One nice thing about Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race for president and to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the job – and then her enthusiasm for the task as she began to gather more support among Democrats nationwide, plus the wall to wall coverage of those efforts – has been the brief respite we’ve enjoyed from hearing TFG’s constant attacks and whining complaints about…well, everything. Even The New York Times has noticed, and immediately sought to give the Republican nominee something of a make-good by doing a story about the fact that he wasn’t getting stories done about him.
It’s an unfamiliar experience for Mr. Trump, who has monopolized America’s televisions, newspapers and smartphones for more than 12 months through indictments, primary victories, 34 felony convictions, an assassination attempt and a Republican National Convention at which he was celebrated as a quasi-religious figure.
In the three days since President Biden announced he was quitting the 2024 race, Mr. Trump has entered foreign territory. He has been largely crowded out from “earned media,” or organic news coverage that spreads rapidly among voters and costs campaigns nothing to produce. And his message has been, for the moment, scrambled as Democrats have replaced an old, frail white man with a younger Black woman who is campaigning energetically and giving new life to the Democratic base.
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The Trump team was not unprepared. They had planned for the possibility of Mr. Biden’s dropping out, produced anti-Harris videos and tested her vulnerabilities in private polls. But they were still somewhat surprised when Mr. Biden actually did it. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers thought he seemed too stubborn — “too Irish,” one aide said — to buckle to the pressure to quit a race against a man he viscerally hated and believed he was best positioned to defeat.
And they were caught off guard by the speed and ruthless efficiency of the replacement. They figured that if he did quit, Democrats would have to stumble through at least a few weeks of turmoil as ambitious Democrats jostled for their shot at the national stage.
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Mr. Trump was furious about the switch. He complained it was unfair that Democrats were forcing him to start over with a new opponent after he had spent all that time and money fighting Mr. Biden.
Boo-hoo. What are you, five years old? “They’re not being fair to me, they’re not being nice.” Try to act like an adult instead of an entitled narcissist who doesn’t want to play the game unless it’s rigged…who keeps telling the same disproved lies over and over because you’ve got nothing else to say.
Which reminds me, I have a suggestion for anyone who finds themselves trying to argue some point or other with a Trump-ish opponent primed with the standard firehose of falsehoods: don’t think you have to fully refute every single specious argument they make. You can take the trouble to point out the error, but they aren’t going to accept your argument – they will respond with another lie. Trump does this all the time. Instead, use forensic judo on them: respond to their torrent of lies with truths: fill the air with the good facts and let the leaden falsehoods from the MAGA mouths thud to the floor.
If you’re a supporter of Kamala Harris, deny the false attack on her and proudly reply with her true position on the issue. No candidate for office, ever, has had a position on each issue that satisfies all potential voters. On some things, we just disagree; that’s OK. She is not running for God, and she doesn’t have to agree with you on every single topic to be a good president. She starts with one insurmountable advantage: her election as president keeps Trump out of office and stymies efforts to implement the Project 2025 goals that the criminal Trump denies knowing anything about. Which is, of course, another Trump lie. (Add that to the more than 30,000 documented lies he told while he was president, or the 30 more “false claims” he managed to squeeze in during less than 90 minutes on stage in last month’s debate.)
If you feel you must knock down the stupid argument, here is a new, handy, fact-check sheet with to-the-point refutations for the usual false claims about job creation, inflation, tax cuts, government debt, tariffs, Ukraine, immigration, crime, and who is the worst president of all time. (I think you know where that one is going.)
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