Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has had quite enough of Democratic hand-wringing about President Joe Biden’s performance at last night’s presidential debate with convicted felon Donald Trump, and he’s got a stern message for them: “Chill the f*ck out!”
On Friday, Fetterman posted this message on Twitter:
“I refuse to join the Democratic vultures on Biden’s shoulder after the debate. No one knows more than me that a rough debate is not the sum total of the person and their record.”
I refuse to join the Democratic vultures on Biden’s shoulder after the debate.
No one knows more than me that a rough debate is not the sum total of the person and their record. pic.twitter.com/NjWdUw5ugh
As HuffPost notes, Fetterman had his own debate issues not so long ago.
Fetterman, who is 54, suffered a stroke while running for Senate in 2022 but later went on to debate his Republican opponent Mehmet Oz. It didn’t go well. He struggled to complete sentences, stumbling over words and pausing altogether as a result of the auditory processing disorder he suffered from the stroke.
Some Democrats expressed similar alarm at the time and wondered whether deciding to the debate had tanked Fetterman’s odds of winning the seat.
Fetterman got plenty of support from others on social media.
Well said Senator. And I think Trump still lost the debate—and he gets sentenced for 34 felonies in 13 days.https://t.co/zyJb1Yy1bJ
When he meets convicted felon/2024 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump in Thursday’s debate, President Joe Biden could lower the rhetorical boom on the disgraced former president with one insult, according to ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
Speaking with NBC News for a piece on the upcoming debate, Gingrich noted that Biden can easily drown out Trump’s claims that he’s too old for a second term by bringing up an episode from the last days of the Trump administration.
“If I were Biden, I would stay away from the age issue and just say, ‘Look, I was wise enough not to try to overthrow the U.S. government,’” he said. “Go through a list of five things in a row and say, ‘I would rather have my age with wisdom than your total lack of seriousness.’”
Former Republican Vice President Dan Quayle also had advice for Biden.
“If I was advising him [Biden], I’d try to make fun of Trump. Try to ridicule him. That will get him mad.”
And Democratic strategist James Carville said he thinks Biden should be in attack mode and go for Trump’s throat.
““At some point, you have to walk into the room and say, ‘We’re going to kick his f—–g ass. We’re going to clock this motherf—-r, you understand?”
If indeed Biden does bring up the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, it will harm Trump in another way: By getting Donald on a tangent about how he won the 2020 election and had every right to contest the results. But polling shows that voters hate when Trump and his surrogates attempt to relitigate history, especially since Biden won in an electoral landslide in multiple battleground states.
With the first 2024 presidential debate how just a little more than 48 hours away, you may be wondering what’s going through the mind of convicted felon Donald Trump as he prepares to face President Joe Biden in what could wind up being a major turning point in the race for the White House.
Former Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller believes Trump is terrified of what will happen when he faces Biden, and he says there are two “signs” of what Trump is feeling as the debate approaches.
“I do think that what we can see publicly is that Donald Trump is concerned about how this debate is being framed up as you lead into the debate,” Miller remarked during an appearance on MSNBC Monday.
“That is why he’s doing all the weird stuff about Joe Biden being on drugs,” he added.
Miller also noted that Trump’s continued insistence over the weekend that he had never called American service members who gave their lives for the nation “suckers” and “losers.”
“To me, that also shows he’s worried about the debate,” Miller explained. “He’s thinking about what Joe Biden’s attacks might be on him, and he’s trying to take the air out of the balloon ahead of time.”
Miller added, “I think there’s a lot of evidence that Trump is concerned about the debate,” said Miller. “How that manifests in his weird mind and whether he’s prepping or not, I’m not sure, but I think we can see plainly that he’s concerned.”
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell verbally excoriated Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) for willfully sharing a blatant lie about President Joe Biden online, and a video of his remarks is going viral this morning.
On his show Tuesday evening, according to HuffPost, O’Donnell referenced a debunked claim that Biden had insisted that he be allowed to sit during next week’s debate with convicted felon Donald Trump.
Here’s what Hawley posted on Twitter:
He can’t stand for 90 minutes – but he’s 100% able to be President? Have fun explaining that https://t.co/8GbDIBN3H6
The network “rejected the claim, telling Forbes ‘it’s not accurate’ and that both Biden and Trump agreed to CNN’s proposed format when they accepted the network’s invitation to debate.”
All of this led O’Donnell to give Hawley a brutal history lesson.
“I can explain it in three words: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
“And in every day of his 13 years as president, Franklin Roosevelt was in a wheelchair,” O’Donnell said. “The same wheelchair he was in in his two terms as governor of New York.”
Roosevelt was struck by polio at age 39 and spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair.
“So, no, standing for 90 minutes is not a presidential job requirement,” O’Donnell continued, adding, “Adolf Hitler was a younger, healthier man than Franklin Roosevelt, but from his wheelchair President Franklin Delano Roosevelt forced Adolf Hitler in Berlin to commit suicide in his bunker as the allies, commanded by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, were closing in on the German capital city.”
And then the MSNBC host went right at Hawley.
“Hitler could stand for 90 minutes. He did it all the time. 90 minutes was a short speech for Adolf Hitler. Josh Hawley would have loved Adolf Hitler if standing for 90 minutes and ranting incoherently is something Josh Hawley truly admires as presidential.”
While he was at it, O’Donnell also pointed to a darling of the right-wing GOPers: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who is in a wheelchair after a horrible accident in 1984 that nearly killed him.
“But wise-guy Josh Hawley wants to do his punk joke about standing for 90 minutes so that he can impress the world’s worst insult comedian, Donald Trump. Sen. Hawley is one of the unindicted participants in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Sen. Hawley was the first member of the Senate to agree to join Republican House members in their plan to challenge the electoral votes won by Joe Biden.”
Josh Hawley should be prosecuted for his role in trying to overturn the last presidential election. He’s a disgusting demagogue and a coward. Here’s hoping the voters of Missouri will kick him to the curb when he runs for reelection.
Alan Lichtman is a history professor at American University who has correctly predicted the winner of all but one presidential election since 1984, and he has some bad news for failed former president Donald Trump: You’re about to lose back-to-back bids for the White House.
According to The Guardian, Lichtman believes “a lot would have to go wrong” before November for President Joe Biden to not win a second term in office.
Here’s how Lichtman makes his determination of who will win: He uses 13 true or false questions. If six or more go against the White House party, it will lose. If fewer than six are against them, the party in power will win.
What are the 13 criteria?
1. Party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the US House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
2. Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
3. Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
4. Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
5. Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
6. Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
10. Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
11. Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
13. Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.
Oh, and for those readers who think Lichtman is anti-Trump, he correctly predicted Donald would win in 2016 and then lose in 2020.
How did Lichtman correctly call the 2016 race for Trump when nearly every poll showed Hillary Clinton ahead?
“The critical sixth key was the contest key: Bernie Sanders’s contest against Clinton. It was an open seat so you lost the incumbency key. The Democrats had done poorly in 2014 so you lost that key. There was no big domestic accomplishment following the Affordable Care Act in the previous term, and no big foreign policy splashy success following the killing of Bin Laden in the first term, so there were just enough keys. It was not an easy call.”
Trump lost in 2020 due in large part to his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, Lichtman notes.
“The pandemic is what did him in. He congratulated me for predicting him but he didn’t understand the keys. The message of the keys is it’s governance not campaigning that counts and instead of dealing substantively with the pandemic, as we know, he thought he could talk his way out of it and that sank him.”
But perhaps most notable is that Lichtman discounts polling, suggesting it simply doesn’t consider enough factors and only succeeds in providing a snapshot of the overall horserace that’s rarely correct.
“Not only are polls a snapshot but they are not predictors. They don’t predict anything and there’s no such thing as, ‘if the election were held today’. That’s a meaningless statement.”
And what might happen if Trump is convicted of a crime?
“It’s always possible there could be a cataclysmic enough event outside the scope of the keys that could affect the election and here we do have, for the first time, not just a former president but a major party candidate sitting in a trial and who knows if he’s convicted – and there’s a good chance he will be – how that might scramble things.”
So what are we to make of a poll released last week that shows Trump leading Biden by six points? Based on history and how wrong the polls have been and how right Professor Lichtman has outperformed them, it’s safe to say those numbers will be wrong yet again and Lichtman will add another feather to his cap.
