Concepts of a Newsletter
I’m usually meticulous about linking to sources, but I’m only going to cover the debate today and everything here is taken from my own notes.
In a shellacking Trump claims he won 90-10 (seriously), Harris had a breakout performance and Trump was his typical firehose of racism, misogyny, and lies ranging from slight exaggerations to egregious untruths.
The moderators corrected him on the latter which has multiple right wing pundits and politicians FURIOUS about bias.
There may have been more but I only noted two such instances:
Trump’s continued insistence that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are kidnapping people’s pets and eating them en masse and also murdering geese in public parks in front of other people. There has not been a single video, photograph, or police report of any of this happening for the simple reason it is not happening. Trump was furious when David Muir pointed out the city manager and police in Springfield have said there is no evidence of any of this happening.
The other big fact check came in response to Trump’s long-held claim that Democrats are allowing mothers to “abort” their babies after birth. I covered this last time, but this is an insane lie from the pro-life crowd. Women who take a baby to term are not just aching for a chance to kill their child.
The rest of the night was his greatest hits of lies:
Tariffs being paid for by foreign countries (they aren’t)
Immigrants taking black jobs (sigh)
EVERY legal scholar and Democrat wanted Roe overturned (blatantly false)
Crime is down worldwide and up in the US because of immigrants and the FBI statistics showing a decrease in crime are fraudluent
Nothing on 1/6 was his fault and Ashli Babbitt was shot by an “out of control” police officer. (Babbitt was crawling through a window which had just been smashed, entering one of the most secure places in the country as part of a mob that had just spent several hours assaulting police)
His repeated lie that Nancy Pelosi turned down National Guard protection on 1/6
His constant and continued misunderstanding of how NATO works. For nearly a decade now he has insisted that NATO pays the United States for protection. They do not. Numerous advisers have tried to get him to understand this. He can’t.
A long repeated lie about Hunter Biden receiving money from a Russian woman whose husband was once the mayor of Moscow.
His continued insistence Kamala Harris only recently claimed to be black, saying he read a statement from her saying she wasn’t. This never happened.
A lie that Harris failed in negotiations between Zelenskyy and Putin, causing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Harris was never tasked with this and has never met Vladimir Putin.
A lie that Harris let the George Floyd protesters who “burned down” Minneapolis out of jail. Right wingers continue to insist multiple cities burned down during these protests despite the fact that those cities… are still there.
An attack on wind energy (Trump hates this because he lost a lawsuit to remove off-shore windmills from near his Scottish golf course) and how the current admin harmed oil production. The US is currently producing more oil than any time in history. Meanwhile wind and solar are shattering expectations for production.
The usual sewage about how he won the 2020 election.
He defended his call for the execution of the Central Park Five who have been exonerated. Yusef Salaam, one of the five and now a city councilman in New York, actually met Trump in the spin room to ask him about Trump saying he should have been executed for a crime he didn’t commit. Trump responded to him by saying “you’re on my side” then ignoring him.
And finally, in the moment that launched a million memes, Trump was asked about his replacement plan for the ACA. He has touted his replacement since 2015, nine years now. He has never actually offered any details. When pressed whether he had a plan for ACA replacement his response was “I have concepts of a plan.”
In nearly a decade, he has not been able to put together any details on a major policy issue and I cannot think of a more perfect summation of the way Donald Trump ran his administration. He is not capable of learning and briefers could not get him to pay attention without graphs and pictures and typically not past one page. He has no understand of or grasp of policy or even basic ways the government functions. He is, and always has been, wildly incompetent.
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