What If You Had a Military Summit Defending the Future of Democracy and No One Gave a Damn?
If you read the dead tree NYT this morning, you might be forgiven for thinking that Joe Biden was isolated from America’s NATO allies.
That’s because the front page put a big picture of Biden’s NATO appearance next to an article describing Biden as isolated within his own party. That story described President Biden’s press conference marking the end of the NATO summit this way:
He faced a new test on Thursday night in a news conference following the NATO summit in Washington. In an early stumble before it even got underway, Mr. Biden flubbed his introduction of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, saying: “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.” He quickly caught himself.
During the news conference, he referred to “Vice President Trump” when he meant Vice President Kamala Harris, a mistake that former President Donald J. Trump immediately mocked on social media.
But Mr. Biden showed a command of the issues on foreign policy, although he spoke slowly and meandered at times. Lawmakers and aides in Congress said it was a strong enough performance to keep the dam from breaking with mass calls for Mr. Biden to step aside, but with enough missteps to prolong the anxiety on Capitol Hill.
There was no description of the summit itself at all in the article. Nor was there a story on the summit anywhere on the dead tree front page.
That “Biden isolated” story didn’t even make the top of digital front page (at least for me), which looked this way this morning:
At that point, the top news included:
- A story from Peter Baker acknowledging Biden’s command of foreign policy, sandwiched between a description of his flubs and a super helpful explanation of how, “every momentary flub, every verbal miscue, even if quickly corrected, now takes on outsize importance, ricocheting across the internet in viral video clips”
- Zolan Kanno-Youngs cataloging five takeaways, in which is command of foreign policy was third:
- He said he is not leaving
- He got off to a rough start
- He showed a command of foreign policy
- He struggled to articulate why he is the best person to defeat Mr. Trump
- He offered a strong defense of Kamala Harris
- A Nicholas Nehamas story that, when written, focused exclusively on those (like Jim Himes) who called for Biden to drop out
- A piece on how Joe Biden lost Hollywood
- One of the many stories that described Biden’s polling on Kamala Harris’ strength against Trump was “quiet” (though the ridiculous claim that this was quiet has now been relegated to a subhead)
- A purported fact check of Biden’s press conference that claimed Biden’s observation, “He’s already told Putin — and I quote — do whatever the hell you want,” needed context
The fact check said nothing about Biden’s claim, in response to a question from AFP journalist Danny Kemp, that world leaders credited Biden for bringing NATO together.
I’m sure you actually could find a world leader who was unimpressed with Biden’s summit — like Viktor Orbán, who scurried from the conference to plan capitulation to Putin at Mar-a-Lago. But no one wanted to talk about that — about Biden’s efforts to stave off authoritarianism, about Biden’s efforts to reverse Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, about Biden’s efforts to save the idea of democracy, about the substance of the summit. So it didn’t merit a fact check either.
There’s a horse race to be run. And there’s absolutely no place for actual policy outcomes when there’s a horse race to be had!
When I first started writing this story, I had to look way down here at the bottom of the NYT page to find any report that was, substantially, about the NATO Summit at all.
The story has been promoted, placed in a section on Trump, not Biden, though still the fourth horizontal section on the page.
The story, from David Sanger, also focused on the press conference and noted Biden’s flubs. But it also described how Trump congratulated Putin’s genius after Russia invaded Ukraine.
[T]he session also served as a platform for him to show a command of foreign policy, including describing in detail the decisions he has made over three and a half years that have been punctuated by wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
He took credit for warning the Europeans of an impending invasion of Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022, and for preparing NATO to provide arms and intelligence as soon as war broke out. And he used the moment to remind American voters that Mr. Trump’s first reaction to the invasion was to praise President Vladimir V. Putin.
“Here’s what he said,” Mr. Biden added, his voice dripping with sarcasm: “‘It was genius. It was wonderful.’”
The biting comparison, with its suggestion that Mr. Trump admires only brute force and is in Mr. Putin’s pocket, was the kind of attack on his opponent that Mr. Biden’s supporters were hoping for in the debate between the two men two weeks ago but never heard.
Further down in that story, starting at ¶18 of a 23¶¶ story, Sanger described the news of the summit: that NATO was going to try to disrupt the relationship between China and Russia.
But it was on the question of Russia’s rapidly expanding relationship with China — and its alignment with North Korea and Iran, two other arms suppliers to Russia — that Mr. Biden broke the most new ground.
Until the news conference, he had never conceded that the United States was seeking to disrupt the relationship between the two countries, just as President Richard M. Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, did a half-century ago, by surprising the world with a diplomatic opening to Beijing.
He declined to discuss details of the strategy in public, but went on to say that “you’ll see that some of our European friends are going to be curtailing their investment in Russia — I mean, excuse me, in China, as long as China continues to have this indirect help to Russia.”
That was a significant reversal. Two years ago, Mr. Biden expressed doubts that the two countries, with their centuries of enmity and border disputes, could ever get along.
By the time the NATO leaders gathered this week for the 75th anniversary of the alliance, however, they were denouncing China as “a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine” and hinting that European nations might restrict their economic interchanges with Beijing.
China “cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation,” the summit’s declaration says, wording that was pressed by Mr. Biden’s aides.
So to find actual news of Biden’s NATO summit, you needed to scroll down the NYT to find the Sanger article, then scroll down in that article to find the news: that NATO is attempting to disrupt a growing alliance of authoritarian countries challenging democracy.
I’m genuinely not sure how NYT (and other outlets, who offered similar coverage) understand the world, wherein the fate of Joe Biden on a minute-to-minute basis can be divorced from the fate of democracy, globally. You have to have democracy before you can have horse races.
Yes, in an op-ed yesterday, NYT included Trump’s disdain for democracy and fondness for “strongmen” among the reasons he’s unfit to lead.
Mr. Trump has demonstrated contempt for these American ideals. He admires autocrats, from Viktor Orban to Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un. He believes in the strongman model of power — a leader who makes things happen by demanding it, compelling agreement through force of will or personality. In reality, a strongman rules through fear and the unprincipled use of political might for self-serving ends, imposing poorly conceived policies that smother innovation, entrepreneurship, ideas and hope.
But NYT did not mention that Trump not only admires these thugs, he is allied with them against democracy.
Yes, it matters that Democrats beat Trump in November. It matters that Democrats have a candidate with the stamina to do that.
But the bigger picture matters, too. And Biden’s success at marshalling democratic powers in alliance is one of the reasons he believes he has demonstrated his fitness to remain President.
His efforts to defend democracy are not news, apparently.
Trump May Attempt to Disavow Project 2025 — but He’s not Disavowing Viktor Orbán
The press has been a bit befuddled by Trump’s repeated attempts to disavow Project 2025.
One of the best debunkings of Trump’s false disavowal came from CNN, which made a list of the 140 Trump associates involved in Project 2025.
“I have no idea who is behind it,” the former president recently claimed on social media.
Many people Trump knows quite well are behind it.
Six of his former Cabinet secretaries helped write or collaborated on the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation. Four individuals Trump nominated as ambassadors were also involved, along with several enforcers of his controversial immigration crackdown. And about 20 pages are credited to his first deputy chief of staff.
In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, a CNN review found, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to “Mandate for Leadership,” the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.
Dozens more who staffed Trump’s government hold positions with conservative groups advising Project 2025, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and longtime adviser Stephen Miller. These groups also include several lawyers deeply involved in Trump’s attempts to remain in power, such as his impeachment attorney Jay Sekulow and two of the legal architects of his failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman.
To quantify the scope of the involvement from Trump’s orbit, CNN reviewed online biographies, LinkedIn profiles and news clippings for more than 1,000 people listed on published directories for the 110 organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board, as well as the 200-plus names credited with working on “Mandate for Leadership.”
Overall, CNN found nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering nearly every aspect of his time in politics and the White House – from day-to-day foot soldiers in Washington to the highest levels of his government. The number is likely higher because many individuals’ online résumés were not available.
Others, like Media Matters, are unpacking video where Trump endorses or is described endorsing the program.
NYT, which led reporting on these plans last year, has abandoned that leadership position to instead both-sides the question. It promised to lay out “a few ways” Project 2025 and Trump’s formal platform differ. Then it offered one: Abortion. NYT proceeded to provide Trump’s false spin that a platform that calls for fetal personhood says nothing about abortion.
There are a few ways the two plans differ.
One is on abortion. Project 2025 takes an aggressive approach to curtailing abortion rights, stating that the federal Health and Human Services Department “should return to being known as the Department of Life” (it was never known by that name) and that the next conservative president “has a moral responsibility to lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again.” Agenda47, however, does not mention abortion once.
Mr. Trump’s public position on abortion has regularly shifted. When he ran in 2016, he pledged to install justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. He called the ruling that overturned it “a great thing” at the presidential debate this year. He also said at the debate that abortion rights should be decided on a state-by-state basis.
Worse still, USA Today attempted to fact check a claim that Trump supports Project 2025 and declared it false, relying on nothing more than Trump’s denial.
Trump, however, has sought to publicly distance himself from the effort, as reported by The Washington Post.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote in a July 5 Truth Social post. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Trump is lying to hide the true scope of his second term agenda, and too many people claiming to be journalists are buying those lies. Personnel is policy, and for Trump, that personnel has and will be Johnny McEntee, a key player in Project 2025.
But there may be a more useful way of understanding the tie, especially today.
Project 2025 is the American instantiation of a authoritarianism adopted from Viktor Orbán, right along with his apology for Russia.
As Casey Michel laid out in the New Republic in March, Orbán has been using the Heritage Foundation as a beachhead to sustain Hungary’s influence operations during the Biden Administration.
Enter the Heritage Foundation. While Heritage grew to prominence in the 1980s as a font of Reaganite policy, in recent years the organization has undergone a monumental shift in terms of both policy and priorities. Rather than persist in its stolid dedication to conservative values, Heritage has swung in a far more reactionary—and far more authoritarian—direction in recent years. Across the policy landscape, Heritage has become little more than an intellectual breeding ground for Trumpist ideas.
While much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the cost.
Much of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.
Part of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things, has said he doesn’t think Joe Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor” to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage finalized what they refer to as a ‘landmark’ cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s government.*
The Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.
[snip]
Most important, however, is the man currently running the Danube Institute: John O’Sullivan, a British conservative who once served as the director of studies at—you guessed it—the Heritage Foundation. “With his extensive connections in the conservative universe, [O’Sullivan] became Orbán’s conduit to the American Right,” Heilbrunn noted.
Unsurprisingly, the key to O’Sullivan’s and the Danube Institute’s outreach to American conservatives has been the Heritage Foundation. A post in early 2023 from the Hungarian Conservative noted that the Danube Institute and the Heritage Foundation had “signed a landmark cooperation agreement, deepening Hungary’s transatlantic relations.”
Trump may be disavowing Project 2025 — or attempting to. But he’s not disavowing Orbán.
On the contrary, he and Orbán seem intent to run, hand in hand, to clothe a Transatlantic authoritarianism in the face of Christian nationalism.
NYTimes Launders Its Own Agency
After having scolded the President that he “should leave the race” that Democratic primary voters elected him to run.
And having ordered the Democratic Party to “speak the [NYT’s] plain truth to Biden,
And having ignored Trump’s own actions in the meanwhile (for example, NYT has no report yet on Viktor Orbán’s latest shenanigans, and they’ve only just reported on Trump’s attempts to disavow Project 2025, which they put in a both-sides frame and don’t cite NYT’s long focus on his Project 2025 aligned plans; Update, 10:09AM ET: NYT has now posted a cursory 7¶¶ 3-byline piece on Orbán.), NYT has now weighed in against Trump.
At least in its headline, the NYT doesn’t scold Trump. It doesn’t order the GOP to do anything.
It observes.
Once you click through to their actual op-ed, however, NYT does something else.
It launders agency it has been exercising all over its front page.
“The Democrats are rightly engaged in their own debate,” the paper that has supplanted every other kind of news to frame that debate says.
“The debate is so intense,” NYT says, not because reporters have engaged in conspiracy theorizing, lied, and (as Nancy Pelosi said of NYT’s overreading of her attempt to be subtle, “ma[d]e stories up.”
After which, NYT has relabled as “analysis” and done significant massaging of their story — though not without labeling Biden “defiant” again.
No.
The debate is so intense because, NYT says, “a compelling Democratic alternative is the only thing that will prevent [Trump’s] return to power.”
Which is to suggest that Joe Biden’s historic success — the policy stuff that, at NYT, always takes the backseat to Biden’s age — is not compelling at all.
Meanwhile, rather than bossing the Republican Party around like NYT did Democrats, NYT wrings its journalistic hands: “It is a national tragedy that the Republicans have failed to have a similar debate,” like the one NYT has forced down Democrats’ throats.
Rather than scolding about what Trump “should” do or ordering what Republicans “must” do, NYT simply “urges” voters here.
This is the op-ed page. It’s where NYT is supposed to exercise the omniscient narrator they’ve sicced on a non-stop flood of Joe Biden stories.
But it would be really nice if elsewhere, off the op-ed page, NYT would focus on reporting, including on the guy they claim is unfit to lead.
Viktor Orbán’s Mar-a-Lago Field Trip
The Atlantic has a very good piece on how Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita plan to win November’s election by shifting a focus from traditional field work to (stop me if this gives you 2016 headaches) digital microtargeting.
Published as it was in the last few days, it starts by laying out the premise: Wiles and LaCivita, to the extent they were going to work, presumed that Joe Biden was the nominee.
Only one thing could disrupt that plan: a change of candidates atop the Democratic ticket.
There was always a certain danger inherent to this assault on Biden’s faculties. If Wiles and LaCivita were too successful—if too many Democrats decided, too quickly, that Biden was no longer capable of defeating Trump, much less serving another four years thereafter—then they risked losing an ideal opponent against whom their every tactical maneuver had already been deliberated, poll-tested, and prepared. Campaigns are usually on guard against peaking too soon; in this case, the risk for Trump’s team was Biden bottoming out too early.
Of course they would build a campaign against Biden. Trump has been tailoring all his electoral plans — all of them — to Joe Biden since 2018. Six years, Trump and the GOP have focused on dirtying up Joe Biden.
And they’ve had help.
In conjunction with the disruption of a Russian botnet operating on Xitter (which I may return to) on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines issued one of the announcements that the Intelligence Community has been trying to get right since 2016: Russia, Iran, and China are playing in US electoral politics again. And Russia continues to target Joe Biden.
Russia’s efforts to influence this year’s U.S. election through information warfare have the same aim as in previous elections — to undermine President Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic Party and weaken public confidence in the electoral process, intelligence officials said Tuesday.
Russia’s election influence operations, which include covert social media accounts and encrypted direct messaging channels, are targeting key voter groups in swing states to exploit political divisions in the U.S. and erode support for Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, officials with the Office of the Director National Intelligence, or ODNI, told reporters.
Asked whether Russia’s information campaign is trying to boost or undermine one of the presidential candidates, an ODNI official said: “We have not observed a shift in Russia’s preferences for the presidential race from past elections, given the role the U.S. is playing with regard to Ukraine and broader policy toward Russia.”
Speaking without attribution, some spook further said that Russia was laundering its efforts through “influential US voices” and commercial firms.
“We are beginning to see Russia target specific voter demographics, promote divisive narratives and denigrate specific politicians. Moscow seeks to shape electoral outcomes, undermine electoral integrity and amplify domestic divisions,” the ODNI official said.
“To accomplish this, Moscow is using a variety of approaches to bolster its messaging and lend an air of authenticity to its efforts. This includes outsourcing its efforts to commercial firms to hide its hand and laundering narratives through influential U.S. voices,” the official said.
Such microtargeting of disgruntled types has a European counterpart — not just efforts to sway the various recent elections (which were wildly successful at the EU, but less so elsewhere), but also recruiting people to engage in sabotage.
A trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post illustrate the breadth of Russia’s efforts to identify potential recruits.
The documents show that in July 2023, Kremlin political strategists studied the Facebook profiles of more than 1,200 people they believed were workers at two major German plants — Aurubis and BASF in Ludwigshafen — to identify employees who could be manipulated into stirring unrest.
The strategists drew up excel spreadsheets analyzing the profiles of every worker, highlighting posts that demonstrated the employees’ anti-government, anti-immigration or anti-Ukrainian views.
At the BASF chemical plant, special attention was paid to the workers’ attitudes toward the closure of several facilities at the plant in spring 2023 because of soaring production costs, including natural gas price hikes, which led to the loss of 2,600 jobs. At the Aurubis metals plant, the strategists noted anti-immigrant views in the posts of some of the workers, one of the documents shows.
“We can concentrate on inciting ethnic hatred,” one of the strategists wrote. “Or on organizing strikes over social benefits.”
We see more on intelligence targeting in Europe than we do in the US, which is one of many reasons to suspect we know about it because the US has shared information to be released publicly (something they can’t do for US persons). But all that would change if Trump were to win the election: He has already threatened to stop sharing that kind of intelligence.
Trump advisers have told allied countries the reduced intel sharing would be part of a broader plan to scale back U.S. support and cooperation with the 32-nation alliance, according to three European officials and a senior NATO official, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal discussions.
The officials said they learned about the proposal to curb intelligence-sharing during discussions with Trump advisers about broader plans to reduce U.S. involvement with NATO. The former president repeatedly questioned and sought to undercut the alliance during his first term in office.
The curtailment of intel could have dire security consequences, especially for Ukraine as it tries to repel the Russian invasion.
“It’s the American intelligence that helped convince a lot of NATO countries that Putin was resolved to invade Ukraine,” one European official said. “Some countries didn’t believe Russia had the capabilities to carry out a successful military campaign.”
Which brings us to Viktor Orbán’s shenanigans.
Hungary just started serving a six-month term as President of the EU. No sooner had Hungary adopted that position than Orbán promptly used it to fly around the world seeking to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding.
In a leaked letter seen Tuesday by POLITICO, the Hungarian prime minister underlined Russian President Vladimir Putin’s maximalist position on Ukraine so thoroughly he could have been auditioning for the role of Kremlin spokesperson.
The missive, addressed to European Council President Charles Michel and shared with other members of the European Council, lays out Putin’s thinking about the status of his war in Ukraine — and what Orbán reckons the EU’s next steps should be.
It caps a week of manic diplomacy, during which Orbán visited Kyiv, then Moscow, and then Beijing, on a self-described Ukraine “peace mission” days after Hungary assumed command of the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU.
Orbán told Michel that, according to Putin, “time is not on the side of Ukraine, but on the side of the Russian forces,” without providing evidence for the battlefield analysis.
Having largely blown off Biden at the NATO summit, Orbán heads to Mar-a-Lago today to pitch this “peace” deal.
A person familiar with Trump’s plans said the former president was scheduled to stay in Florida until Friday, at which point he would fly to Philadelphia for a rally, and that there was “no time even hypothetically” to meet with Orbán afterwards. That left Thursday as the only day that Orbán could fly down to meet with the Republican candidate.
Trump would also be wary of Orbán trying to position himself as a power broker in Europe, the person said. Bloomberg News reported that Trump had not asked Orbán to negotiate the peace deal for him.
Orbán has not had an official meeting with Biden for the past four years but met Trump in March this year at his beachfront compound in Mar-a-Lago. Orbán endorsed him several times throughout the past eight years and expressed support, calling him a “man of honor” after Trump was found guilty on 34 counts in a criminal trial.
This all comes after Trump performed like a trained seal at the debate, twice raising the Hunter Biden laptop, repeatedly claiming that Putin wouldn’t have invaded if he had been President, describing speaking to Putin before Putin did invade — and promising to achieve a peace deal before inauguration.
To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say suckers and losers – we have 19 people that said it was never said by me. It was made up by him, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was made up, just like the 51 intelligence agents are made up, just like the new thing with the 16 economists are talking.
It’s the same thing. Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation. It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter. It wasn’t Russia disinformation. He made up the suckers and losers, so he should apologize to me right now.
[snip]
As far as Russia and Ukraine, if we had a real president, a president that knew – that was respected by Putin, he would have never – he would have never invaded Ukraine.
A lot of people are dead right now, much more than people know. You know, they talk about numbers. You can double those numbers, maybe triple those numbers. He did nothing to stop it. In fact, I think he encouraged Russia from going in.
I’ll tell you what happened, he was so bad with Afghanistan, it was such a horrible embarrassment, most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, that when Putin watched that and he saw the incompetence that he should – he should have fired those generals like I fired the one that you mentioned, and so he’s got no love lost. But he should have fired those generals.
No general got fired for the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan, where we left billions of dollars of equipment behind, we lost 13 beautiful soldiers and 38 soldiers were obliterated. And by the way, we left people behind too. We left American citizens behind.
When Putin saw that, he said, you know what? I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream. The difference is he never would have invaded Ukraine. Never.
Just like Israel would have never been invaded, in a million years, by Hamas. You know why? Because Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for anything. No money for terror.
[snip]
TRUMP: No, they’re not acceptable. No, they’re not acceptable.
But look, this is a war that never should have started. If we had a leader in this war – he led everybody along. He’s given $200 billion now or more to Ukraine. He’s given $200 billion. That’s a lot of money. I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it. Every time that Zelenskyy comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion. He’s the greatest salesman ever.
And I’m not knocking him, I’m not knocking anything. I’m only saying, the money that we’re spending on this war, and we shouldn’t be spending, it should have never happened.
I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelenskyy as president-elect before I take office on January 20th. I’ll have that war settled.
People being killed so needlessly, so stupidly, and I will get it settled and I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.
[snip]
TRUMP: Just going back to Ukraine for one second, we have an ocean separating us. The European nations together have spent $100 billion, or maybe more than that, less than us. Why doesn’t he call them so you got to put up your money like I did with NATO? I got them to put up hundreds of billions of dollars. The secretary general of NATO said Trump did the most incredible job I’ve ever seen. You wouldn’t – they wouldn’t have any – they were going out of business. We were spending – almost 100 percent of the money was – it was paid by us.
He didn’t do that. He is getting all – you got to ask these people to put up the money. We’re over $100 billion more spent, and it has a bigger impact on them, because of location, because we have an ocean in between. You got to ask them.
As far as Israel and Hamas, Israel’s the one that wants to go – he said the only one who wants to keep going is Hamas. Actually, Israel is the one. And you should them go and let them finish the job.
He doesn’t want to do it. He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.
[snip]
And we mentioned the laptop, We mentioned “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.” And everything he does is a lie. It’s misinformation and disinformation. The “losers and suckers” story that he made up is a total lie on the military. It’s a disgrace.
[snip]
TRUMP: Just to finish what he said, if I might, Russia – they took a lot of land from Bush. They took a lot of land from Obama and Biden. They took no land, nothing from Trump, nothing.
He knew not to do it. He’s not going to play games with me. He knew that. I got along with him very well, but he knew not to play games.
He took nothing from me, but now, he’s going to take the whole thing from this man right here.
That’s a war that should have never started. It would’ve never started ever with me. And he’s going to take Ukraine and, you know, you asked me a question before, would you do this with – he’s got us in such a bad position right now with Ukraine and Russia because Ukraine’s not winning that war.
He said, I will never settle until such time – they’re running out of people, they’re running out of soldiers, they’ve lost so many people. It’s so sad.
They’ve lost so many people and they’ve lost those gorgeous cities with the golden domes that are 1,000-years-old, all because of him and stupid decisions.
Russia would’ve never attacked if I were president.
Trump said he’d get Ukraine settled, and Orbán swooped in, with his plan to “settle” it.
Note, too, how Trump links Hamas and Ukraine (and the slur, Palestinian, here). With both Hamas and Russia, Biden is facing hostage situations — most notably with Evan Gershkoich’s detention — that Trump claims he can solve.
While Trump claims to be wary of following Orbán’s lead, that’s no more credible than his claim to disavow Project 2025, the Heritage-linked project with its own ties to Orbán.
It’s all happening in front of our eyes.
But back to Trump’s campaign plan to use digital microtargeting instead of traditional field. The idea is that Trump is going to focus on people who don’t vote, and after getting people who never turn out to turn out, he’ll then throw his election deniers — people like Christina Bobb, who was indicted in Arizona for her false claims in 2020 — to “protect the vote.”
Scouring precinct-level statistics from the four previous times Trump had competed in Iowa—the primary and general elections in 2016 and 2020—they isolated the most MAGA-friendly pockets of the state. Then, comparing data they’d collected from those areas against the state’s voter file, LaCivita and Wiles found what they were looking for: Some 8,000 of those Iowans they identified as pro-Trump—people who, over the previous seven or eight years, had engaged with Trump’s campaign either physically, digitally, or through the mail—were not even registered to vote. Thousands more who were registered to vote had never participated in a caucus. These were the people who, if converted from sympathizers to supporters, could power Trump’s organization.
[snip]
The RNC under Ronna McDaniel, who chaired the national party from early 2017 until LaCivita’s takeover, had become a frequent target of Trump’s ire. He didn’t like that the party remained neutral in the early stages of the 2024 primary—and he was especially furious that McDaniel commissioned debates among the candidates. But what might have bothered him most was the RNC’s priorities: McDaniel was continuing to pour money into field operations, stressing the need for a massive get-out-the-vote program, but showed little interest in his pet issue of “election integrity.”
“Tell you what,” Trump said to Wiles and LaCivita. “I’ll turn out the vote. You spend that money protecting it.”
The marching orders were clear: Trump’s lieutenants were to dismantle much of the RNC’s existing ground game and divert resources to a colossal new election-integrity program—a legion of lawyers on retainer, hundreds of training seminars for poll monitors nationwide, a goal of 100,000 volunteers organized and assigned to stand watch outside voting precincts, tabulation centers, and even individual drop boxes.
The Atlantic piece is really good for understanding what Wiles and LaCivita claim they’re doing.
But it suffers from a category error, which is believing that Trump is thinking exclusively in terms of electoral victory.
It’s all happening in front of our eyes.
WaPo’s Manufactured “Landslide”
[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]
When a distinguished professor of journalism calls out the Washington Post on its bullshit, you’d hope WaPo would take note and make a correction in its direction:
One Democratic senator who is noted for being to the right end of the Democrats’ political spectrum apparently constitutes a landslide in Democratic Party opinion.
If Democrats stood on Sen. Michael Bennet’s side of the boat we’d be Republican Lite sinking the boat.
What’s truly disgusting about WaPo’s skewed priorities is that another event of far more import than Bennet’s lone opinion took place last evening and hasn’t received the scrutiny it should have.
Laffy wrote a thread summarizing Donald Trump’s campaign rally. I’m not going to post the entire thread, just posts 2 and 3 from a 10-post thread:
The entire thread begins at this link.
This synopsis spares you Trump’s droning whine as he reels out over an hour of white Christian nationalist/supremacist grievance using an absurd number of lies.
I listened to this nauseating dreck this morning and it’s awful. If this man is elected and allowed to act on his hatred relying on the Roberts’ court’s presidential immunity, no one who is a person of color or LGBTQ+ will be safe let alone other marginalized groups.
The rotting cherry on the top of this ugliness: this was a campaign rally held at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami.
In other words, Trump laundered campaign funds which paid for this event, transferring it to his Trump org-owned golf course and eventually into his own pocket.
The Secret Service was surely charged by the course for what resources it used to protect him at the course — this money went directly to the course and into Trump’s pocket.
GOP presumptive presidential nominee Trump was grifting right under the noses of his supporters and what little media was present, while airing so much hateful screed as a campaign speech.
But a “landslide” of one Democratic senator was more important and featured on WaPo’s front page.
The Lie David Sanger Told to Sustain NYT’s Non-Stop Campaign against Joe Biden
Predictably, the NYT treated President Biden’s speech to kick off NATO’s 75th Anniversary as if Biden merely invented the date and the event and maybe even NATO itself to cover up a shoddy debate performance. In addition to the subhead that nonsensically complained there was, “no mention of President Biden’s political peril,” in his speech, in this 25-paragraph story, NYT made this a story about Biden’s campaign by:
- ¶1: Asserting Biden was trying to bolster the alliance and his campaign.
- ¶2: Describing Biden’s “strong voice, with few errors.”
- ¶4: Claiming the delivery of Biden’s speech “may have mattered as much as his words.”
- ¶5: Falsely claiming that the “faltering” of Biden’s campaign “created a test for the alliance that it did not anticipate.”
- ¶6: Adopting the passive voice to project its obsession with Biden’s delivery onto NATO’s leaders: “Mr. Biden made no mention of his political troubles, but he could not have escaped the fact that every word was being scrutinized for signs of faltering.”
- ¶7: Declaring that, “By all measures, he passed the test,” but then caveating that judgement by explaining what teleprompters are.
- ¶8: Quoting Biden’s comments to George Stephanopoulos about his role in leading NATO.
- ¶9: Mentioning Biden’s attempt to draw a contrast with Trump and derisively adding, “the man he swears he can still beat in November.”
- ¶10: Describing Biden’s goal for the contrast.
- ¶13: Explaining that, “Mr. Biden’s own aides concede that no matter how well the president performs [at NATO] he cannot make Americans unsee his debate performance.”
- ¶14: Falsely claiming that “confidence in its core member” was in doubt only because of Biden’s debate performance, and not Trump generally.
Compare that wildly partisan approach with the WaPo, which said only, “the summit is a moment of intense scrutiny as he faces pressure over his readiness to serve another four years,” in ¶12 out of 43 paragraphs (though WaPo has since added a story comparable to NYT’s, complete with claims of “defian[ce]”).
To sustain this fairytale — that the NATO summit exists merely as a measure of Biden’s ability to recover from his debate — David Sanger and Lara Jakes lie.
As noted, in ¶5, they claim that no one was worried about whether NATO could sustain its support for Ukraine until Biden’s campaign “faltered.”
The faltering of Mr. Biden’s campaign has also created a test for the alliance that it did not anticipate: whether it can credibly maintain the momentum it has built in supporting Ukraine and serving as a bulwark against further aggression when confidence in its most important player has never been more fragile. [my emphasis]
That is a lie. And one way we can be sure it is a lie — and that David Sanger knows it is a lie — is because a guy name David Sanger wrote this article, in February, which the NYT printed on A1 of the newspaper.
The February article not only describes that even before Trump suggested he would let Putin invade NATO countries, European leaders were already discussing what would happen if Trump withdrew from NATO. And that article explicitly contrasts Trump’s threats to abandon the alliance with Biden’s vocal support of it.
Long before Donald J. Trump threatened over the weekend that he was willing to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” against NATO allies that do not contribute sufficiently to collective defense, European leaders were quietly discussing how they might prepare for a world in which America removes itself as the centerpiece of the 75-year-old alliance.
Even allowing for the usual bombast of one of his campaign rallies, where he made his declaration on Saturday, Mr. Trump may now force Europe’s debate into a far more public phase.
So far the discussion in the European media has focused on whether the former president, if returned to office, would pull the United States out of NATO.
But the larger implication of his statement is that he might invite President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to pick off a NATO nation, as a warning and a lesson to the 30 or so others about heeding Mr. Trump’s demands.
His statement stunned many in Europe, especially after three years in which President Biden, attempting to restore the confidence in the alliance lost during Mr. Trump’s four years in office, has repeatedly said that the United States would “defend every inch of NATO territory.” [my emphasis]
Now, five months after setting up that stark contrast, David Sanger suggests that when Biden made the contrast himself in his NATO speech, it was just politics.
They were largely complimentary as Mr. Biden talked about America’s and the West’s “sacred obligation” to come to the aid of free nations and democracies under attack. He was clearly drawing a contrast with former President Donald J. Trump, the man he swears he can still beat in November. To drive home the difference between Mr. Trump’s Republican Party and the party of decades past, Mr. Biden quoted former President Ronald Reagan: “If you are threatened, we are threatened. If you’re not at peace, we cannot be at peace.”
Mr. Biden’s goal was clear: to establish Mr. Trump, with his “America First” approach and threats to withdraw the United States from the alliance, as a threat not only to NATO nations but also to his own country.
Even as Trump — in the debate that NYT deems such a disaster for Biden — described speaking to Putin about his invasion of Ukraine in advance ..,
When Putin saw that, he said, you know what? I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my – this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.
David Sanger now ignores his past reporting about the very real threat that Trump posed and still poses to NATO and American security, and rewrites that into a fairytale about Biden’s age.
This election was always going to be at least close. As Sanger himself reported months ago, European allies have been anticipating the significance of a second Trump term for months.
Yet now, because the NYT is so determined to make Biden’s electoral chances the cause for everything, Trump’s own preferences get a pass and are now caused by Biden’s plight.
The cause for NATO’s concerns is Trump. Not Biden’s campaign. And once upon a time, NYT reported it that way.
Peter Baker Argues Joe Biden Is Unfit because Peter Baker Is Too Lazy to Read the Homework
The NYT and ABC have now joined the insane mob tying the White House visits of a neurologist who has written papers on topics that include Parkinson’s, Dr. Kevin Cannard, to their wild brays that Joe Biden is unfit to stay in the race.
The NYT version is particularly remarkable, because Peter Baker, along with NYT’s health care correspondent, Emily Baumgaertner, describe Dr. Cannard’s specialty as “movement disorder specialist.”
The expert, Dr. Kevin Cannard, is a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders and recently published a paper on Parkinson’s. The logs, released by the White House, document visits from July 2023 through March of this year. More recent visits, if there have been any, would not be released until later under the White House’s voluntary disclosure policy.
And they link the report from Biden’s physical earlier this year, which they then quote, describing that after “an extremely detailed neurologic exam,” doctors like Cannard and White House physician Kevin O’Connor determined that Biden did not have Parkinsons.
That means they had all the tools they needed, aside from some basic reading comprehension, I guess, to discover that elsewhere in the same report they linked, under the heading that included “neurology,” O’Connor described adding a movement disorder neurologic specialist — someone just like Dr. Cannard!!! — to advise him on Biden’s gait problems.
In November 2021, O’Connor added a movement disorder neurologic specialist to Biden’s healthcare team, and these crack NYT journalists have decided that the evidence in front of them suggests Parkinson’s.
Remember, they’re supposed to be engaged in this mob out of a belief that Biden is not fit for his job.
Yet over and over, participants in this mob rush to provide evidence that the fitness problems lie elsewhere.
Update: O’Connor has now written a letter confirming that the only times Cannard has met with the President were in conjunction with his yearly physical.
As I have written in each of the President’s medical reports, as part of the President’s annual physical, he sees a team of specialists that have included Optometry, Dentistry, Orthopedics (Foot and Ankle), Orthopedics (Spine), Physical Therapy, Neurology, Sleep Medicine, Cardiology, Radiology, and Dermatology. Dr. Cannard was the neurological specialist that examined President Biden for each of his annual physicals. His findings have been made public each time I have released the results of the President’s annual physical. President Biden has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical.
Cannard is, as O’Connor describes, someone with a long background in general neurology before he did a movement disorders fellowship, and much of what he appears at the White House to treat are other neurological problems of military personnel tied to their service.
Dr. Cannard has been the Neurology Consultant to the White House Medical Unit since 2012. He was chosen for his breadth of experience and expertise across the specialty of Neurology. Prior to his Movement Disorders fellowship at Emory University, he had practiced as a general neurologist for six years. He is the longest serving Neurologist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and in the Military Healthcare System. He has been a member of the faculty at the Uniformed Services University’s medical school since 1991 and is core faculty of the Neurology Residency Program. He has numerous local and national teaching awards, and is highly regarded for his clinical skills. These qualities make him a valued and versatile consultant to assess and treat a wide variety of conditions. Prior to the pandemic, and following its end, he has held regular Neurology Clinics at the White House Medical Clinic in support of the thousands of active-duty members assigned in support of White House operations. Many military personnel experience neurological issues related to their service, and Dr. Cannard regularly visits the WHMU as part of this General Neurology practice.
Imagine if Dana Bash Knew Trump Had Been President Before?
After letting Donald Trump lie non-stop in the debate, Dana Bash invited his aspiring running-mate, Marco Rubio, onto her show to tell the same lies.
Ostensibly, she was asking Rubio about whether the Supreme Court immunity decision violated Rubio’s own stated dodge on accountability for January 6: “let history, and if necessary, the courts judge the events of the past.”
But Rubio quickly took over the segment, spending 37 seconds, and then another 22 seconds, falsely claiming that Joe Biden’s Administration was using DOJ as a legal weapon against Donald Trump. Rubio claimed, “The evidence is in the headlines every day. Every you day you open up it’s another Republican going to jail somewhere.” Bash let Rubio drone on at length, before interrupting to state there’s no evidence that Biden is doing this.
Worse still was Bash’s failure to rebut Rubio’s lies about Donald Trump’s first term. Rubio claimed, “I can’t think of a single prominent Democrat who was chased around, persecuted, prosecuted.” He followed up, “He was President for four years, he didn’t go after Hillary Clinton, he didn’t go after Joe Biden, he didn’t go after Barack Obama, he didn’t go after any other consultants. We didn’t see under him what we’re seeing now.” In one uncomfortable moment, Rubio cited the debate at which Bash had let Trump lie over and over about his future plans to criminalize his opponents, as if it represented the truth. Rubio then stated again that Trump, “was President before and he didn’t do it then.”
Those are all lies.
Those are all lies that Bash has a responsibility to debunk.
After Trump demanded it, Hillary Clinton remained under investigation — based off Peter Schweizer’s political hit job, Clinton Cash — for the entirety of Trump’s term, with a declination memo issuing only in August 2021.
Career prosecutors in Little Rock then closed the case, notifying the F.B.I.’s office there in two letters in January 2021. But in a toxic atmosphere in which Mr. Trump had long accused the F.B.I. of bias, the top agent in Little Rock wanted it known that career prosecutors, not F.B.I. officials, were behind the decision.
In August 2021, the F.B.I. received what is known as a declination memo from prosecutors and as a result considered the matter closed.
“All of the evidence obtained during the course of this investigation has been returned or otherwise destroyed,” according to the F.B.I.
Rubio mentioned, “consultants.” After Trump demanded prosecutions from John Durham, Durham indicted DNC cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann on flimsy charges. When Durham wildly misrepresented a report Sussmann made — showing the use of Yota phones inside Executive Office of the Presidency during the Obama Administration — Trump even issued suggested Sussmann should be put to death.
Yes, Sussmann was acquitted, but not before leaving his firm and spending untold legal fees to defend against a manufactured indictment and death threats from the former President.
Bash even seems ignorant of the first impeachment, in which Trump withheld funds appropriated to Ukraine in an attempt to extort the announcement of an investigation into Joe Biden and his kid.
On at least two more occasions, Donald Trump personally intervened into the criminal investigation of Joe Biden’s son. One was shortly after the NYPost unveiled material from a hard drive copy of a laptop attributed to Hunter Biden (as described in Bill Barr’s memoir), days before the 2020 election.
In mid-October I received a call from the President, which was the last time I spoke to him prior to the election. It was a very short con-versation. The call came soon after Rudy Giuliani succeeded in making public information about Hunter Biden’s laptop. I had walked over to my desk to take the call. These calls had become rare, so Will Levi stood nearby waiting expectantly to see what it was about. After brief pleasantry about his being out on the campaign trail, the President said, “You know this stuff from Hunter Biden’s laptop?”
I cut the President off sharply. “Mr. President, I can’t talk about that, and I am not going to.”
President Trump hesitated, then continued in a plaintive tone, “You know, if that was one of my kids—”
I cut him off again, raising my voice, “Dammit, Mr. President, I am not going to talk to you about Hunter Biden. Period!”
He was silent for a moment, then quickly got off the line.
I looked up at Will, whose eyes were as big as saucers. “You yelled at the President?” he asked, confirming the obvious. I nodded. He shook his head in disbelief.
Trump intervened again on December 27, 2020, when — during the conversation where Trump first threatened to replace Jeffrey Rosen if he didn’t back Trump’s false claims of election fraud — Trump also said, “people will criticize the DOJ if [Biden, to which Richard Donoghue added an “H” after the fact] not investigated for real.”
These non-public demands regarding the investigation into Hunter Biden accompanied public demands to “Lock him up!” Trump even raised Hunter Biden in between calls to march to the Capitol on January 6.
But Bash’s worst failures involve doing an interview with the Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and not asking him about two investigations conducted under Bill Barr that implicate confirmed and suspected disinformation with Russian ties.
As part of Barr’s effort to investigate Hillary Clinton for calling out Donald Trump’s embrace of Vladimir Putin, for example, starting in 2020 (as Trump demanded results), the Attorney General and John Durham relied on materials obtained from Russia that the Intelligence Community considered likely disinformation, a claim that Hillary had made a decision to “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” As it is, there’s a dispute about the use of those materials, with John Brennan, claiming in his House deposition last May that this claim involved a misrepresentation of what happened.
Mr. Brennan. Not out of hand, but I think it was — a week or two prior to that, there was a selective release of information that included my briefing notes to President Obama in the White House Situation Room that was misrepresenting, in fact, the facts, where it was pushed out in redacted version. And I did think that was a very, very unfortunate, unprofessional, unethical engagement on the part of the Director of National Intelligence in a Presidential election.
Marco Rubio is one person who could weigh in this dispute.
But Durham didn’t stop there. He then fabricated a claim that wasn’t included in the suspected Russian disinformation: That Hillary planned to make false claims about Trump’s fondness for Russia.
First, the Clinton Plan intelligence itself and on its face arguably suggested that private actors affiliated with the Clinton campaign were seeking in 2016 to promote a false or exaggerated narrative to the public and to U.S. government agencies about Trump’s possible ties to Russia.
At a time when Trump was publicly demanding results from Durham, then, the Special Counsel made shit up, politicizing intelligence, in an attempt to find charges against Hillary Clinton.
Bash let Rubio claim it didn’t exist.
Then there’s the blockbuster of which political journalists like Bash (and her colleague, Kaitlan Collins) appear aggressively ignorant.
In January 2020 (this was in the same time period he and Durham were fabricating claims about Hillary Clinton), Bill Barr set up a side channel to ingest dirt from Rudy Giuliani, including some from known Russian spy Andrii Derkach. Via still unexplained means, that side channel discovered false claims made by FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who has subsequently claimed to have extensive ties to Russian spies. Even though the claim was easily debunked, that dedicated side channel nevertheless failed to discover real problems with the fabricated claim that Joe Biden had been bribed by Mykola Zlockevsky. Indeed, days after Trump pressured Bill Barr about investigating Hunter Biden, on October 23, 2020, Richard Donoghue ensured the fabricated claim would be assigned to David Weiss for further investigation.
Worse still, through the efforts of Republican congressmen and Bill Barr, that fabricated claim of a Joe Biden bribe appears to have played a key role in the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal and subsequent felony conviction.
For the entirety of the time that these twin efforts to use suspected Russian disinformation to frame Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, Marco Rubio has been either Chair or Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee — one of the few people who can demand answers when the nation’s intelligence and counterintelligence system is so badly abused that Donald Trump’s political enemies can be framed, potentially in cahoots with Russian spies.
And Dana Bash had Marco Rubio sitting right there, in a position where she, in turn, could demand answers.
Instead, she let him lie and lie and lie about Trump’s past efforts to criminalize his political rivals.
Hunter Biden is on his way to prison in significant part because of Trump’s success at criminally targeting his political enemies. And Dana Bash never told viewers that Trump already has a documented record of doing just that.