember all this the next time you're told that Democrats are elitist bullies who treat Trump voters with contempt. This is the media diet of Trump voters. They hate us, and this is why.

*****

UPDATE: I see it isn't just online right-wing influencers who are trying to conflate Biden's prostate health and his mental acuity. Here's the vice president of the United States:

Always be demonizing.

IT'S GOOD TO BE ABLE TO CRITICIZE YOUR OWN SIDE, BUT NOT WHEN THE ALTERNATIVE IS FASCISM

There's a book review I read more than twenty years ago that I think about a lot in reference to American politics and the dire state of liberalism. The book under review wasn't about politics -- it was Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s by Gerald Nachman. I haven't read the book, though I'm familiar with most of the comics it discusses. What stays with me is this passage from Adam Gopnik's review in The New Yorker. It talks about the degree to which the "rebel comedians" of the Eisenhower/Joe McCarthy/JFK/LBJ era were mocking the people who bought tickets to their shows rather than people on the right:

For what is really striking about all the “rebel” comedians of the time, hard and soft, is that their main target was almost never the excesses of the right wing in power. From Tom Lehrer’s “Love, love love me, I’m a liberal” and Shelley Berman’s nervous flier to Woody Allen’s mockery of CUNY ethics and Nichols and May’s sublime catalogue of the sounds of tolerance (“Well, Al Schweitzer is just a great guy. Al is a lot of laughs. I personally have never dated him”), their subject was liberalism and its pieties. As Nachman sees quite clearly, though he seems not always to see the centrality of his own observation, the bulk of Mort Sahl’s material, beyond a couple of anti-McCarthy jokes long after McCarthy was out of power, wasn’t political—and, to the degree that it was, it mostly mocked liberal saints like the Kennedys. Rather, it was social and sexual: “There are no women in the Beat Generation, just girls who have broken with their parents for the evening.” Lenny Bruce may have been victimized by the police and the judiciary, but he seldom made fun of them—partly because he had a twisted, junkie’s respect for anyone who had contempt for him, but mostly because there wasn’t enough life in what they did to be very funny. “What can a man Eisenhower’s age say to me?” he shrugged memorably and then joked about liberal hypocrisies and liberal conventions (“I used to go to civil-rights marches, but Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles keep bumping into people”). Nichols and May are funny because they have perfect pitch for the holy words of progressive culture (“I can never believe that Bartók died on Central Park West”). Well past the high-water mark of McCarthyism, the comedians were mocking liberalism, implicitly recognizing that this was the ideology in cultural ascent.

The book and this review were published in 2003, but we've seen what Gopnik describes in subsequent decades on Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. We see it in contemporary streaming shows like Hacks and The Studio, in which characters who earnestly or cynically embrace progressive ideas are depicted as somewhat ridiculous.

I thought about all this again when a friend on Bluesky pointed me to Jake Tapper's Substack page, where we learn that his book tour with Alex Thompson for that Biden "cover-up" book will continue for several more weeks and feature quite a few public appearances with friendly interviewers:

THURSDAY MAY 22 in WASHINGTON DC with Maureen Dowd at the 9:30 Club;

TUESDAY MAY 27 in NEW YORK, NY with David Remnick at the 92nd Street Y;

THURSDAY MAY 29 in PHILLY with Tamala Edwards at the Free Library;

SATURDAY MAY 31 in SEATTLE with Mike Pesca at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival;

MONDAY JUNE 2 in SAN FRANCISCO with Marisa Lagos at the Commonwealth Club;

TUESDAY JUNE 3 in LOS ANGELES with Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett at Writers Bloc;

THURSDAY JUNE 5 in CHICAGO with David Folkenflik at WBEZ Presents, at the Vic Theater.

More to come!

If you think of the contemporary version of the liberal culture Gopnik describes above as a belief system, Tapper and Thompson are about to appear with several of its most prominent clerics (Jon Favreau! David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker!), and at some of its most famous cathedrals (the 92nd Street Y! WBEZ, home of This American Life and Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!).

What does it mean when liberal culture embraces a book that bashes the Democratic Party and its former leader this way?

Up to a point, I respect liberals for being willing to engage in self-criticism. Do Republicans ever do that? How many Republican-bashing books have Republicans bought in bestseller numbers? How many jokes does Greg Gutfeld tell on Fox that are at the right's expense? But past a certain point, this impulse leaves many liberals unable to fully take their own side in an argument. They'd rather attack their own allies.

Maureen Dowd will chat with Tapper and Thompson in D.C. next week. Her latest column bashes Biden and the Democrats using the language and ideas of the Tapper/Thompson book. Gratifyingly, most of the reader picks among the comments are having none of it:

Looks like we're back to the old pastime of observing that Joe Biden is old. Never mind that Donald Trump is also old, but is also a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and barely able to string two coherent sentences together. And he's also crashed the economy and is wrecking the federal government. Plus, he's got those strange ties to Vladimir putin. Instead, let's beat up on Biden again. I'd take Biden's peace and stability, and the economy running like a well oiled machine, any day over the chaos we have now.

****

I believe that Joe Biden should never have declared for a second term. I also believe that Joe Biden’s worst day with mental decline is preferable to any day under Trump.

****

Be that as it may, whie Biden was President in the last year, he made no major gaffes, said nothing outlandish, was not vengeful - despite was Dowd offers up here. And most important in this "cognitive decline narrative", BIDEN STEPPED ASIDE; HE DID NOT RUN. Meanwhile, Trump messes up every single day, lies every day, grifts every day, insults every day. BUt here we are, still blaming Biden for everything.

****

I was with you, Maureen, until I read this:

"Democratic pooh-bahs and lawmakers were silent when they should have been screaming — as the Republicans are now with Trump’s egregious assaults on the Constitution, his cringey grifting..."

Republicans are screaming about Trump's corruption? Who? Where? When?

****

Yes, Biden should’ve dropped out earlier or not run at all. But in November 2024 voters had a clear choice between a qualified woman of color and chose the grifter instead, so the current ongoing catastrophe is on them. Leave Biden alone.

****

Cool! Do we have this fully off our chests now? Can we not hear another peep about Biden from this newspaper and bring the focus back to Israel's destruction of Gaza and Trump's rendition of US residents to El Salvador?

I guess these readers are capable of taking their own side in an argument.

WAS IT A COVER-UP IF EVERYONE KNEW WHAT WAS ALLEGEDLY CONCEALED?

Here's an excerpt from a post I found at Reddit, in the Bulwark subreddit:

Like many of you, I’m starting to get sick of Jack Tapper’s “Biden cover-up” book tour. Here’s a newsflash, Jake: There was no “cover-up,” you just don’t know how to do journalism.

It was obvious to anyone with two eyes, two ears, and three brain cells that Joe Biden was physically and cognitively impaired and shouldn’t seek a second term. Many of us, myself included, expressed our feelings on this board and others in 2022/2023....

None of us were geniuses or had any inside information, we just saw what we saw. Biden barely did public appearances, which is always a bad sign. When he did, he was stuttering and hesitant. He trailed off, both verbally and physically. He shuffled about. He looked terrible: The hair loss, the squinting to the point where you couldn’t see the whites of his eyes, the age spots. He looked like the Crypt Keeper from Tales Of The Crypt. And that’s just in comparison to the Biden of 2020!

This poster, who goes by the name of PorcelainDalmatian, points out that some people resisted this assessment:

We were told we weren’t “team players” and “you can’t ask a President not to run for a second term.” If I had a nickel for every snarky “I didn’t know you were his doctor!” comment on my posts, I’d be richer than Elon Musk.

This poster is describing an America in which millions of voters, possibly a majority, thought Biden was obviously, self-evidently impaired, while his defenders insisted that he remained capable of doing the job, and would certainly do it better than Donald Trump.

And that's exactly what the polls said. Here's an ABC News/FiveThirtyEight story that was published just after Biden's awful debate with Trump:

... the debate didn't suddenly thrust Biden's age into the spotlight for most Americans the way it seemingly did for Democratic Party elites.... [A]nswers to specific questions about Biden's age haven't changed much ... because most Americans already thought Biden was too old....

Here are some numbers:

When asked last September [2023] how much of an effect they thought Biden's health and age would have on his ability to fulfill his duties as president if reelected, 57 percent of Americans said his age would "severely limit" his ability. Right after the debate, that number was 61 percent. A significant share of Democrats, too, have long held concerns about the president's age and his ability to do the job. In September, 25 percent of Democrats said Biden's age would severely limit his abilities in his second term, while 30 percent said so immediately after the debate (and 27 percent in a more recent poll).

In a poll fielded between June 28 and July 1 [2024] (the weekend following the debate), 56 percent of Americans and 28 percent of Democrats said Biden's age was a big problem. But that's not so far off from a November [2023] poll in which 25 percent of Democrats and an identical 56 percent of overall respondents said the president's age was a big problem.

So if there was a cover-up prior to the debate, it wasn't working. Non-Democratic voters already thought Biden was too old to be effective, and it's quite possible that Democrats thought he was still capable but impaired. The FiveThirtyEight story adds:

... 69 percent of registered voters said they somewhat or strongly agreed that Biden was "too old to be an effective president" in a New York Times/Siena College poll after the debate, including 55 percent of those who chose Biden in a head-to-head with Trump. But when asked to expand, 40 percent of voters who chose Biden and said he was too old said that his age "makes him ineffective, but he is still able to handle the job of president well enough," compared to 14 percent who said his age was "such a problem that he is not capable of handling the job of president."

Even before the debate, it's quite likely that many Democrats would have said that Biden's age "makes him ineffective, but he is still able to handle the job of president well enough." (I would said it made him less effective but still able to handle the job well enough -- and certainly better than Trump. I still believe that.)

The fact that the media can't seem to move past this, and that a subset of Democrats can't get enough of this discourse, is a byproduct of the Republican Party's highly successful Stockholmization of both the mainstream press and the Democratic Party over the past few decades. Tapper and others seem to take great pride in saying, Wow, we really suck don't we? We did this horrible thing on behalf of the Democratic Party! We really deserve to be flagellated for that! Democratic insiders seem to take pride in saying the same thing, which complements the "I'm not awful like those woke Democrats" message so many of them are leaning on now. Both groups are wallowing in mea culpas because the GOP has brainwashed them into believing that if they beat themselves up while confessing anti-Republican bias, they'll win the favor of the Republican captors with whom they've fallen in love. (They won't.)

The public knew the pros and cons of voting for Biden in 2024. The media and Democratic insiders are telling us otherwise because they want to be chastised by the GOP.

ONE MORE TRUMP VICTORY IN THE BATTLE TO MAKE OFFENDING REPUBLICANS ILLEGAL

I know this looks like one of those Trumpian "distractions" that establishment Democrats believe they should ignore, but the regime and its allies are hitting this one hard, and they've already successfully bullied an ex-FBI director into submission, with no pushback from Democrats:

U.S. law enforcement officials said on May 15 that they were looking into a social media post by former FBI Director James Comey depicting an image of "8647," which some Trump supporters interpreted as a threat against President Donald Trump.

Comey, who was fired by Trump in 2017, later took down the post, according to Reuters, saying he was unaware the apparent political message could have been associated with violence....

A federal law enforcement official told USA TODAY that the Secret Service was sending agents to question Comey about his post....

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose agency oversees the Secret Service, said on X that DHS and the Secret Service were "investigating this threat and will respond appropriately."

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went further, saying she believes Comey should be put behind bars for the post. Asked by Fox News anchor Jesse Watters if she believed the former FBI director "should be in jail," Gabbard said, "I do.” ...

Current FBI Director Kash Patel said on X that his agency was in communication with the Secret Service about the post and "will provide all necessary support."

Others were more explicit in assigning a malign meaning to Comey's post, with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino saying it was a call to assassinate Trump.

More:

“This is deeply concerning to all of us and is being taken seriously,” Taylor Budowich, White House deputy chief of staff, said in a post on X.

“American leadership has been restored and peace is on the horizon,” Budowich added in another post. “This has left the Deep State desperate and dangerous—Comey is only the latest and most disturbing example of them lashing out through threats of violence.”

That's a lot of firepower directed at an innocent social media post.

This is now the lead story on the USA Today site. It was the lead story at 9:00 A.M. on Fox. And now a Fox interviewer in Abu Dhabi has asked the president about this.

Trump says, "A child knows what that meant" -- yes, because if there's one thing the average child knows well, it's twentieth-century restaurant slang.

That's what "86" is. Merriam-Webster tells us:

Eighty-six is slang meaning "to throw out," "to get rid of," or "to refuse service to." It comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning that an item was sold out. There is varying anecdotal evidence about why the term eighty-six was used, but the most common theory is that it is rhyming slang for nix.

Merriam-Webster offers many examples of these two meanings:

When a soda popper says the tuna fish salad is eighty-six, he means there isn’t any more.
— Will Cuppy, The New York Herald Tribune, 21 Dec. 1941...

I have all I can handle eighty-sixing the drunks.
— Independent (Long Beach, CA), 12 Sept 1960

There's one quote from a soldier using "eighty-sixed" to mean "killed in action," but that's not the common understanding of the term.

The only pushback I see is from anti-Trumpers on social media, who point out that there's a great deal of "86 46" merchandise on sale, even with President Biden out of office:

How about all the people who bought and sold 8646 merch? They should all be in prison, right? pic.twitter.com/1aQNZhtSzA

— Jeff Ralston 🥧🥧🍻💉 (@JeffR914) May 16, 2025

A Google Shopping page is here. No one ever threatened these T-shirt and decal sellers with potential prosecution because no one ever saw them as death threats.

And, of course, a prominent Trump supporter who's denounced Comey posted "86 46" a couple of years ago:

Oops….MAGAs will say that when they went around posting "8646" and wearing the shirts that it was completely different from what Comey posted pic.twitter.com/Gg4EtmxLl7

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) May 16, 2025

This isn't just a shiny object. It's serious for a lot of reasons.

I've seen "86 47" signs at a number of anti-Trump rallies. If the notion that this is a death threat becomes credible, maybe the administration won't dare to indict Comey, but it might indict ordinary protesters. Or Republican law enforcement personnel at the state and local level might decide the signs are a crime. And once that's a crime, what's next? I see many posts on social media with messages like this:

If "86 47" can be redefined as a threat, is some variation on I can't wait for Trump to die also a threat? Is there a limit?

All this comes at a time when the weaponization of the law by the Trump administration and the Republican Party might just be getting into gear. Punchbowl reports:

House conservatives are urging Attorney General Pam Bondi to be more aggressive against President Donald Trump’s political enemies.

These Republicans want Dr. Anthony Fauci and New York Attorney General Letitia James arrested for what they view as politically targeted efforts to go after Trump.

They also want federal criminal charges filed against Democratic mayors who offered sanctuary to undocumented immigrants.

Another target — Biden administration bureaucrats that Republicans argue wasted federal taxpayer money by pushing DEI, climate change and other progressive goals. It’s unclear what laws were allegedly broken here, or if any were.

Pursuing diversity, equity, and inclusion in ways that were not only lawfully but encouraged by the previous administration might be a crime now? That's chilling.

And this is happening when rignht-wingers are urging President Trump to pardon George Floyd's murderer, Derek Chauvin, and one right-wing troll, Jack Cashill -- yes, the guy who thinks Bill Ayers ghostwrote Barack Obama's first book -- is urging Tim Walz to pardon Chauvin on state charges.

They're trying to build an America in which anything a Fox viewer would like is legal and anything a Fox viewer would find distasteful is against the law. At the very least, they're trying to build an America in which anything that offends the famous Fox viewer in The White House is illegal. If we don't call them on this now, they'll keep trying to remake the country in this way. And they might get us at least partway there.

IS THE SUPREME COURT GUNNING FOR BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP? NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS? DUE PROCESS? ALL THREE?

I said back in January that I believe the Supreme Court will throw out birthright citizenship. The Supremes might not rule that way in the case of births to green card holders or other non-citizens who are here legally, but I strongly suspect that they'll say the U.S.-born children of immigrants who are here without legal certification aren't citizens. I don't think it matters that the arguments against birthright citizenship used to be seen as part of the right-wing fringe, as The New York Times noted yesterday -- the desire to restrict citizenship is utterly mainstream among the Republican rank-and-file, and it's not an important issue to swing voters, so I think the Court will, as usual, choose ideology over the Constitution.

But we don't know whether the birthright citizenship case currently before the Court will lead to a ruling on birthright citizenship itself. Politico reports:

It’s perhaps the most high-profile case of the year, but it’s not clear what exactly the court will be deciding.

Will the justices wade into the constitutionality of Trump’s effort to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. whose parents are undocumented immigrants or here on temporary visas? Or will the justices sidestep that legal lightning rod for now and focus solely on a more procedural, yet still momentous, issue: whether lower-court judges will retain the authority to block federal policies nationwide.

“It’s the question that’s on everyone’s minds,” said Columbia Law professor Elora Mukherjee, an expert on immigration law. “I anticipate we’ll see some discussion of the underlying merits, but I am not clear on how much.”

... the administration, notably, is not asking the court at this stage to overturn the district judges’ legal reasoning and declare Trump’s policy constitutional. Rather, the administration says the judges simply lacked the power to issue any nationwide injunctions in the first place.

... If the justices invalidate the injunctions, Trump may be able to enact his citizenship policy in vast areas of the country — even though every court to squarely weigh the policy’s legality has ruled against it.

So for now we might just get a ruling on whether district judges can issue nationwide injunctions. If so, I assume that the Court will hand even more power to Trump by saying that nationwide injunctions are bad -- or are bad only in certain policy areas. The ruling will be crafted so it hands power to Trump while leaving open the possibility that executive power can be taken away if there's ever a Democratic president again.

In the current case, we may be left with a situation in which the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants are citizens in some parts of America and not citizens in other parts. That seems like a recipe for chaos -- are these kids still citizens if their parents take them from a pro-citizenship federal district to an anti-citizenship federal district? -- but it could be sort of an out-of-town tryout for the idea of overturning birthright citizenship altogether: the country will live with a two-tiered system for a while, and get used to that, which sets the table for a full abandonment of the principle that no longer seems radical to most Americans.

And I think it's possible that the Supremes will rule on birthright citizenship itself, in a way that has an impact far beyond what happens to immigrants' babies.

The argument in favor of universal birthright citizenship is that the Fourteenth Amendment is unambiguous:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means that U.S. law applies to them (as it doesn't fully apply to, say, foreign diplomats who live here).

If, as I suspect, the Supreme Court says (now or in the future) that undocumented immigrants' babies aren't "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, that will not only mean that these babies aren't citizens, it will also mean that no one living here illegally is entitled to due process rights. The Fifth Amendment says, "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" -- note that it's "No person" rather than "No citizen." I think the Supremes are likely to rule that the Fifth Amendment wasn't really intended to extend due process to people here unlawfully (or, in Trump's America, people who were here lawfully until the administration declared that they weren't), and that the Fourteenth Amendment didn't really mean that people here unlawfully are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.

At that point, birthright citizenship will be a thing of the past and Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Tom Homan will have the unchallengeable right to do anything they please to anyone deemed "illegal" by the Executive Branch.

It's disturbing that the Supremes pushed this case to the front of the line. The New York Times reports that today's arguments in the case

will take place after the justices have heard all of their scheduled cases this term, and in the weeks before they begin issuing their most consequential decisions of the year — an unusual move that signals that the justices regard the dispute as significant enough to consider immediately.

They want to legislate from the bench right now. That tells me they want tro do something nasty and ideological right away.

WE HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING WHETHER A BIDEN WITHDRAWAL WOULD HAVE SAVED THE DEMOCRATS IN 2024

Next Tuesday is the publication date for the new book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson. The book tells us that the Democratic loss in 2024 was all President Biden's fault.

Joe Biden “totally fucked us” by leaving it too late to drop out of the 2024 US presidential election, a former top campaign aide to Kamala Harris has told the authors of a new book.

David Plouffe, who was manager of Barack Obama’s winning 2008 campaign and a senior adviser in his White House, was drafted in to help Harris’s bid for president after the declining Biden withdrew from the race last summer.

Harris’s 107-day sprint against Donald Trump was “a fucking nightmare”, Plouffe is quoted as saying by authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. A copy was obtained by the Guardian.

“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe adds, reflecting on the former US president’s decisions to run for re-election and then to cling on for more than three weeks after a catastrophic debate performance against Trump raised questions about his mental acuity and age. “He totally fucked us.”

... In the wake of Harris’s loss [Plouffe] posted a message on X – formerly known as Twitter – that the Harris campaign had begun in a “deep hole”.

Plouffe's argument is that the lateness of Biden's departure from the race left him and other campaign professionals with inadequate time to work their magic. But the substitution of Kamala Harris for Biden in July 2024 led to a surge in the polls for the Democratic ticket and a massive wave of donations. Although the wave of enthusiasm was widely dismissed as a "sugar high," Harris seemed to have a decent chance of winning before the consultant bros came on board. Maybe they were the problem.

In an excerpt from the book published in The New Yorker, Tapper and Thompson quote George Clooney:

Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities and, Clooney said, “that’s how Trump won.”

But was the country really deceived? Clips of Biden "senior moments," both real and manufactured, were all over the internet throughout Biden's term. This wasn't like the cover-up of Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's in his second term. Voters knew that Biden was past his prime.

Would an earlier Biden withdrawal have saved America from a second Trump term? We have no way of knowing. I'll remind you that every contested Democratic primary since 2004 has been a battle between the Establishment and insurgents that left a significant number of voters bitter. In 2008, everything worked out, despite the lingering anger of Hillary Clinton supporters; in 2020, when Establishment candidates banded together to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination, everything worked out again, but barely. (Biden received a record number of votes and won the popular vote decisively, but the swing states were extremely close.) On the other hand, in 2004, the Howard Dean insurgency was seen as a problem to be solved, and the Establishment's consensus candidate -- an uncharismatic John Kerry -- couldn't bring home a win. And in 2016, many voters were furious when Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, and some of those voters have continued to blow off the Democratic Party.

When Tapper and Thompson tell us that “The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” and when the subtitle of their book calls Biden's decision to run in 2024 "disastrous," what they're saying is that an earlier withdrawal would have guaranteed a Democratic victory. I'm not sure what else they could be saying, because the actual election couldn't have been much closer without tipping to Harris: Trump won the three states that gave him a victory, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, by less than 1.75% each. Tapper and Thompson don't challenge this anonymous quote that appears in the New Yorker excerpt:

“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.”

But we don't know that.

If there's an "original sin" here, it's not Biden's choices with regard to the 2024 election and it's not the way Biden's team managed his diminished state, which wasn't a particularly effective cover-up. The "original sin" is how Biden managed his presidency. He did many good things, but he was a godawful public communicator, and he didn't delegate public communication to Harris or any other subordinates. He wasn't able to offer his side of the story every day in an effective way, which meant that the Republican smear machine operated without genuine opposition for four years.

In addition, I think age left Biden -- as it's left other old people I've known -- wanting to focus on what he wanted to focus on, which meant he was less capable of pivoting to other subjects. He wanted to manage the global coalition against Russia, and he did that effectively. He took pride in the Inflation Reduction Act, which included many provisions that would have improved Americans' lives and would have helped the planet deal with climate change. But he wasn't nimble enough to pivot to inflation, which damaged a lot of voters and continued to have a significant impact even after it cooled, probably because of record-high interest rates on credit cards. He also never found an effective strategy or message as Trump and the rest of the GOP noise machine ginned up a panic about immigration.

Excepts and reviews of the Tapper/Thompson book have persuaded me that Biden at his worst was somewhat more impaired than I realized. The New Yorker excerpt focuses on a fund-raiser at which -- after a grueling amount of travel -- Biden doesn't recognize George Clooney, and other observers see Biden struggling.

Clooney was certainly not the only one concerned. Other high-dollar attendees who posed for photographs with [Barack] Obama and Biden described Biden as slow and almost catatonic. Though they saw pockets of clarity while watching him on television, and onstage later that night, there were obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide. It was, to some of them, terrifying.

Obama didn’t know what to make of how his former running mate was acting. At one point, in a small group of a few dozen top donors, Biden began speaking—barely audibly—and trailed off incoherently. Obama had to jump in and preside. At other moments, during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him.

It's obviously a problem that, as the New York Times review notes, Biden staffers had to develop a habit of "restricting urgent business to the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m." The Times review tells us that "By late 2023, [Biden's] staff was pushing as much of his schedule as they could to midday."

But midday Biden appears to have been a knowledgeable, thoughtful president with good judgment -- and his replacement is none of these things at any hour of the day. Biden and his smart, capable, decent aides ran the country better -- and, I believe, would have continued to run the country better -- than the current motley crew of know-nothings, flatterers, bigots, scoundrels, and psychopaths.

For the good of the country, we deserved to have a third option. Eventually we got one, and it's probably the one we would have had if there'd been a full slate of contested primaries. (The source material is gone, but in 2023 and the first half of 2024, as I noted last summer, Kamala Harris won every national Democratic primary poll listed at FiveThirtyEight that didn't include Biden.) Regrettably, America rejected the capable alternative the Democrats offered -- and that might very well have happened even if Biden had announced he wasn't running a couple of years earlier.

DONALD TRUMP, AN ELITIST TAKING HANDOUTS

Most of the time, Donald Trump seems good at messaging, and at creating bamboozlements that distract us from news stories that are bad for him. I generally resist the argument that he's doing X specifically to distract us from Y -- I think his strategy is to throw everything at the wall all the time, on the assumption that whatever lands poorly for him will be forgotten as soon as he generates the next cycle of people-pleasing (or at least base-pleasing) headlines.

But the plane from Qatar seems to be a messaging disaster for him. He can't seem to drive it from the headlines, and it buried the story of his China tariff deal, which wasn't much of a win but could have been spun as one. Stock markets rallied yesterday, today he has a decent inflation number -- yet he still can't get past the damn plane story.

I think Trump misread the way poor and middle-class voters respond to his wealth. Many Americans enjoy rich people's wealth vicariously. Many actually believe they'll get wealthy themselves someday. Trump has successfully sold millions of Americans on an idea connected to this: I'm rich because I'm a business genius. Now I'm applying my business genius on your behalf.

That's more or less the message he tried to convey on Truth Social when the first reports appeared:

But the Trump of his voters' fantasies shouldn't need a gift from the Middle East. Trump's voters think he's so brilliant that he should be able to get a new Air Force One built ahead of schedule and under budget. Why get one from foreigners? Why should America -- Trump's America! -- need a handout like this from overseas?

And the foreigners who gave us this handout are Muslims who don't wear Western clothes! Islamophobia isn't as visible in America as it was two decades ago -- we've swept the unpopular Iraq and Afghanistan wars under the rug (Trump has helped make them almost as unpopular among Republicans as they've been among Democrats), and we don't talk about the "war on terror" very much anymore -- but people on the right still regard Muslims with deep hostility, and everyone thinks the Middle East's petro-states are sleazy and suspect.

Much of Trump's corruption -- the crypto cash grab, for instance -- seems too complicated for most Americans to follow. But the plane is different. It's a big, expensive gift. Why would these rich Muslims in funny clothes give Trump something for nothing? They must be expecting something in return.

Trump misread this because he now thinks the entire country is on board with everything about his presidency, including the corruption. This is Trump as an out-of-touch elitist -- which is ironic, because our entire political culture believes that Democrats are the out-of-touch elitists and Trump is a true Man of the People leading a party rooted in common American soil. At the same time, he also looks as if he's accepting charity in our name -- which is in character for Trump, who's spent much of his life scrounging for financing. All in all, it's a bad look. I hope the story stays in the news for weeks.

THE PRESS NEEDS TO ACKNOWLEDGE SECOND-TERM TRUMP'S CORRUPTION THE WAY IT (MORE OR LESS) LEARNED TO ACKNOWLEDGE FIRST-TERM TRUMP'S DISHONESTY (updated)

In Donald Trump's first campaign and first term, the mainstream media resisted describing his falsehoods as lies. The press did point out dishonest statements -- The Washington Post, for instance, began tracking Trump's "false and misleading claims" at the beginning of his term and then catalogued 30,573 such claims by January 2021. But the Post didn't use the word lie in reference to a Trump assertion until the summer of 2018, when he'd been in office for a year and a half.

Nevertheless, the press got somewhat better at categorizing Trump's claims, and doing so in the opening paragraphs of stories. After he began insisting that he won the 2020 election, it became common for the press to describe this as a "false" claim. And the press also used forms of the word lie: Here's a campaign fact-check from CNN's Daniel Dale in October 2024 that appeared under the headline "Trump, on a Lying Spree, Made at Least 40 Separate False Claims in Two Pennsylvania Speeches."

In Trump's second term, the press needs to improve its coverage of Trump's corruption the way some news outlets improved their coverage of his honesty. The corruption needs to be made clear in headlines and in the opening paragraphs of stories.

Here's the headline of a New York Times story datelined today:

Trump Heads to the Middle East With a Single Goal: Deals, Deals, Deals

President Trump has always viewed the presidency as a worldwide hunt for deals. And there is no better place for that than the Gulf, where a few men wield absolute authority over vast wealth.

Apart from the fact that any use of the word "deal" in a headline about Trump is using his own branding, this tells us nothing about how shady Trump's plans are. Nor does the lede:

When American presidents visit the Middle East, they usually arrive with a strategic vision for the region, even if it seems a far reach.

Jimmy Carter pushed Egypt and Israel to a historic peace accord. Bill Clinton tried and failed with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader. George W. Bush imagined his war on terrorism would ultimately lead to democratization in the region. Barack Obama went to Cairo “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.”

President Trump will tour the Gulf this week in search of one thing above all else: business deals. Planes. Nuclear power. Artificial intelligence investments. Arms. Anything that puts a signature on the bottom of a page.

The point of the story is that this trip is oddly disengaged from American foreign policy. And sure, that's worth noting.

... as a strategic exercise, the trip’s purpose remains foggy. During his 2017 journey to the region, Mr. Trump made waves by rallying dozens of leaders from majority-Muslim countries to confront and denounce extremism. It is unclear what foreign policy goals, if any, will be advanced on this visit.

It's only in paragraph 12 that readers begin to get a glimmer of how corrupt this all is:

In place of grand strategy will be a series of financial transactions that Mr. Trump will promote as producing jobs for American workers.

The agenda conveniently aligns with Mr. Trump’s expanding business plans. His family has six pending deals with a majority Saudi-owned real estate firm, a cryptocurrency deal with an affiliate of the government of the United Arab Emirates and a new golf and luxury villa project backed by the government of Qatar.

The Qataris are going to great lengths to court Mr. Trump. The Trump administration is poised to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane as a donation from the Qatari royal family that will be upgraded to serve as Air Force One, in possibly the biggest foreign gift ever received by the U.S. government, several American officials with knowledge of the matter said.

The plan under discussion raises substantial ethical issues....

So "ethical issues" get mentioned, but only in paragraph 15. It's only in paragraph 26 that we're told, "No part of the world has been more important to the rising financial well-being of the Trump family than the Middle East." Jared Kushner's ties to the Saudis are mentioned in paragraph 27. Some of Trump's business dealings are cited in subsequent paragraphs. So if you read this all the way to the end, you understand that Trump is using the office of the president for self-dealing, and that this isn't normal. But it's all reported subtly. This needs to be stated much more overtly.

There's a similar problem with the headline of a Times story about Trump's memecoin:

Auction to Dine With Trump Creates Foreign Influence Opportunity

(Imagine a similar headline: "Piles of White Powder and Rolled Hundred-Dollar Bills Create Drug Abuse Opportunity.")

The subhead is similarly bland:

When the bidding stops Monday, the top buyers of a Trump family crypto coin will win a tour of the White House.

But the lede at least conveys some sense of Trump's ethical bankruptcy, although it absurdly implies that the corruption might just happen:

The sale of face-to-face access to President Trump using the Trump family’s own cryptocurrency has done more than benefit him financially, though it has certainly done that.

Mr. Trump announced last month that leading buyers of a digital coin his family is marketing would be rewarded with a private dinner with him at one of his golf courses and that the very top bidders would win a tour of the White House.

The auction, which ends Monday, has set off a spectacle that has drawn bipartisan criticism, triggered a suspicious trading pattern, and left a sitting United States president wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him.

Trump isn't "wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him." He's actively encouraging coin buyers to corruptly influence him.

The Times story about the Qatari plane is better:

Trump Is Poised to Accept a Luxury 747 From Qatar for Use as Air Force One

The plan raises substantial ethical issues, given the immense value of the lavishly appointed plane and that Mr. Trump intends to take ownership of it after he leaves office.

All of these stories describe presidential acts that raise "substantial ethical issues," but at least we're told that right away in this story.

The third paragraph of the story refers to "a day of controversy in which even some Republicans privately questioned the wisdom of the plan." Then we get this in paragraphs 5 and 6:

While a Qatari official described the proposal as still under discussion and the White House said that gifts it accepted would be done in full compliance with the law, Democratic lawmakers and good government groups expressed outrage over the substantial ethical issues the plan presented. They cited the intersection of Mr. Trump’s official duties with his business interests in the Middle East, the immense value of the lavishly appointed plane and the assumption that Mr. Trump would have use of it after leaving office. Sold new, a commercial Boeing 747-8 costs in the range of $400 million.

“Even in a presidency defined by grift, this move is shocking,” said Robert Weissman, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. “It makes clear that U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump is up for sale.”

That's much better. Trump is off-the-charts corrupt, and every story about his self-dealing should make that clear.

It's part of a larger media failing in Trump's second term: although nearly everything he's doing is in violation of the law, much of it is not described as illegal and potentially impeachable -- he's just doing stuff this way, and the law says it's supposed to be done that way, and the conclusion is often left unstated: What he's doing is illegal. But I don't expect the press to change.

*****

UPDATE: OMG.

Lipton is the lead author of the crypto story cited above. If this view of corruption is common among our elite journalists, no wonder Trump thinks he can get away with pretty much anything he wants to do.