The Biden campaign has good reason to run ads drawing attention to Trump’s criminal conviction: President Joe Biden’s campaign had been restrained in its attacks on Donald Trump’s New York criminal conviction for weeks until the campaign said internal polling and focus groups showed the verdict turned off voters. The result, hitting TV sets across the country on Monday, was the campaign’s unleashing of its sharpest attack ad yet, depicting Trump as a “convicted criminal who’s only out for himself.” And the campaign says it’s just the start. Biden advisers say they plan to hammer Trump over the coming weeks — aiming to both set up a favorable narrative ahead of next week’s debate and keep Trump’s felony conviction top-of-mind for voters who haven’t yet fully tuned into the election. “We’ve seen in polling since the conviction that the more the conviction is front and center in voters’ attention, the worse it is for Trump,” said a Biden campaign pollster granted anonymity to describe internal polling because they were not authorized to do so publicly.
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Judd Legum writes about the factual disconnect on crime: According to the latest FBI data, violent crime and property crime are down sharply in 2024. The new data shows substantial drops in every category, including murder (-26.4%), rape (-25.7%), robbery (-17.8%), and property crime (-15.1%). These declines follow steep drops in violent crime and property crime in 2023. And yet, according to a recent Gallup poll, “77% [of Americans] believe there is more crime in the U.S. than a year ago.” Why? There are two key factors. First, high-profile politicians are constantly making false claims about crime rates in the United States. For example, speaking at a Black church in Detroit last Saturday, former President Trump said the following: We’ll bring back public safety and defend our communities for law-abiding American citizens. The crime is most rampant right here in African American communities. And more people see me, and they say, “Sir, we want protection. We want the police to protect us.
The hero worship of Donald Trump has reached new heights. It’s now Kim Jong Un level. Dan Morrison at USA Today writes: It’s the Summer of Trump in the House of Representatives, where Republican lawmakers have flooded the chamber with bills and resolutions honoring the former president, convicted felon and 2024 GOP frontrunner. These largely symbolic gestures are a way to get noticed by the Republican powerhouse, who can make or break politicians with his endorsements, according to a former member of Congress. Earlier this month, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., introduced a bill requiring the U.S. Treasury to start printing $500 bills again after 79 years, with the pricey legal tender now “featuring a portrait” of Trump in place of the late President William McKinley. Gosar said the proposal was meant to draw attention to high inflation under Joe Biden. There’s cash, and then there’s gold. In May, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., pushed a bill to award Trump the Congressional Gold Medal for his administration’s foreign policy successes.
Matt Yglesias writes: Sophisticates knno that the Trump Crime Wave has been reversed, but the 2024 data (so far, it’s early yet) is actually better than that and suggests we’re on pace for the lowest murder rate year since *2014* fully reversing the post-Ferguson rise in lethal violence. And yet a majority of Americans are convinced that we are in the midst of an unprecedented crime wave. Why? Because Donald Trump and the Republicans are pathological liars and the mainstream media is apparently incapable of effectively countering their lies. We know this because large numbers of non-MAGA voters who don’t watch Fox believe this. Some of it is the hangover from the pandemic crime spike and it takes a while for people to absorb changes. But they would be aware of it if the media would be more assertive in challenging the lies. Instead, much of the time they frame it as a matter of opinion.
We’ve all heard about the resurgence of the far right in Europe (although the extent of it was very overstated at first) but the UKisn’t among them: Sunak surprised many in his own party by announcing an early election on May 22, against widespread expectations that he would wait until later in the year to allow more time for living standards to recover after the highest inflation in 40 years. Market research company Savanta found 46% support for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, up 2 points on the previous poll five days earlier, while support for the Conservatives dropped 4 points to 21%. The poll was conducted from June 12 to June 14 for the Sunday Telegraph, opens new tab. Advertisement · Scroll to continueReport this ad Labour’s 25-point lead was the largest since the premiership of Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, whose tax cut plans prompted investors to dump British government bonds, pushing up interest rates and forcing a Bank of England intervention.
Another one bites the dust: The pastor of one of the country’s largest churches—and who Donald Trump once named as a spiritual adviser—has admitted to “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a woman who says he sexually abused her when she was just 12 years old. On Friday, Cindy Clemishire told The Wartburg Watch, a religious watchdog blog, that Robert Morris, the pastor of Texas’ Gateway Church, asked her to come into his room when he stayed with her family for Christmas in 1982. She was 12 and he was 20 at the time. She said Morris molested her and then ordered her not to say anything about his behavior “because it will ruin everything.” The abuse continued for years before Clemishire confided in a close friend, prompting Morris’ wife to find out and Morris to step down from the ministry, according to the report. He eventually returned to the church and founded Gateway Church in 2000, turning it into one of the country’s largest megachurches with an estimated weekly attendance of 100,000, according to the church.
It’s still the Independents, stupid Six in 10 key state voters turn out sporadically or are not firmly committed, Post-Schar poll finds. Let’s dig in: In a nation where many voters have made up their minds, Denning [26] and Etter [age 48] are among the voters whose decisions about the presidential race are neither firmly fixed nor whose participation is wholly predictable. As a group, these voters do not exactly fit the description of being undecided. Some lean toward a specific candidate. Some even say they will definitely vote for that candidate. But age or voting history or both leave open the question of how they will vote in November — if they vote at all. The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University surveyed 3,513 registered voters in the six key battleground states. The survey was completed in April and May, before a New York jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts in the hush money trial involving an adult-film actress.
Ashes, ashes “Motivated ignorance,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic, refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity. Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively decide to remain in a state of ignorance. If they are presented with strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them. Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others. This is why, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff suggests, the truth (facts) will not set them free. Or as his former student, Anat Shenker-Osorio, quips, truth for some people is more an “I’ll see it when I believe it” proposition and not the other way around. Motivated cognition, she told Lawrence O’Donnell, “is a helluva drug.” Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it.
Over the weekend Donald Trump committed one of the worst verbal “glitches” of the campaign so far. After delivering his standard line about how Joe Biden should be forced to take a cognitive test and rambling on about how he had “aced” his, Trump then said: “Doc Ronny Johnson, does everyone know Doc Ronny Johnson from Texas? He was the White House doctor and he said that I was the healthiest, he feels, president in history so I liked him very much.” Trump was very close with this former admiral (busted down to captain for his inappropriate behavior, drinking and drug use) doctor, now congressman. I wrote about their relationship some years back: Brig. Gen. Dr. Richard Tubb, said in a letter that the doctor had been attached like “Velcro” to Trump since Inauguration Day. Tubb explained that [the] office is “one of only a very few in the White House Residence proper,” located directly across the hall from the president’s private elevator.
There are Democrats out there who say the Biden campaign shouldn’t run ads like this. They say nothing matters but voters’ perceptions of the economy. I don’t think that’s true. (It certainly isn’t true of the MAGA people who are all about cult worship and culture wars.) And I don’t think it’s a good idea to push disinformation even if it’s in service of assuaging people’s concerns. The truth is the best way to go. And the truth is that some people are economically insecure. Millions of them. And Biden has done as much as any president in my lifetime to address that. Nonetheless, it perennially exists in our country and you can’t sugar coat it. Some people need help. At the same time, the economy really is in a comparatively good place with lots of jobs, inflation coming down sharply and roaring markets which should be celebrated, not downplayed. Democrats do themselves no favors by being the Debbie Downer party while Trump is out there selling himself as having the greatest economy the world has ever seen.