Biden’s fitness for a second term

I think President Biden did an excellent job highlighting the differences between him and Trump. The choices are clear. Which vision do you want for our country? President Biden is optimistically looking forward, planning for future generations by addressing climate change now. Biden sees a positive future for our country, one that includes all Americans.  Biden made specific promises - new taxes for billionaires, a tax credit to help with housing costs etc. Trump is stuck in the past, stuck talking about the 2020 election. He paints a very negative picture of our country and is fear mongering with his talk of "migrant crime". Trump's plans are in writing on his website, clear for everyone to see. He will definitely take our country down a very dark path towards an authoritarian, fascist, white Christian nationalist state.

www.nytimes.com/2024/03/08/us/politics/trump-biden-speeches.html

In Two Speeches, Trump and Biden Offer Starkly Different Views of the Country
President Biden’s State of the Union address and former President Donald Trump’s victory speech on Super Tuesday conjured diametrically opposed visions of America’s past, present and future.

On Tuesday night, a triumphant Donald J. Trump looked out on an adoring crowd at his seaside mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., evoked the halcyon days of his presidency when, in his telling, there were no wars, the nation was universally admired and united in egalitarian prosperity — and then declared, “Our country is dying.”

Two days later, President Biden looked out on a sharply divided audience and conjured the mirror image: a country that is now “literally the envy of the world,” and a recent past as “one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history,” when crime was soaring, a deadly virus raged and the nation’s chief executive had “failed the most basic presidential duty” — “the duty to care.”

With the presidential election now fully engaged, two speeches two days apart laid out the choice that voters face, with visions of past, present and future that are diametrically opposed. But both men seemed to share the political goal of rallying their own base voters rather than the more traditional task of pivoting to the center to appeal to fence-sitters and foes.

The State of the Union address on Thursday and Mr. Trump’s victory speech after his near-sweep of Super Tuesday were in different settings and under different circumstances. The former president’s was a political rally at his perpetual political perch of Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Biden’s was supposed to be a Constitutionally mandated update on the condition of the nation, delivered to the elected branch of government, members of the Supreme Court and military leadership, with all the trappings and pageantry of state.

But in this tale of two speeches, both were strikingly partisan, delivered by a pair of elderly politicians beginning their general-election rematch with nods to their ages, hyperbolic warnings about this moment in history, prescriptions for the future — Mr. Trump’s vague, Mr. Biden’s specific down to a potato chip portion — and visions for the nation as different as they could possibly be.

“I see a future for all Americans,” Mr. Biden’s speech concluded. “I see a country for all Americans. And I will always be a president for all Americans because I believe in America.”

Mr. Trump’s finale struck a different tone.

“We’re going to have to deport a lot of people, a lot of bad people,” he said in concluding his 20-minute address, “because our countries can’t live like this, our cities are choking to death, our states are dying and frankly our country is dying, and we’re going to make America great again.”

There were nonetheless remarkable parallels. Neither man reached out to the other side or to a middle immiserated by the choices they face in the coming presidential election. Each addressed the liability of his age.

Mr. Biden spoke of his 81 years of age as an accumulation of wisdom and experience: “When you get to my age, certain things become clearer than ever before,” he said. “I know the American story. Again and again, I’ve seen the contest between competing forces in the battle for the soul of our nation.”

Mr. Trump was more oblique but wistful in recognizing he no longer was a young man, when he acknowledged youthful people in his audience: “I’d love to be your age,” he told them. “I’d pay a lot of money to be your age.”

Both referred directly to each other in the most negative possible terms.

Without uttering the name Trump, Mr. Biden referred to “my predecessor” 13 times, lashing him for his “outrageous” suggestion that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “do whatever the hell you want” with NATO allies in arrears on military spending, for burying “the truth” about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, for orchestrating the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and most starkly for Mr. Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in which Mr. Biden said his predecessor had “failed the most basic presidential duty that he owes to American people: the duty to care.”

Mr. Trump was less specific, even more hyperbolic and did use his opponent’s name, in his signature tone of emphasis, as he clipped through his pronunciation of “Joe,” then expanded the vowels in “Biden.”

He went after his opponent’s age in visceral terms, evoking “Joe Biden” on the beach, where White House advisers might think he looks good in a bathing suit, but “he can’t get his feet out of the sand, or lift the chair which weighs about nine ounces.”

Then Mr. Trump added of his rival, “He’s the worst president in the history of our country. There’s never been anything like what’s happening to our country.”

That assessment of American history left out some universally recognized bad presidents who led the country to the Civil War, when a nation divided by slavery ripped itself apart through secession and as many as 750,000 American soldiers slaughtered each other in fratricidal combat.

Mr. Biden, for his part, did acknowledge that ugliest of historical chapters in attempting to put the coming campaign into the most dire of contexts: “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today,” he warned. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time.”

Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden was specific in his promises for a new four-year term, from the grand — a 25 percent minimum tax on billionaires — to the granular, a temporary tax credit of $400 a month to offset new mortgages.

But it was another aspect of American history that differentiated one man’s politics from the other’s: the fact that the United States is a nation of immigrants. The question of whether it will continue to be one could define much of the coming campaign.

Mr. Trump had a few other policy prescriptions — he said that in a second term, he would “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas and would pursue “the second phase of our tax cuts,” an economic policy that Mr. Biden warned would be coming but that congressional Republicans in the audience denied was in the works.

But Mr. Trump made clear the centerpiece of his campaign would be border control and immigration, speaking floridly of an invasion of criminals and thugs that he said must be reversed through stringent border closures and mass deportations.

If that is what voters want, their choice will be clear, because while Mr. Biden ad-libbed the Republican term “illegal” to refer to an undocumented immigrant accused of murder, and while he embraced the tougher border-security measures reached in the Senate only to be torpedoed at Mr. Trump’s behest, he spoke of immigrants themselves in the soaring terms of presidents and poets past.

“I will not demonize immigrants saying they are ‘poison in the blood of our country.’ I will not separate families. I will not ban people because of their faith,” Mr. Biden promised. “Unlike my predecessor, I know who we are as Americans. We are the only nation in the world with a heart and soul that draws from old and new.”

I hate to burst your bubble there sparky but I was clear in what I posted.  If you choose not to understand that, that is your choice.   And if you refuse to see the damage the words did that again is your choice.  But because you don’t see it does not make it an inaccurate description of the events.

That is YOUR opinion and I disagree with it.  

But you keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better. 😀

We can only hope his luck is running out. To his long list of good fortune, I would add the unfortunate timing of RBG's death.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/05/donald-trump-luckiest-politician/

Opinion Donald Trump, the luckiest politician who ever lived
By Charles Sykes
March 5, 2024

A federal judge has declared him liable for rape. He faces paying a half-billion dollars in legal judgments for fraud and defamation. Twice impeached, then defeated for reelection, he has been charged with 91 felonies. He has been arrested and his mug shot published; he will spend much of the year in and out of courtrooms. On the campaign trail, his rambling speeches are gaffe-ridden and prone to malapropisms and meltdowns.

In a normal universe, this would not be the description of a fortunate man.
But we do not live that universe, and we must consider the very real — and infuriating — possibility that Donald J. Trump is the single luckiest politician who ever lived.

For almost a decade (though it feels even longer), we’ve watched him trip through minefields, totter on the edge of sinkholes and step on trapdoors, each time thinking: This is it. Now he’s going down. It has become a mantra of dashed hopes: The walls are (once again) closing in on Donald Trump. He’s on the brink, desperate. This time, surely this time. And yet, somehow, he escapes.

Consider the good fortune that has blown his way in just the recent past:
· With a major criminal trial looming for trying to overturn the 2020 election results, the Supreme Court on Feb. 28 threw him a lifeline on his immunity claim, likely pushing his moment of reckoning past Election Day.
· The felony election-interference case against him in Georgia has been thrown into disarray by alleged prosecutorial hanky-panky.
· Trump was caught with a Florida stash of classified government documents, including war plans, but last spring he somehow managed to draw the extraordinarily friendly Aileen M. Cannon as the judge in the case.
· On the campaign trail, Trump is prone to bouts of incoherence that seem to suggest he is losing it. But, lucky man that he is, the Justice Department chose a special counsel whom Trump had appointed to be the U.S. attorney for Maryland to investigate President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents; declining to charge him last month, the prosecutor made the Biden’s memory lapses the story.

By now, this must feel like a familiar pattern.

In 2016, with Trump less than two weeks from seemingly certain election defeat, FBI Director James B. Comey decided to kneecap Hillary Clinton.

When an audio recording surfaced during the 2016 campaign revealing Trump bragging about being able to grab women by the genitals, his opponents just knew he was done. They hadn’t reckoned with Trump Luck: His evangelical supporters, it turned out, were willing to shelve their morals to win an election.

That year, Trump lost the popular vote by millions but won the presidency in the electoral college. Even he looked like the guy at the slot machine who can’t believe it when the bells clang and the coins start flying.
Indeed, Trump has been exceedingly fortunate in his opponents. In 2016, the Republican primaries ended with Trump facing only one serious challenger: Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), who had the distinction of possibly being the most loathed person in American politics. In the general election, Trump faced probably the only Democrat who could not beat him. This year, the GOP’s great non-Trump hope, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, imploded under the weight of his own jerkitude. And now an overwhelming majority of voters think his 2024 opponent, Biden — less than four years older than Trump — is too elderly to be given another term.

For years, pundits wondered when the GOP would break with Trump. After Charlottesville? After his 2020 defeat? After Jan. 6? After he called for the termination of the Constitution? But, as we know, Trump has been deeply fortunate in the quality of the GOP establishment, whose feeble resistance to his various outrages was, to use H.L. Mencken’s memorable phrase, “not unlike that of a sheep trying to bark.”

In a stroke of extraordinary luck, Trump was saved from conviction in his second impeachment trial when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blinked at the crucial moment, despite his certainty of Trump’s guilt. Now it is McConnell who is heading to exile, while Trump is surging toward the White House.

So it has gone. Time and again, Trump has faced allegations that would sink any other politician but has been handed counter-narratives — often bogus and tendentious, but nonetheless useful — to deflect and distract in an endless round of whataboutism. (Hunter Biden’s laptop comes to mind.)

In his oddly charmed political life, Trump has benefited mightily from what political scientist Brian Klaas calls the “banality of crazy,” as the body politic has grown increasingly numb to Trump’s fire hose of malice.

Even Trump must marvel at his good fortune to come on the scene at a time when America’s memory has collapsed into a national amnesia where politicians and voters alike simply can’t remember the last abhorrent thing he said.
It must feel almost providential to Trump that his rise to power has also coincided with the downfall of much of the traditional fact-based media, as well as the emergence of just the sort of alternative-reality information silos that he needed to shape his narrative and platform his bluster, bombast and fakery.

So now, despite (waves hand) all this, Trump is about to clinch the GOP nomination for the third time, and most national polls show him leading President Biden as he seeks to a return to the White House.
Has anyone ever been this lucky?

JFC, just how blinded and stubborn do you have to be, to keep making this patently untrue claim?

”THE CLAIM IS there is nothing he said that debunked the claim that he told people to inject/drink bleach/disinfectant.”

He apparently said something later on to reduce the damage from his initial statement. I’m taking your word on that, because I don’t want to listen to a single word he says if I don't absolutely have to. That is NOT “debunking the claim that he told people to … blah blah blah.” It is merely retracting his initial statement. But he most certainly said it. We all heard him. Retracting a statement later on is not the same thing as never having said it.

For the love of God, please stop screeching at people that the claim he said it in the first place has been debunked. It has not.

Trump's speech tonight makes the choice between candidates crystal clear.

He started by making fun of President Biden's stutter.  By the end he was struggling with words, possibly another sign of aphasia
claims E Jean Carroll made false accusations
says the pier in Gaza won't work because the bad guys will sell it to other guys with no money
talks about the border like there are Vikings sacking and plundering (his words)
says they raided his house with no raid
refers to himself as Biden's top political "appointment"
pledged to not give federal funding to any public school with vaccine mandates (not only does a president not have this power, most schools in most states have vaccine requirements)
continued to attack Ron DeSantis, even though he dropped out of the race and is no longer really relevant
said "I know words.  I have the best words" but can't pronounce the word compliments
talked about undocumented immigrants knocking on people's doors asking to use their kitchen
talked previously about immigrants speaking languages that no one understands but Trump was practically incomprehensible by the end of his speech


Compare that to President Biden's State of the Union
he talked about restoring abortion rights
he plans to help with housing costs through tax credits
he proposed a tax on billionaires
he challenged Republicans to sign the bill they insisted on, negotiated then rejected because Trump told them to
pledged to help reduce the cost of prescription drugs
Talked about common sense gun safety

today - he wore a Regulate guns, not women button that was gifted to him

Love the end, his sense of humor and his ability to laugh at himself.

Great questions

But. First. He. Suggested. Injections.
Stop insisting he didn’t. You aren't going to win this one.