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DMZ America Podcast #101: Trump Returns, Biden’s Brewing Scandals, Behind the Pulitzers

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Ted Rall

As the 2024 presidential campaign begins in earnest, political cartoonist Ted Rall, (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) dig into what looks like an 1892-style political rematch, between former and possibly future President Donald Trump, and current President Joe Biden.

Trump appeared on CNN for the first time since 2016, at a raucous town hall meeting that received widespread criticism from liberals and their mainstream media allies. He advised congressional Republicans to be willing to risk default in the debt-limit crisis, signaled that he would reduce or eliminate military aid to Ukraine, and made fun of Jean Carroll, the columnist who won $5 million from a jury that found him liable for sexual battery and defamation. Trump is just Trump being Trump as usual, but what else did we expect? The question now is, will old Trump 2016 win, or will old Trump 2020 lose?

The Republican-controlled House oversight committee has its sights set firmly on the current president, Joe Biden, the First Lady and other members of his family. The first family acquired $13 million from unknown sources a few years ago, and Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop seems to indicate that the money may have originated from covert and corrupt sources in places like Romania, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and China. If the president really accepted bribes and kickbacks from foreign countries, this could be the biggest scandal in American presidential history.

Columbia University announced the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes earlier this week, and with all such pomposity, there’s a lot less than meets the eye to the proceedings. Scott and Ted dish on everything you need to know about how this particular sausage is made, as well as the self-dealing and conflicts of interest on a staggering scale.

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:

DMZ America Podcast Ep 101 Sec 1: Trump Returns

DMZ America Podcast Ep 101 Sec 2: Biden’s Brewing Scandals

DMZ America Podcast Ep 101 Sec 3: Behind the Pulitzers

Joe Biden and the Democrats: A Slow-Motion Train Wreck of Their Own Making

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Ted Rall

           A new Washington Post-ABC News poll places the President’s approval rating at a record low, 36%. In the modern era, no president has been reelected with numbers like these.

            58% of Democrats want their party to nominate someone other than Joe Biden in 2024. Of Democrats.

            If the election were held today, Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden by four points.

            Only 32% of voters think Biden has sufficient mental sharpness to do a president’s job.

            This, as grim is it all is, is the good news. Enjoy, Democrats! Because it’s downhill from here. The economy is, as usual stupid, the biggest issue; just as the campaign begins this fall, so will a recession, according to the Federal Reserve Bank. Then there’s Hunter Biden’s pesky laptop, the gift that keeps on giving to the Republicans. Whether Joe proves to be “the big guy” who gets slices of kickbacks or the $13 million that mysteriously wound up in his bank account in 2017 and 2018 turns out to be a bribe paid by an Uzbekistani telecom or some other scandal related to the crack-addict deadbeat-dad son who refuses to shut up, it’s beginning to smell a lot like whoop-ass.

            Biden reminds me of the classic “Tales from the Darkside” episode in which a grandfather is too stubborn to admit that he’s dead even as chunks of flesh slip off his face. The American people have a clear, loud message for the president, which he refuses to hear: we hired you for one term. Which is kind of what he promised.

            It isn’t, of course, too late to reverse course. Nothing prevents the president from announcing: “Well, on second thought, actually I’d like to spend more time with my great-great-grandchildren.” Who knows? With Joe an officially lame duck, Kamala Harris might step up and impress us with her border czarina gig—or her new AI thingie.

            Could be he’s up to some 17-dimensional chess, as suggested by my fellow Centerclip contributor Rina Shah. Shah recently mused, and I think she’s on to something, that Biden officially announced in order to clear the field of Democratic competitors and set the stage for him to anoint his chosen successor whether they be Harris or someone less impressively unpopular. Such political bait-and-switch would be a new low—but don’t forget, we are talking about a guy who got 51 former intelligence officers to manipulate a presidential election for him, while risking World War III.

            Short of these two options, what can an incumbent president who is disliked, disrespected and deemed to be dim, do to dodge defeat?

            We know what Democrats plan to do: what worked in 2020.

            Biden will point out that he’s not Trump. “Compare him to the alternative,” Biden surrogate Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) says. He won’t campaign. “Frankly, the best way to run for re-election as president is to be president,” Coons argues. He’ll avoid debating his Democratic primary challengers. He’ll hope Trump goes to prison (as if the legal system could act quickly).

            But 2024 isn’t 2020. The pandemic is over. America is outside again. Americans expect their president to be out there with them.

            “Watch me. It’s all I can say.” That’s what Biden says whenever a reporter asks whether he’s too old for his job. Trouble for him is, we have been watching—for three years—and the results are in that Washington Post-ABC News poll. Fair or not, we don’t like what we see.

            Biden and the Democrats can’t talk their way out of the widespread perception that the president is past his due date. Cries of “ageism” are falling on deaf ears, including among the 62% of voters over age 65 who think Biden is too old. There’s one possible solution: stop hidin’ Biden.

            Put the President out in front of the White House press corps every single day of the week, fielding unscripted questions, no cheatsheets allowed. Have him do weekly town halls, including in hostile Republican territory. Grant presidential interviews to vicious right-wingers like Sean Hannity—and don’t forget left-wing progressives. If Biden does all that for months on end and manages to hold his own, he might turn some of us into believers.

            Biden’s staffers and advisers, many of whom worked for Obama, are not stupid people. They know what must be done to save this doomed reelection campaign. Unfortunately, they know they can’t do it. Biden isn’t up to a tough race.

            So here the Democrats go, eyes wide-open, standing like idiots on the tracks as the train appears in the distance and slowly draws nearer. Disaster is as avoidable as can be. They can amble off those tracks any time. All they have to do to save themselves is make a move.

            Right now, they’re paralyzed.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and co-hosts “The Final Countdown” radio show Mon-Fri 10 am – 12 noon ET. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Biden’s Reelection Campaign Begins Unimpressively

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Ted Rall

           Coupled with leaks from inside his campaign, President Joe Biden’s announcement video indicates the general tenor and strategy of his upcoming reelection bid.

            Biden’s messaging is especially notable for what it’s missing.

            Absent from the voiceovers and images is a reference to the COVID-19 crisis. Biden was arguably elected in the first place in large part, if not primarily, in reaction to Donald Trump’s inexplicable attacks on science and common sense in the face of the coronavirus. Biden took office after hundreds of thousands of Americans had died, presided over distribution of vaccines and billions of dollars in federal aid to employers and workers who might otherwise have been financially obliterated, and declared an end to the emergency. You’d think he’d take a wholly-justified victory lap. Perhaps his team believes a mention of the American Rescue Plan would trigger accusations that the stimulus package triggered inflation.

            There’s still time. Anyway, like it or not, Republicans will make the economy their top issue. If I were Biden, I’d have a simple response to the inflation question: which would you choose? Losing your job and therefore 100% of your earning power? Or dealing with inflation and losing 10%? Republicans wouldn’t have done anything to help you. Thanks to me, there are “help wanted” ads all over the place instead of bread lines. You’re welcome.

            Trump, of course, was also silent about the best part of his record in 2020. A President Hillary Clinton would have been far more cautious and slower, dotting every I and crossing every T with the FDA and so would have fallen short of the remarkable achievement of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Trump’s decision to play exclusively to his right-wing base, running away from his big win, cost him votes even among people whose lives were saved by his gamble.

            Also missing from Biden’s rap is Ukraine, where he is fully vested in that proxy war to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. No doubt, falling support among voters for arming and funding Ukraine is responsible for that omission. Americans like a winner and hate a loser; results of this summer’s fighting will impact the race.

            The most glaring absence, of course, is any indication of what Biden will do to improve the lives of voters and the people they care about should he win reelection. In the old days, we called these statements “campaign promises.” Are Democrats worried that Biden wouldn’t be able to fulfill his pledges because Republicans might control one or both houses of Congress after 2024? Do they want voters to forget the promises he flaked out on last time—a $15-an-hour minimum wage, a legislative push for student loan forgiveness (as opposed to the half-hearted, clearly doomed-from-the-start executive order), a legal path to citizenship for undocumented workers? Whatever the reason, substituting vague pabulum like “I’d like to finish the job” in place of an actual platform violates Electoral Politics 101. Why should people vote for you if you aren’t promising anything new and improved?

            Biden has one thing right: abortion will be a good issue for Democrats. 85% of Americans, a record high, now support, abortion rights with or without exceptions. Republican actions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reek of right-wing overreach, making even evangelical Christian conservatives uncomfortable. Pregnant women—including those who spent tens of thousands of dollars undergoing in vitro fertilization—have nearly died since the Dobbs decision prompted doctors to wait to abort their fetuses until they were coding. Each case like this makes for a potentially devastating Democratic attack ad—just wait until the first death.

            Perhaps the biggest misfire in the 2024 cycle thus far has been Biden’s hammering away against “extreme MAGA Republicans,” often in conjunction with footage from the January 6th Capitol riot. American elections are always about the future, never the past, and in a country as ahistorical as this one three years had might as well be an eternity. January 6th was a shameful and embarrassing chapter in history, but it’s no more worth wallowing in than were the September 11th terrorist attacks, which we have finally managed to put behind us. It wasn’t a coup d’état, it wasn’t an insurrection, we weren’t close to dictatorship and Biden looks silly when he says otherwise.

            To the extent that January 6th offers red meat to the Democratic voting base, its negative potency is stronger still. The tiny subset of protesters who invaded the Capitol building cannot reasonably tarnish the thousands more attendees who attended and did not go inside, much less Republican voters or Trump supporters as a whole, yet it’s impossible to interpret the implication any other way. The problem for Biden is not that a base strategy turns off swing voters—there are so few of them, it’s high time for Democrats to start ignoring them anyway—but rather that refusing to shut up about January 6th energizes the GOP by feeding their narrative that they are beleaguered by evil coastal elites and demoralizes progressive voters, who yearn for a party that fights for significant policy change rather than bickering over symbolism.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

You Have the Right to Remain Mystified

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Ted Rall

Donald Trump was indicted on 34 felony counts in Manhattan in an indictment that failed to specify the underlying motivation for falsifying business records. Whatever you think about Donald Trump, the fact that this is legal in New York reflects the fact that the system can be Orwellian.

DMZ America Podcast #96: Trump Indictment, Progressives on the March, Is France Moving Right?

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Ted Rall

Two of America’s best Editorial Cartoonists dissect the issues of the day. First up: the Trump Indictment. Is it folly? Or good justice? Scott and Ted take a deep dive into the recent, historically unprecedented arraignment of former President Donald Trump on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. What are the repercussions and what can and should come next? Following that, Ted and Scott look at not one but two high-profile progressive victories: one for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, assuring abortion rights in the state for the foreseeable future, and the other for Mayor of Chicago. Is this a sign of a leftward movement by the country, or a pair of anomalies? Lastly Scott and Ted (both of French descent, Ted even holding dual French-U.S. citizenship), discuss a recent poll showing current French President Emmanuel Macron trailing far-right politician leader Marine Le Pen. Does this poll reflect a shift in French attitudes, or is it more of a reaction to Macron’s unilateral decision to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64? This DMZ America Podcast spans the globe!
 

 

Watch the Video Versions of the DMZ America Podcast:
DMZ America Podcast Ep 95 Sec 1: The Indictment of President Trump
DMZ America Podcast Ep95 Sec 2: Progressives Win Elections in the Midwest
DMZ America Podcast Ep 96 Sec 3: Is France Moving Right?

No Donald Trump Is Above the Law

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Ted Rall

            In the United States, no man is above the law, not even the President—if his name is Donald J. Trump.

            A decade before 1884, when he was elected to his first term, Grover Cleveland fathered a child with Maria Halpin, a widow. Thing is, she testified under oath that Cleveland had raped her. Ambitious and wealthy, Cleveland did what any rich mean 19th century dude would do: he arranged to have the baby sent off to an orphanage and the mother committed to an insane asylum. (It didn’t take. They let her go.) For good measure, he had her smeared in the press as an alcoholic slut. As it happened, Halpin turned out to be an upstanding churchgoer with a good reputation.

            No charges were ever filed against Cleveland.

            Ronald Reagan’s best-known scandal was Iran-Contra, in which his Administration violated its own sanctions and sold weapons to Iran and broke federal law by spending the proceeds on right-wing death squads in Central America. He wasn’t new to this sort of thing.

            Worried that the American embassy personnel who were seized as hostages by Iran might get released before the 1980 election, thus allowing Jimmy Carter to win reelection, three top Reagan officials—campaign manager and future CIA director James Casey, former Texas governor John Connally and Connally’s protégé Ben Barnes—promised the Iranians to sell them arms in exchange for their promise not to release the hostages until after the election. True to their side of the deal, Iran sent them home a few hours after Reagan took the inaugural oath. Reagan reneged on the weapons.

            Reagan was never charged.

            The Gipper may have been inspired by the Chennault Affair, then-GOP candidate Richard Nixon’s scheme to undermine incumbent Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to achieve peace in Vietnam and thus deny the White House to Hubert Humphrey.

            Two weeks before the 1968 election, things were looking up for the Democrats. Worried about a Nixon victory because we was rabidly anti-communist, the USSR ordered North Vietnam, its client state, to agree to a peace deal. LBJ agreed to stop bombing the North. All that remained was getting South Vietnam—America’s client—on board.

            So Nixon used back channels (Mrs. Chennault) to ask South Vietnam’s president to boycott the peace talks, promising continued military and economic support after he won. The South Vietnamese leader scuttled the deal, Nixon won and the war ground on seven more years, killing hundreds of thousands more people. “This is treason,” LBJ said when FBI wiretaps revealed the plot.

            Nixon wasn’t charged.

            Executive Order 12333, signed by Reagan, states: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” It’s still the law of the land.

            Reagan didn’t follow his own rule. He ordered a hit on Lebanese cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah in 1984; Fadlallah escaped unscathed but 80 innocent bystanders were killed. In 1986 he bombed Moammar Gaddafi’s home, killing the Libyan ruler’s infant daughter.

            No charges there.

            George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden murdered thousands of people in drone strikes—each and every one of them by definition a political assassination (a person killed “for what he represents politically”). Obama ordered the murder of Osama bin Laden and Trump murdered Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian general.

            No charges.

            Actress Heather Lind accused George H.W. Bush of groping her at a 2014 photo-op. Juanita Broaddrick says Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, when he was Arkansas attorney general. Tara Reade claims Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993.

            No charges have been filed in any of these cases.

            Richard Nixon received a presidential pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford, whom he had appointed. So he was immune from prosecution for Watergate.

            Bill Clinton paid $25,000 in order to avoid being prosecuted for perjury in the Paula Jones case.

            From Andrew Jackson, who killed a guy in a duel in 1806—dueling was already illegal at the time—to Bush, Obama and Trump, who all presided over Guantánamo torture camp—the U.S. is a signatory of the Convention Against Torture, which makes it a treaty obligation and thus carries the full weight of federal law—no president or former president has ever faced criminal charges.

            Until now.

            Merciful and easygoing by nature, the American people can easily turn a blind eye to a run-of-the-mill political assassination—or a thousand of them. Who of us can say we haven’t killed a man in a duel? Rape is unpleasant for the victim, but think how much worse it would be for the rapist if that rapist were a president or former president—better to move on.

            Conspiring with a foreign country to manipulate a presidential election strikes one as gauche, even tacky—especially when they mean extra-long wars or extra time spent for a hostage. But going after a president or former president over such things seems excessive. Best not to think about such matters, much less act upon them.

            Even in America, this most permissive of countries if you’re rich and white and powerful, there are limits. And that limit is: falsifying business records in order to violate federal campaign finance laws in the course of paying a former mistress to shut up. Donald J. Trump has crossed that hard line.

            And he must pay.

            If Trump, the worst president America has ever had and ever could have, and the worst person the human race has ever produced, doesn’t go to prison for the maximum five years over paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, it will send an awful message:

            Anything goes.

            Can’t have that!

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

An Officer and a War Criminal

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Ted Rall

The Washington Post ran a shocking expose revealing that Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a possible candidate for the presidency, participated and legally justified war crimes including torture after having volunteered to serve at the Guantánamo concentration camp. Even more shocking than his disgusting actions, which should have landed him in prison for the rest of his life, is the lack of reaction by politicians of both political parties as well as other media outlets. A nation that normalizes torture to the point of shrugging its collective shoulders has lost its moral compass.

Lame Crimes and Misdemeanors

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Ted Rall

Of all the possible business and political crimes you could think of charging Donald Trump with, it’s hard to think of anything pettier than falsifying business records for the purpose of paying off Stormy Daniels to begin with.

What Doesn’t Convict Me Makes Me Stronger

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Ted Rall

Democrats may believe that a resting and trying Donald Trump on campaign finance violations will hurt him, but he thrives on negative energy and the belief that all publicity is good publicity.

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