Here’s what I’ve found interesting: President Biden’s debate performance was terrible but we need to take a deep breath and stop with the panic, the Philadelphia Inquirer rightly calls on Donald Trump to leave the race, a witty and accessible review of Project 2025, Trump proposes having migrants fight each other for sport, how we could lose reality under Project 2025, a conservative-backed group is making a public list of federal workers it believes won’t be loyal to Trump, the real photo that won an AI image contest, I was wrong about the end of Voyager 1, and Newsmax does a better job than CNN of fact-checking the results of 2020 election.
#1
July 27, 2024 (Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American)
It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.
There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just an hour afterward suggested that the technique worked on him.
That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
President Biden’s performance during the first half hour was the worst of any candidate in the history of presidential and vice presidential debates. It does not make sense to ignore what happened. People have eyes and ears. But we also shouldn’t panic.
Biden is ultimately responsible for what happened. But my goodness, where was his staff? How could they not leak before the debate that Biden had a cold? How could they not set expectations that we would hear a hoarse voice at a minimum?
It was also clear that Biden was not just overprepared, but he was overprepared for the wrong kind of debate. He didn’t need to memorize lists of factoids. Anyone who has watched a recent Donald Trump rally knew this debate would not be about policy expertise. Biden needed to be able to call out Donald Trump’s lies—especially after CNN made clear it was not going to let Jake Tapper and Dana Bash handle this fundamental journalist role. As the American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote, “The people who spent a week with Biden at Camp David had a specific duty, which they failed utterly to accomplish.”
Allowing Trump to lie also set up Biden to be a victim of the “Gish gallop” historian Heather Cox Richardson describes in the excerpt I’ve quoted above. It took Biden time to catch up with the cascade of false statements. I’ve experienced this when facing someone screaming false accusations at me. It’s hard to overcome.
After about a half hour, Biden rallied. Thankfully. It was at about that time that Trump began to falter.
But first impressions matter.
I was relieved to see Biden do so well the next day, starting with voter interactions at the Waffle House and an outstanding rally speech. He owned his poor debate performance, reminded his supporters about what is at stake in this election, and once again got up after metaphorically getting knocked down. Biden has made a political career and life out of that.
Biden was pitch-perfect when he said, “I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!”
I hope that still matters.
There has been a conversation about whether Democrats should replace Biden as the presidential candidate this year. I’ve been unimpressed by the arguments made by pundits who think a replacement is necessary. A poor performance while ill should not determine presidential campaign strategy—particularly when the alternatives discussed are more unrealistic than an Aaron Sorkin plot.
Critical parts of the Democratic coalition are quite unimpressed with all of the suggestions about replacing the first woman of color to be Vice President with a white man or white woman at the top of the ticket. (Visiting Black Twitter is always worthwhile for a reality check—and don’t overlook how Trump’s debate reference to “black jobs” has hurt him.) Do you think the current post-debate reaction is a crisis? The clusterbleep that would happen if Vice President Kamala Harris were passed over would far exceed it. People also seem to have forgotten that Harris is the only person who could use the millions the Biden-Harris campaign has already raised. Everyone else would start fundraising from zero.
Biden, his family, and his advisors have a difficult decision to make. They need to be sure that the president is up to the challenge. The strategy that led to Biden’s campaign pushing for this debate failed. This election will be too close for another mistake of this magnitude.
Biden had a bad night. However, Trump led an insurrection that prevented a peaceful transfer of power. Trump is a felon. Trump appointed the Supreme Court Justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump failed our country during the pandemic. Trump lied in every answer he gave during the debate. Trump says he wants to help Russia, North Korea, and China be great again. On Sunday Trump reposted on Truth Social an image calling Liz Cheney “guilty of treason” and that she should face a “televised military tribunal.”
We should never accept that kind of rhetoric as normal from a presidential candidate.
Plus, as Stuart Stevens warned on Twitter in answering a question about whether Trump would be pleased or nervous if he were suddenly running against another Democrat: “He’d be relieved. The message from the Democratic Party would be, ‘I guess Trump was right and Biden wasn’t up to it. We’ll give it another shot. Eventually we’ll get it right. And hey, trust us to lead the country.’ It’s madness.”
Sure is. It would be a challenge to build a winning coalition around that perception.
We know Biden can run the country because he has demonstrated it over the past three-and-a-half years. The Biden-Harris ticket needs to win to protect democracies around the world. This debate was a setback. I hope the president has learned a lesson—and that he will once again bounce back from adversity.
So. Let’s take a breath. Campaigns are full of lows and highs. We have work to do. So, as Jimmy Buffett once sang, let’s “breathe in, breathe out, move on.”
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#2
To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race (Editorial Board, The Philadelphia Inquirer)
President Joe Biden’s debate performance was a disaster. His disjointed responses and dazed look sparked calls for him to drop out of the presidential race.
But lost in the hand wringing was Donald Trump’s usual bombastic litany of lies, hyperbole, bigotry, ignorance, and fear mongering. His performance demonstrated once again that he is a danger to democracy and unfit for office.
In fact, the debate about the debate is misplaced. The only person who should withdraw from the race is Trump.
Trump, 78, has been on the political stage for eight years marked by chaos, corruption, and incivility. Why go back to that?
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
At least one editorial board is willing to ask that question. In this editorial, The Philadelphia Inquirer reviews Trump’s policy failures, his impeachments, and his lying about everything. They conclude that Trump is actually the candidate who needs to step down.
As The Bulwark’s Jill Lawrence also explained, the fact that we are supposed to pretend that the leader of an insurrection designed to overturn the 2020 election is a typical political candidate demonstrates a series of failures by our nation’s institutions. Trump had three opportunities during the debate to agree that he would accept the results of the 2024 election. He refused each time. Shouldn’t that matter?
We must not forget who Donald Trump has proven to be. We must take every opportunity to remind people what actually happened during his first term. The Philadelphia Inquirer does the nation a service by being so blunt in its reminder about what is at stake in this election.
Where are the rest of the pundits and editorial writers? Why do they continue to give Trump a pass?
#3
A Review of Project 2025 (Emily Galvin-Almanza, Twitter via Thread Reader)
You may have heard the term “Project 2025” floating around, and you may even have cracked open the 900+ page document yourself, only to see a lot of kind of bland, policy-wonk text. So let me crack through the policy-speak and tell you WTF is in this document.
This is, um, a long thread. But if you want a lot of info about Project 2025, all in one place, you’ve come to the right place.
This document is what Trump and his team will do if elected. It’s their document, their plan, their platform. So like… it’s not *me* saying what they’ll do, this is *them* saying so.
Shall we dig in? I’ll organize and give you page numbers. I’m going to start with criminal justice stuff (of course) and then we’ll wander through other topics like repro rights (none), discrimination (fine, unless it’s against nuclear power), environmental protection (gone), etc.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Emily Galvin-Almanza, the Founder and Executive Director of Partners for Justice, provides a readable and witty summary of Project 2025. She’s done the challenging reading of the 900-page document, so you don’t have to.
I am frustrated that Project 2025 did not come up in the first presidential debate. Voters need to understand what is in the document and how it would fundamentally transform our nation in ways that do not have popular support.
This tweet thread may be a way to get your family and friends to engage with Project 2025 before the election.
#4
Trump’s new pitch: having migrants fight each other for sport (Steve Benen, MSNBC)
Referring to Dana White, Trump told the audience, “I said, ‘Dana, I have an idea. Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league — these are the greatest fighters in the world — fight the champion of the migrants.’ I think the migrant guy might win, that’s how tough they are. He didn’t like that idea too much, but actually, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever had. No, it’s, these are tough people, these people are tough, and they’re nasty, mean.”
White later confirmed that Trump did, in fact, present the idea to him privately.
Apparently pleased with the crowd’s reaction in Washington, D.C., the Republican spoke at a rally in Philadelphia hours later, at which point he pitched the identical idea.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I want all of the pundits and editorial writers who have so far failed to demand that Donald Trump leave the race to explain why this kind of idea is an acceptable policy proposal. Trump should not get a pass because they expect him to say outrageous things. He means what he says. Stop covering up for him.
I know Trump may be better for their business. The book deals were undoubtedly better when Trump was in office.
But have reporters, editors, and publishers forgotten all of the historical examples demonstrating how autocrats target these professions as they consolidate power? Do they really think they will get a pass because they didn’t treat his policy ideas seriously now?
I probably don’t want to know their answer to that last question.
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#5
The Information Regime of Authoritarianism, coming soon to a Federal Agency Near You (Seth Cotlar, Rightlandia)
This post is inspired by this very insightful thread that Dave Roberts posted on ex-Twitter. It opened with a link to an article that used a wide array of government data to establish convincingly that yes, crime rates are indeed very much down recently. Democracies depend on access to reliable information that citizens can use as the basis for our arguments about what problems we face and how we might solve them. To a great extent, Trump 2.0 (as articulated by the folks at Project 2025) is all about dismantling that sort of democratic knowledge/information regime and replacing it with a dystopian and authoritarian version of it in which knowing things about empirical reality with any degree of certainty will be much harder, if not impossible.
Remember how Trump floated the idea that Covid would go away if we just stopped testing for it? People treated that like it was Trump being dumb, but he was actually articulating a quite savvy, authoritarian way of handling information. Want climate change to go away? Just stop measuring it! If you think I’m kidding, that is precisely what the Project 2025 folks have planned for NOAA.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
What happens to our public discourse if there are no independent facts? What will happen to all of the government data we rely upon when Donald Trump implements Schedule F and replaces thousands of civil servants with people who have taken a loyalty oath?
As Roberts explains in the twitter thread Cotlar includes in his post, if Trump implements Project 2025 we will no longer know what is really going on with our government, economy, and society. The post-truth world that exists in social media will become our reality.
If we lose these statistical institutions, rebuilding them will be extremely difficult. I hope we can get enough voters to understand what is at stake.
#6
Conservative-backed group is creating a list of federal workers it suspects could resist Trump plans (Lisa Mascaro, The Associated Press)
From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparationsfor a new White House.
Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online.
With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda— and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Yeah, the Trump supporters are getting ready to act if their guy takes office. Can you imagine the chilling effect this is going to have on federal workers, even before the implementation of Schedule F? We know that threats of violence follow when Trump supporters post the names of people with whom they disagree. Trump and his supporters learned how appointments can impact policy. They will not make the mistake of hiring people who place truth—or the Constitution—ahead of their loyalty to Donald J. Trump.
#7
Photographer Wins AI Image Contest with Real Picture, Then Gets Disqualified (Alex Greenberger, Art News)
Astray’s winning picture, a photograph of a flamingo whose head appears to be bent into its body, took first place in the AI category of the People’s Vote Award at the 1839 Photography Awards.
This year, the judges had also given Astray’s photograph, titled F L A M I N G O N E, a third-place prize in the AI category. The juried prizes are decided by representatives from the New York Times, the auction house Christie’s, the publishing house Phaidon, and elsewhere.
On his website, Astray wrote that he had deliberately submitted his photograph as a means to advocate for human-made pictures: “With AI-generated content remodelling the digital landscape rapidly while sparking an ever-fiercer debate about its implications for the future of content and the creators behind it – from creatives like artists, journalists, and graphic designers to employees in all sorts of industries – I entered this actual photo into the AI category of 1839 Awards to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and her human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits.”
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
I love this story. I am not sure how many more wins reality will have over artificial intelligence, so I am going to celebrate the heck out of the ones we still get. Besides, that photo is so cool.
#8
NASA says Voyager 1 is fully back online months after it stopped making sense (Wes Davis, The Verge)
Voyager 1, the farthest human-made craft from the Earth, is finally sending back data from all four of its scientific instruments, NASA said this week. That means the agency is once more receiving its readings on plasma waves, magnetic fields, and space-bound particles.
Voyager 1 stopped sending back good data in November, and fixing it was fraught as engineers had to wait 45 hours to hear anything back. In April, the agency got it to start sending back health and status information, then science data from two of its instruments in May.
Now, NASA says Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles from Earth, is “conducting normal science operations” and the agency just needs to resync its timekeeping software and do some maintenance on a sparingly-used digital tape recorder.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
This is such a cool story, and I am so impressed with the work these NASA engineers and scientists did to bring Voyager 1 back to life. Sometimes I love being wrong.
And I think we needed some good news in this issue.
The Closer
The caption is funny. Some network suits want to avoid another lawsuit! But also, I wonder if CNN’s leadership really thinks it is good for their network that Newsmax did a better job of telling the truth about the 2020 election results than it did during the presidential debate.
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.”—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
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