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      Trump claims Joe Biden is on 'performance-enhancing drugs' – video

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      After the New York Times’ revelations about his tax returns, Donald Trump hit back with a series of baseless allegations, including that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, had used ‘performance-enhancing drugs’ during appearances. In an unfocused White House briefing, the US president also accused Biden’s son, Hunter, of corruption and speculated about non-existent Democrat policies of unattended open borders
      Donald Trump steps up wild attacks on Joe Biden as first debate looms
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      Donald Trump steps up wild attacks on Joe Biden as first debate looms

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      Five weeks from from polling day, two days from the first presidential candidates’ debate, and moments after the New York Times published bombshell revelations about Donald Trump’s taxes, the US president took aim at his Democratic opponent Joe Biden with a series of wild and unproven accusations.In an unfocussed White House briefing, the president retailed baseless allegations, including that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden had used “performance-enhancing drug” during appearances.Trump compared Biden’s performance across primary debates, including, according to the president, that he was stronger in some debates than others: “People say he was on performance-enhancing drugs. A lot of people have said that,” Trump claimed, without evidence. When challenged Trump told reporters to “look on the internet” to see who was saying it. .“I will be strongly demanding a drug test of Sleepy Joe Biden prior to, or after, the debate on Tuesday night,” Trump later wrote on Twitter.I will be strongly demanding a Drug Test of Sleepy Joe Biden prior to, or after, the Debate on Tuesday night. Naturally, I will agree to take one also. His Debate performances have been record setting UNEVEN, to put it mildly. Only drugs could have caused this discrepancy???— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2020
      The president also accused Biden’s son Hunter of corruption and speculated about non-existent Democrat policies of unattended, open borders. In a familiar refrain, he painted a dystopian vision of life under a Democratic administration.“They will destroy the American dream. They will destroy America … your private right to own a firearm will be totally eliminated, your guns will be confiscated, your ability to live by your religious faith will be devastated, they’ll abolish America’s borders and give healthcare to illegal aliens which will destroy our healthcare system.”Trump condemned criticism of his pick for the Supreme Court – the Catholic judge Amy Coney Barrett – as “fighting Catholicism”, and argued he was upholding his “presidential obligation” by nominating her to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He forecast Barrett’s nomination “is going to go quickly”.Trump revisited, too, his favoured tropes: the “lamestream media”; the failures of Obamacare; and allegations of widespread voter fraud.There were few facts to back up his assertions..The latest revelationfrom The New York Times that Trump paid just $750 in tax the year he won the presidency, and no tax in 10 of the last 15 years, because he lost more money than he made, was dismissed:“It’s fake news. Totally fake news. Made up,” Trump said.Trump has reportedly done little in the way of formal preparation for this week’s debate against Biden, though he said on Sunday that the former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his former 2016 primary rival, Chris Christie, had been drafted in to help him.“We had a little debate prep before we came here,” Trump said, while Christie and Giuliani watched from the press briefing room. “What I do is debate prep, every day.”Biden, by contrast, has spent months honing his debate lines of attack, and preparing to aggressively rebut Trump’s attacks on him.Biden’s campaign has been holding mock debate sessions featuring Bob Bauer, a senior Biden adviser and former White House general counsel, playing the role of Trump, a source with direct knowledge of the preparations told AP on condition of anonymity.First debates, historically, are by far the most impactful and Tuesday night in the swing state of Ohio could be critical in determining Trump’s chances of clawing back Biden’s stubbornly consistent lead in the polls.The 90-minute event, moderated by Fox News host Chris Wallace, is the first of three scheduled presidential debates.Vice President Mike Pence and California Senator Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, will debate in October. More

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      Biden’s team hopes for repeat of his 2012 performance as Trump debate nears

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      For Democrats and supporters of former vice-president Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, the hope is that the version of Biden who faced then-congressman Paul Ryan back in 2012 shows up for the debate against Donald Trump on Tuesday in Ohio.The Biden who showed up for the Ryan debate eight years ago helped turn around the trajectory of then-President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. Ask just about any former Obama campaign alumna or Democratic strategist and they will concede that Obama’s performance against Mitt Romney in the first debate was lacking.“I would describe what he did in 2012 as a circuit breaker,” said Tad Devine, who ran Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.It was a low point in the campaign, former Obama campaign staffers recalled in interviews with the Guardian, and it was unclear whether Biden’s performance in the vice-presidential debate would help lift the suddenly faltering campaign back up or let it sink further.“Obama’s performance was just miserable,” Devine said of the first 2012 debate between Obama and Romney. “Biden went in there against Ryan and, boy, he was appropriately aggressive. On point. Really drove the thing and I think staunched the bleeding.”Staffers for the reelection campaign often contrast the first debate with the vice-presidential debate. “Obama had flubbed the first debate and there was a lot of pressure on [Biden] to deliver and he nailed it and I know he sort of cold-cocked them,” a top reelection campaign adviser recalled.The stakes for Biden’s performance are far higher in 2020 as he now tops the Democratic ticket and faces off against a norm-shattering figure such as Trump in a momentous election the whole world is watching. “The first one is almost the whole ball game because we have a polarized country, everyone knows who they’re going to vote for except for a small group of people and they’ll watch the first debate and make a judgement,” said Bill Daley, a former chief of staff to Obama who also advised Biden on one of his earlier White House bids.But the Biden who took the stage alongside Ryan, Mitt Romney’s nominee for vice-president, surprised some. He was energetic policy literate. And he didn’t produce the verbal missteps that for years he was famed for. As Ryan ticked off statistics or delivered his carefully crafted attack lines, Biden switched between stern seriousness and exasperated eyerolls. Seven minutes into the debate Biden used one of his trademark phrases – “Malarkey!” – to parry a remark by Ryan.“Not a single thing he said is accurate,” Biden said with a determined smile on his face before he went on to detail how Ryan, as chairman of the House ways and means committee, had a hand in cutting off funding for a US embassy in Benghazi.Whereas aides on the Obama campaign knew the president was not delivering in the first debate, the staff for Biden in the makeshift war room at Centre College in Kentucky flooded the spin room, where reporters interview candidates and surrogates after a debate, to capitalize on Biden’s performance.“The first hour, hour and a quarter had been so good it didn’t even matter what had happened next,” a former Obama campaign staffer recalled of that debate. “We wanted to convey that.”Similarly, at the Obama campaign reelection headquarters there was a strong sense of relief and optimism, according to multiple former staffers from that campaign. The campaign seemed to have overcome one of the bleaker periods.Eight years later, the stakes are different. Biden is now the Democrats’ presidential candidate. One of Donald Trump’s favorite attacks is to knock the 77 year old on his age or vivacity (though Trump himself is 74). Biden also benefits from being the underdog.“He benefits from low expectations going into these debates,” said David Wilhelm, who served as Biden’s Iowa campaign manager in his 1988 presidential bid. “Expectations can shift of course even from debate to debate. He’ll benefit from that.”Biden has made a habit of keeping his top advisers close to him for years. Ron Klain, the former vice president’s chief of staff who helped prep him in 2012, has been involved in coaching him this time around. Sheila Nix, another longtime aide who was involved in preparation in 2012, is now a top staffer for California senator Kamala Harris’s staffing contingent of the Biden campaign. Mike Donilon, another longtime Biden adviser, and Biden campaign deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield are also involved.Veterans of working with Biden and other campaigns argue that the former vice-president usually does better in head-to-head debates rather than multi-candidate ones. He also likes to get into policy without getting too wonky, recalled a top Obama campaign reelection adviser. But in preparation for debate he “just wants the backup to make the points that he wants to make”.“He was terrific in the 2012 vice presidential debates and I think that would be a better model for this than where he had ten people or eight people on stage,” said Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic strategist who has advised Biden in the past and helped run rival Bob Kerrey’s 1992 presidential campaign.Biden and his team have been readying for this debate for weeks, but only in the past few days has the focus increased, according to a Democrat with ties to the campaign. Biden himself acknowledged that recently.“I’ve started to prepare but I haven’t gotten into it really heavily,” Biden said Wednesday while talking to a group of reporters. “I will beginning tomorrow.”He’s set to spend most of the final days before the debate preparing for it. Devine warned that the worst case for Biden is if voters come out of the debate questioning Biden’s capacity to be president. Devine stressed he didn’t think that would happen but “that’s how low they’ve set the bar”. More

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      Amid talk of civil war, America is already split – Trump Nation has seceded | Robert Reich

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      What is America really fighting over in the upcoming election? Not any particular issue. Not even Democrats versus Republicans. The central fight is over Donald J Trump.Before Trump, most Americans weren’t especially passionate about politics. But Trump’s MO has been to force people to become passionate about him – to take fierce sides for or against. And he considers himself president only of the former, whom he calls “my people”.Trump came to office with no agenda except to feed his monstrous ego. He has never fueled his base. His base has fueled him. Its adoration sustains him.So does the antipathy of his detractors. Presidents usually try to appease their critics. Trump has gone out of his way to offend them. “I do bring rage out,” he unapologetically told Bob Woodward in 2016.In this way, he has turned America into a gargantuan projection of his own pathological narcissism.To Trump and his core enablers and supporters, the laws of Trump Nation authorize him to do whatever he wantsHis entire re-election platform is found in his use of the pronouns “we” and “them”. “We” are people who love him, Trump Nation. “They” hate him.In late August, near the end of a somnolent address on the South Lawn of the White House, accepting the Republican nomination, Trump extemporized: “The fact is, we’re here – and they’re not.” It drew a standing ovation.At a recent White House news conference, a CNN correspondent asked if Trump condemned the behavior of his supporters in Portland, Oregon. In response, he charged: “Your supporters, and they are your supporters indeed, shot a young gentleman.”In Trump’s eyes, CNN exists in a different country: Anti-Trump Nation.So do the putative rioters and looters of “Biden’s America”. So do the inhabitants of blue states whose state and local tax deductions Trump eliminated. So do those who live in the “Democrat cities”, as he calls them, whose funding he’s trying to cut.California is a big part of Anti-Trump Nation. He wanted to reject its request for aid to battle wildfires “because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him”, said former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor.New York is the capital of Anti-Trump Nation, which probably contributed to Trump “playing down” the threat of Covid-19 last March, when its virulence seemed largely confined to that metropolis. Even now, Trump claims the US rate of Covid-19 deaths would be low “if you take the blue states out”. That’s untrue, but it’s not the point. For Trump, blue states don’t count because they’re Anti-Trump Nation.To Trump and his core enablers and supporters, the laws of Trump Nation authorize him to do whatever he wants. Anti-Trump Nation’s laws constrain him, but they’re illegitimate because they are made and enforced by the people who reject him.If he loses the election, Trump will not accept the result because it would be the product of Anti-Trump NationSo Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine seeking help with the election was “perfect”. It was fine for Russia to side with him in 2016, and it’s fine for it to do so again. And of course the justice department, postal service and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should help him win re-election. They’re all aiding Trump Nation.By a similar twisted logic, Anti-Trump Nation is dangerous. Hence, says Trump, the armed teenager who killed two in Kenosha, Wisconsin, acted in “self-defense”, yet the suspected killer of a rightwinger in Portland deserved the “retribution” he got when federal marshals killed him.It follows that if he loses the election, Trump will not accept the result because it would be the product of Anti-Trump Nation, and Trump isn’t the president of people who would vote against him. As he recently claimed, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”In the warped minds of Trump and his acolytes, this could lead to civil war. Just this week he refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. His consigliere Roger Stone urges him to declare “martial law” if he loses. Michael Caputo, assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, warns “the shooting will begin” when Trump refuses to go.Civil war is unlikely, but the weeks and perhaps months after election day will surely be fraught. Even if Trump is ultimately forced to relinquish power, his core adherents will continue to view him as their leader. If he retains power, many if not most Americans will consider his presidency illegitimate.So whatever happens, Trump’s megalomaniacal ego will prevail. America will have come apart over him, and Trump Nation will have seceded from Anti-Trump Nation. More

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      'Scranton v Park Avenue' is Biden's best campaign issue – not the supreme court | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      With the death of the US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Friday, the stakes of November’s election are more obvious than ever. If Trump retains control of the presidency, most likely through a win in the electoral college but loss in the popular vote, that will cement minority Republican rule for a generation. Abortion rights, healthcare legislation, labor protections and voting rights will all be directly impacted.Democratic partisans are acutely aware of this fact. ActBlue, the party’s most important fundraiser, raised more than $100m from 1.5 million individuals since Ginsburg’s passing. For some, like the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, Ginsburg’s death means that Democrats need to ratchet up their rhetoric about the courts and foreground their plans for significant institutional reform. If Democrats can take the Senate, Toobin suggests, then the filibuster must be abolished, Washington DC and Puerto Rico granted statehood, the number of lower-court federal judges expanded, and the supreme court be packed with three more judges. On the latter point, at least, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, agrees, saying that “everything is on the table”.Many of the same commentators and strategists getting on board with plans like court-packing think that Biden should be trying to appeal to moderate Republican suburban voters. But there is an unacknowledged tension here: Ginsburg’s passing will likely limit defections from the small cadre of Republicans who find Trump distasteful enough to contemplate a Biden vote. Many of these voters may think a conservative court is worth the embarrassment of being associated with another Trump term.The problem with treating the election as a referendum on the supreme court is that, as Anne Applebaum recently argued, it “organizes the electorate along two fronts of a culture war, and forces people to make stark ideological choices. Instead of focusing voters on the president’s failure to control Covid-19 or the consequent economic collapse, the culture war makes voters think only of their deepest tribal identities.” But whether Applebaum wants it to be the case or not, the courts will be the forefront of the minds of many regular voters. Recent events, then, should call into question the entire Biden premise of building a campaign around current or former Republican voters in affluent suburbs.Another strategy – instead of chasing suburban voters uncomfortable with Trump’s conduct – is to offer bread-and-butter issues to lower propensity young and working-class voters, who Bernie Sanders had tried to mobilize in his primary run to varying levels of success. (Perhaps easier accomplished in a general election rather than in closed party primaries.) While the culture war might divide much of the existing electorate, this new electorate can be potentially reached through appeals for widely popular progressive policies such as universal healthcare and a federal jobs program. In a time where millions of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck – and many are experiencing unemployment and an uncertain future – offering more security and support is a message that can win an election.Though they obviously overlap, the 64% of Americans who think the rich should pay more in taxes to support public programs are a firmer basis to build a political coalition than the quarter of Americans who identify as “liberal”, or, for that matter, the probably tiny number of former Trump voters who can be won over to Biden by outrage at the president’s behavior. Rather than talking about “packing the courts”, Biden would be wise to appear credible on this bread-and-butter agenda and then use his mandate to “do whatever it takes” in the way of structural reform to accomplish it.The former vice-president has been making some populist noises lately, such as when he recently framed the election as a choice between the interests of “Scranton” and “Park Avenue.” (This sparked the ire of the liberal MSNBC crowd, who, in an incredible encapsulation of their own irrelevance and privilege, attacked Biden’s framing for being divisive and Trump-like.) But he’s not always consistent in this messaging.There is still time for Biden to embrace a populist message more resolutely, and speak to the millions of Americans looking for a strong, progressive leader who can help them weather this economic storm – much like FDR did during the Great Depression. The question isn’t whether Biden should pursue this path, but whether he will – and whether people should believe him if he finally does. More