Josh Marshall
This note from TPM Reader JS more or less summarizes my thoughts.
Read MoreThe Boat in the Atlantic. Great metaphor. I don’t know Jon Alter, but I get the feeling that many of the “he’s too old” crowd are just pre-loading “I told you so” ammunition if he loses. There’s no downside to saying what everyone else is saying. I think so many people can’t contemplate a Trump restoration that they have to have some explanation why it happened. Biden was too old. The kids hate Israel. Whatever. Those explanations make sense to these people in a way that “more voters liked Trump” does not. I think they are then living in that world where things will happen as they forecast and it’s more comfortable than just getting your shit together and holding the course on the boat we have.
TPM AT WORK: Never-Before-Published Details on the Trump Coup 
Today we’re launching the first installment of a three-part series reporting never-before-published details on the failed Trump coup attempt which unfolded in the final days of 2020 and climaxed on January 6th, when a mob of feral Trumpers stormed the United States Capitol building. These stories are based on a trove of documents from co-conspirator Ken Chesebro. You can read our introduction to the series here, which outlines the overall findings, gives details about the document trove we worked with, and more. In the first installment, we report the plan to have January 6th essentially never end, or rather continue up to inauguration day, January 20th. The plan wasn’t so much to directly achieve the goal of installing Trump as President as to create so much spectacle and chaos with no end in sight that the Supreme Court would feel compelled to step in and, Trump’s lawyers hoped, install Donald Trump as President, much as it did 20 years earlier in the disputed election which ended with Bush v Gore.
Read MoreChris Christie, after a campaign that was, at least as I understood it, focused on blocking the danger of a second Trump presidency, says he probably would just not vote for President at all. He’ll leave that part of the ballot blank. “I can’t see myself voting for [Biden] because I don’t agree with his policies.” Marco Rubio meanwhile says he has “zero concerns” about Trump’s claim that he’ll encourage Russia to invade NATO allies if they don’t up their defense budgets.
My friend Jon Alter has a piece up about how Biden and his campaign can defuse and limit the damage from concerns about his age and mental acuity. Every point he makes is so on the mark I want you to go read it. The gist is the Biden’s age and occasional brain freezes are obviously a political liability. Jon has known and been interviewing Biden for 35+ years and he says he’s always been that way.
Sure Biden’s slower than he was even a decade ago. But the verbal missteps are same old same old for him. How you address that is leaning into it, getting Biden out in front of the public a lot. Yes, he will swap one name out for another or mangle words sometimes. It is what it is. Even though right wing media will seize on every goof viewers will also see a President who is basically fine, addressing complex issues in able and sophisticated ways. They’re already seizing on every awkward moment. If you keep Biden under wraps that’s all anyone will see.
Read MoreI wanted to share a note I received from TPM Reader JR and my reply. Helps me refine my understanding of what we see in both Biden and Trump and how they are both perceived.
From TPM Reader JR …
Read MoreI’m a practicing psychiatrist who has evaluated many people over the years for dementia.
Based on my experience, Josh M is on to something when he wrote about how Trump’s anger makes him seem less cognitively impaired than Biden.
More Angry Biden, Please
Is it frustration? Something deeper, or more shallow? I woke up this morning to see that the front page of the Times has five stories above the virtual fold. All five were about Joe Biden’s memory, press conference, special counsel report. Full news day, I guess. Yesterday I noticed the Times’ Astead Herndon on this on Twitter. He is not some slightly younger version of David Broder. He’s a pretty new entrant to the upper echelon of elite DC news media. I think he graduated from college as Trump’s first campaign was getting underway. But the acculturation appears complete. After Hur’s report dropped he wrote that despite questions about Biden’s age being “the most impt non-Trump issue in this elec[tion]” the DC press corps has “a sorta gentleman’s agreement for the last year to pretend like it’s not. Maybe that ends now.”
Am I taking crazy pills here? Do I have dementia? I think it’s fair to say that at least a third of the political chatter about President Biden for the last year, and quite possibly half of it, is about the President’s age. But maybe the omertà is about to end? I’m still trying to process the idea that a top Washington reporter really thinks there’s been some kind of fix-is-in ban on discussing the President’s age.
Read MoreI don’t know the precise timing and angle. But I fully agree this is worth going on offense. I hadn’t focused enough on the claim the President didn’t remember when his son died. Personal, gratuitous, callous, denigrating, almost certainly not true. From a longtime TPM Reader …
Read MoreFirst off, Merrick Galrland is a disastrously bad AG. He has appointed special counsels he never should have. And he had no business allowing a report to be released that violated DOJ guidelines. Most of all, his two years of fruitless propitiatory delay moving on the elite insurrectionists has America and the world on the doorstep of disaster.
Let me share a few thoughts on the Biden special counsel report.
First off, this is another example of the universal rule: Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Democrats. And Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Republicans. It may not have been a great idea for Merrick Garland to have a two-time Trump appointee investigate Joe Biden. But here we are. Robert Hur totally slimed Biden with these gratuitous comments about his mental acuity and memory, referring to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Even if you assume they are the product of a good faith evaluation they are still wildly inappropriate.
DOJ guidelines make clear that if you’re not bringing charges you don’t bash the subject of the investigation in your announcement (a la James Comey). You certainly aren’t supposed to affirmatively attempt to demean the subject of the investigation with clearly political attacks that aren’t even related to what you’re investigating. Hur might as well have called him “Fake News Joe Biden.” It’s really that transparent and that bad.
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Why Weren’t Presidents Explicitly Included in the 14th?
I don’t know how or whether this has any relevance to today’s proceedings and ballot disqualification. But it’s one place where history provides some guidance as to why an amendment is written the way it is. First, I don’t think it makes sense at all that the disqualification clause doesn’t apply to the President. It’s a very over-clever semantic argument that is on par with the logic behind the “independent state legislature” theory: a hyper-literal focus on text without context which has the effect of producing an outcome no one could have intended. But — and this is a significant “but” — it is true that presidents were not what the authors of the language were most concerned about. And that matter of focus may have impacted how they structured the language.
Read MoreOur team will be live-blogging today’s SCOTUS Trump ballot disqualification hearing here. The hearing is scheduled to start at 10 AM.