At NBC News, Jonathan Allen writes about an outrageous lie by Vance: Vance claims Trump ‘salvaged’ Obamacare. Trump tried, and failed, to kill it.
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed Tuesday night — in contradiction of history — that his running mate, former President Donald Trump, “salvaged Obamacare,” the health insurance program that Trump tried to kill.
During the vice presidential debate on CBS against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance, a senator from Ohio, echoed Trump’s own recent revisionism. But the assertion also served to remind voters that Democrats ultimately won the yearslong political fight over expanding access to health insurance: The Republican ticket no longer wants to repeal the 2010 law.
Trump “actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States,” Vance said Tuesday night. “And I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along. I think this is an important point about President Trump.
“When Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program,” Vance added. “Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”
But when Trump was president, repeal was a centerpiece of his agenda. In a dramatic Senate vote in 2017, Democrats and a handful of Republicans rejected his plan to repeal Obamacare. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., cast the deciding vote by turning his thumb down with a theatrical flourish. A critic of Obamacare, McCain nonetheless concluded that the “skinny repeal” measure would leave people worse off than if Obamacare remained in place.
Walz noted that episode Tuesday night.
Trump “would have repealed [Obamacare] had it not been for the courage of John McCain,” Walz said.
At The Daily Beast, AJ McDougall describes a notable interaction between the two men: Tim Walz Reveals During Debate That Son Gus Witnessed a Shooting.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate that his son Gus was among the many Americans who have witnessed a shooting, causing an otherwise contentious sparring session to be briefly waylaid by a moment of human compassion.
“I’ve got a 17-year-old,” Walz said, as part of answer to a question about the issue of gun violence, “and he witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball.”
“That’s awful,” JD Vance muttered, visibly surprised.
When it was the Ohio senator’s turn to respond, Vance turned to Walz.
“Tim, first of all, I didn’t know that your 17-year-old witnessed a shooting, and I’m sorry about that and I hope he’s doing OK,” he said.
Then he proclaimed: “Christ have mercy. It is awful.”
“I appreciate you saying that,” Walz thanked him.
Walz has previously referred to the anecdote along the campaign trail while discussing the need for gun control.
“Too many of us have been there,” he said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, two weeks ago. “My own son was in a location where someone was shot in the head.”
This is an interesting sidelight from Mary Ann Akers at The Daily Beast: Republicans Will Secretly Cheer Walz during Debate: Friend.
Tim Walz‘s former roommate and fellow lawmaker claims there’s a secret cabal of Republicans that supports Kamala Harris but whose members are too chicken to cross Donald Trump.
Former Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006 alongside Walz told the Daily Beast Tuesday that not only will he be rooting for his ex-roomie to defeat JD Vance in Tuesday night’s debate, but former colleagues on the other side of the aisle will be, too.
“There’s a silent majority out there that wants to send a message to Donald Trump that he was fired once for a reason,” Murphy told the Daily Beast Tuesday.
Former Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA)
The only problem with these GOP members is that they fear Trump, who—in spite of everything—still has an iron grip on the GOP congressional establishment.
Former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is the latest GOP ex-member of Congress to endorse Harris, joining the likes of former Republican Reps. Jim Greenwood, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, has also endorsed Harris.
Walz’s friend Murphy, who served on House Armed Services when Walz served on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said he regularly texts with Republicans who say they support Harris and don’t want another four years of Trump in the White House.
“But they’re afraid,” he said, adding that Trump’s most recent personal attacks on Harris may be the final blow for Republicans who are privately fed up with the former president and 2024 GOP nominee. Murphy declined to name names.
“More Republicans will definitely be coming out to endorse Harris,” he predicted. “After lying about cats and dogs being eaten, Obama not being born in America, he’s now turning on her with false claims about a mental disability,” said Murphy, a combat veteran who served as a paratrooper with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq.
Moira Donegan at The Guardian on Vance: JD Vance’s debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense.
Maybe he thought the pink tie could help. JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, clearly set out to make himself seem less creepy at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, and a major target of this project was aimed at convincing women voters to like him. Vance, after all, has what pollsters call “high unfavorables”, which is a polite way of saying that people hate his guts.
Much of this stems from Vance’s extreme and inflexible views on abortion, his hostility to childless women, and his creepy statements about families and childrearing. He had to convince women that he’s not out to hurt them or monitor their menstrual cycles; he had to try and seem kindly, empathetic, gentle. The resulting 90 minutes felt like watching a remarkably lifelike robot try to imitate normal human emotion. He smiled. He cooed. He spoke of an anonymous woman he knew whom he said was watching, and told her: “Love ya”. And occasionally, when he was fact-checked or received pushback on his falsehoods or distortions, the eyes of his stiff, fixed face flashed with an incandescent rage.
A generous characterization of Vance’s performance might be to call it “slick”. Vance delivered practiced answers to questions on healthcare, abortion rights and childcare that were dense with lies and euphemism. Asked about his call for a national abortion ban, Vance insisted that what he wanted was a national “standard” – a standard, that is, to ban it at 15 weeks.
He spoke in what was probably supposed to be empathetic terms about a woman he had grown up with who had told him that she felt she had had to have the abortion she got when they were younger, because it allowed her to leave her abusive relationship – without clarifying that the laws that Vance supports would have compelled that woman he purports to care about to carry her abuser’s child to term, and likely become trapped with him.
He claimed that Americans didn’t “trust” Republicans on the abortion issue, but did not mention that they don’t trust Republicans because those are the ones taking their rights away.
When asked about childcare, Vance spoke in eerily imprecise terms about encouraging people to choose their preferred “family model”, without specifying exactly which “model” he had in mind. He spoke of the “multiple people who could be providing family care options” but did not specify if these “people” had anything in common with each other. In media appearances throughout his career, Vance has been more explicit: he means that women will perform childcare for free – dropping out of paid work in the public sphere to do so, if necessary.
Vance was confident and smiling as he delivered these lines; he had the greasy self-assurance of someone who is used to lying to people he thinks are stupider than him. He sounded every bit like the Yale Law lawyer that he is. Even when he was not degrading women’s dignity or condescending to the two female moderators, his answers were often delivered with a polish that seemed intended to conceal the fact that they made no sense.
Asked about the housing crisis, for instance, he said that mass deportations – a horrific ethnic-cleansing operation proposed by the Trump campaign that would ruin communities, families and lives – would lower prices by decreasing demand. It was a kind of repeat of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, but this time it wasn’t satire. He also suggested that the government could build housing on federal lands – but neglected to mention that most of those lands are in the vast, rural, empty Mountain West, in regions with lots of tumbleweeds and absolutely no jobs.
Read more at The Guardian.
If the VP debate was somewhat unmemorable, Trump’s behavior yesterday decidedly was not. Some highlights:
William Vaillancourt at The Daily Beast: Donald Trump Takes Aim at Jimmy Carter on His Milestone 100th Birthday.
Not only was Donald Trump the sole living president—current or former—to not deliver a video message for Jimmy Carter in honor of the 39th president’s milestone 100th birthday on Tuesday, but he made no mention of the historic occasion despite talking about Carter’s presidency in an attempt to criticize Joe Biden.
On Tuesday, the Carter Center shared excerpts of messages of support from Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden that were shown at Carter’s birthday concert last month at Atlanta’s Fox Theater. The concert, a benefit that has raised $1.2 million thus far for the Carter Center’s mission to “wage peace, fight disease, and build hope,” airs Tuesday on Georgia Public Broadcasting….
Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden also posted about Carter on their official social media accounts. As of publication, Trump hadn’t even done that.
Instead, while campaigning in Waunakee, Wisconsin, Trump used Biden’s administration as a way to mention Carter—and not in a positive way.
“Jimmy Carter is the happiest man because Jimmy Carter is considered a brilliant president in comparison,” Trump said, after having called Biden “the worst.”
Carter, who left office in 1981, has had the longest post-presidency of any former commander-in-chief and is the only former president to have turned 100. He entered hospice care in February 2023….
Seen Tuesday surrounded by family and friends in his backyard while being saluted with a military flyover, Carter has downplayed his birthday. What’s more important to him, he has made clear through his family, is being able to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump once again insulted U.S. troops. Matthew Chapman at Raw Story: ‘They had a headache’: Trump dismisses brain injuries of U.S. soldiers from Iran strike.
Former President Donald Trump dismissed the injuries of U.S. soldiers who were caught in a 2020 missile attack by Iran on an American military installation, while he fielded questions from reporters at his latest campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Earlier in the day, the former president reacted to the news of strikes on Israel by Iran, by claiming that nothing of the sort could have happened if he were still in office.
Notably, Iran did the same thing during his presidency to American troops in retaliation for a U.S. operation that assassinated Iranian general Qasem Suleimani.
When confronted with this fact by a reporter, Trump downplayed the idea that U.S. troop casualties in the incident were a big deal.
“Do you believe that you should have been tougher on Iran after they had launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 soldiers injured?” asked a reporter.
“So first of all, injured. What does injured mean?” said Trump. “You mean because they had a headache. Because the bombs never hit the fort. So, just so you understand, there was nobody ever tougher on Iraq. They had no money with me, they would have made any deal with me. I would have had a deal made within — literally, I would have had a deal made within one week after the election.”
The troops who were wounded in the missile strike suffered considerably more than a headache, officials have said.
According to a Pentagon report at the time, 109 troops were injured, many of whom suffered traumatic brain injuries. Despite the report, Trump has insisted, “We suffered no casualties.”
Sabrina Rodriguez and Isaac Arnsdorf at The Washington Post: Trump mixes up words, swerves among subjects in off-topic speech.
MILWAUKEE — Republican nominee Donald Trump spoke for 33 minutes before his first mention of the ostensible focus of his remarks.
Signs reading “SCHOOL CHOICE,” “EDUCATION FREEDOM NOW” and “LET PARENTS DECIDE” decorated a small auditorium, and a panel of speakers preceding the former president focused on using public funds to let families choose between public and private, especially religious, schools. Trump read from a binder containing a prepared speech on the subject, and he switched abruptly between the text and a jumble of other topics.
“We can be nice and we can be politically incorrect, but the only thing they’re going to do there is cheat on elections, and we just can’t let this happen,” he said at one point. Without warning, he continued: “The city of Milwaukee is the home of first and oldest choice program.”
He spoke of “a million Rambos.” “Turnarounds” and “gotaways” and “dead-head spending.” He mixed up Iran with North Korea and strained to pronounce United Arab Emirates. He marveled at Hurricane Helene coming so late in the storm season, which typically runs through November. He falsely claimed government agencies can’t name the U.S. population, and he compared the conflict between Israel and Iran to “two kids fighting in the schoolyard.”
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at Discovery World, Friday, Oct. 1, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Trump, 78, often speaks in a digressive, extemporaneous style that thrills his fans at large-scale rallies. But Tuesday’s event, in front of almost entirely reporters, was especially scattered and hard to follow. Polls show voters’ concerns about Trump’s age and fitness have increased since President Joe Biden, 81, withdrew and was replaced as the Democratic nominee by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump spoke slowly and appeared tired. It was his second stop of the day, and he has picked up the pace of campaigning in recent weeks….
Trump was more energetic during a speech to supporters in Waunakee, Wis., earlier Tuesday. He went on an extended riff about the 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket” and made up a false claim that Harris raised taxes as the San Francisco district attorney, which is not a power of that office.
Trump avoided direct questions about how he would address the escalating violence between Iran and Israel, by repeatedly insisting it never would have happened if he were president. He claimed he could settle that war, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with a single phone call apiece, but he declined to specify how.
“I don’t want to say what I’d use because I don’t want to give up negotiating abilities,” he said. He even boasted that with a second term he could have struck a peace deal between Iran and Israel.
There’s more Trump nonsense at the link. The guy is really coming apart.
Finally, from Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: Trump’s decompensation was the big debate day story. They write that highlights of the debate
…pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s most troubling showing yet on the campaign trail. Across two campaign events in Wisconsin on Tuesday, the former and would-be president reiterated a truth that is much more important than who won the debate: namely, that he’s morally and intellectually unfit for office.
Both Trump events were packed with outrageous defamations and lies. His targets included troops wounded abroad while he was president, which would be unthinkable in anything resembling a normal era of politics.
Vicious as Trump’s attacks were, they also managed to be muddled in ways suggesting he isn’t up to the task of being president until he’s 82 years old. Vance’s slick lying and election denialism is even more ominous given the possibility that he may end up as the country’s leader in a second, nightmarish, Trump term….
Trump’s public addresses are disjointed and disconnected from reality at the best of times. Yesterday, however, was a particularly wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.
His first speech of the day in the the Madison suburb of Waunakee featured racially coded attacks on Brittney Griner, a Black American basketball player who was held hostage in Russia. Trump also lied about opposing the Iraq War and said all sorts of strange stuff, such as accusing Democrats of supporting “water-free bathrooms.”
The lowlight, however, came when Trump flat out defamed Kamala Harris for murder, saying of a murder victim, “She murdered him. In my opinion Kamala murdered him. Just like she had a gun in her hand.” (So much for Trump toning down the rhetoric and offering a message of unity — watch the clip below.)
Even lower depths were explored during Trump’s appearance later in the day in Milwaukee. Taking questions from the press, he told a reporter who asked him if he trusts the election process this time around that “I’ll let you know in 33 days” — the implication being that he would accept the results only if he wins. Riffing about immigration, he wandered off into a bizarre, woozy, blatantly racist rant about people in the Congo, a country that he boasted he did not know anything about. (“They come from the Congo in the Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.”) [….]
Then, in a moment that would’ve driven news cycles for days had Biden done it, Trump confused the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, with the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and claimed his buddy Kim “is trying to kill me.”
Then came the episode when Trump mocked injured troops.
That debacle came when a reporter asked Trump if he should’ve been tougher in retaliation against Iran after they launched a 2020 missile attack on a US base in Iraq, which injured more than 100 US soldiers. The Iranian launch was in retaliation for a US drone strike which killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. More than 100 US soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries.
Trump at the time lied about the incident, insisting that no soldiers were harmed and that he’d “heard that they had headaches.” The episode was mostly forgotten over the ensuing four years, but Trump reminded everyone about it during his news conference, peevishly responding to the reporter: “So first of all — injured. What does injured mean? Injured means — you mean because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort.”
After Trump finished downplaying serious, life-changing injuries suffered by the troops, he then attacked the reporter for not being “truthful” while mixing up Iraq and Iran.
Read on at Public Notice for more horrifying Trump quotes along with videos.
The result was a wide-ranging, policy-heavy back and forth that often pushed Walz and Vance to play defense for the presidential nominees, affording them little opportunity to make a fresh and forceful case to undecided voters just weeks before they head to the polls.
Vance dismissed the argument that courts had already rejected Trump’s allegations of election fraud. “You can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically,” Vance told Douthat. “And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.”
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New York Times: Olivia Nuzzi, Reporter Linked to R.F.K. Jr., Accuses Ex-Fiancé of Harassment.
Olivia Nuzzi, the star political writer for New York magazine who was placed on leave after she disclosed her personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has accused her former fiancé of a campaign of harassment and blackmail, according to court filings.
In a complaint filed in Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Ms. Nuzzi accused the former fiancé, Ryan Lizza, a top political reporter at Politico, of hacking her devices and stealing a device to surveil her and collect materials to pressure her back into a relationship with him.
She accused Mr. Lizza of bringing “damaging information” to the attention of her employer and of distributing materials to the media that she said she believed to be doctored.
She also claimed in the complaint that Mr. Lizza had threatened her with violence to coerce her into assuming his financial responsibility in a joint book contract, and “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career and reputation — a threat he has since carried out.”
New York Times: Olivia Nuzzi, Reporter Linked to R.F.K. Jr., Accuses Ex-Fiancé of Harassment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/01/business/media/olivia-nuzzi-ryan-lizza.html
Olivia Nuzzi, the star political writer for New York magazine who was placed on leave after she disclosed her personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has accused her former fiancé of a campaign of harassment and blackmail, according to court filings.
In a complaint filed in Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Ms. Nuzzi accused the former fiancé, Ryan Lizza, a top political reporter at Politico, of hacking her devices and stealing a device to surveil her and collect materials to pressure her back into a relationship with him.
She accused Mr. Lizza of bringing “damaging information” to the attention of her employer and of distributing materials to the media that she said she believed to be doctored.
She also claimed in the complaint that Mr. Lizza had threatened her with violence to coerce her into assuming his financial responsibility in a joint book contract, and “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career and reputation — a threat he has since carried out.”
Vance oozed lies. Only a real sociopath could be such a facile liar.
Thanks for the helpful!