2024 presidential election

It’s been a rough few days over at MSNBC. Since the attempted assassination on Donald Trump over the weekend, the network seems to be the one unable to regain its footing. From J-13 truthers to The Lord of the Rings conspiracies, here’s Cockburn’s rundown of everything that's gone wrong so far. Much like Joe Biden’s weekly routine, MSNBC got off to a shaky start on Monday after it pulled Morning Joe from air following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. Executives were worried Mika Brzezinski planned to pull out her hand-stitched Trump voodoo doll. Whatever the couple had cooked up, Joe Scarborough was not happy that they weren’t able to pull it off.

Even amid inner Democratic turmoil over his capability to stay in office, President Joe Biden refuses to step down. In terms of proving he is too diminished to run, Cockburn is not sure what more evidence the Democratic Party needs. Biden mumbled through his Complex news interview with Speedy Morman on Friday. A few people in the comments on the interview said they had to turn on subtitles to understand him. Biden also said, “In 2020 when Barack asked me to vice president...” Cockburn can forgive the guy for making a simple mistake, having been Barack Obama’s VP from 2009-2017. And yet with repeated evidence of memory mix-ups — not pertaining to normal, everyday mistakes, but to serious questions of mental acuity — each infraction is increasingly concerning.

The iconic images are already dominating the airwaves. Trump, blood running down his face from a bullet that hit his right ear, urges the Secret Service detail to wait as they try to usher him off the stage at his rally in Pennsylvania. He raises a fist to the crowd and tells them, “Fight. Fight. Fight.” Despite likely being a different head-tilt or a gust of wind away from losing his life, the former president’s instinct was to reassure his supporters that he was OK and that he was going to stay in the fight. Compare this reaction to the one displayed by our current president, Joe Biden. It took President Biden more than an hour and a half to release a short statement about the incident: I have been briefed on the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania.

Days after a radio host admitted to using the Biden campaign’s pre-selected questions in her post-debate interview with the president, another "journalist" committed credibility hari-kari. Earl Ingram, the host of Wisconsin-based radio show Civic Media, confessed to editing an interview with Joe Biden... at the request of the president’s campaign, naturally.  Ingram conducted the interview with Biden on July 3, following his disastrous performance in the presidential debate on June 27, airing the interview a day later.   The Biden campaign reportedly called the radio station right after the interview was recorded asking for two edits to be made. Civic Media did not specify who exactly made the report.

If you were expecting a Benjamin Button-style de-aging of President Joe Biden at tonight's NATO press conference after he recovered from the cold and jet lag he claims led to his disastrous debate performance, well... Biden is still Biden. His voice still sounds old and whispery. That being said, when he finally did step onto the press conference stage, he had an air of confidence that was not present during the debate two weeks ago. There were quite a few complications leading up to actually starting the press conference. The White House originally scheduled it for 5:30, but bumped it back to 6:30. The streaming started then, but the conference didn’t actually begin until almost an entire hour after 6:30.

With the Republican National Convention just around the corner, Cockburn sees only three possible options when it comes to Donald Trump announcing his VP pick. And according to the former president in an interview with Sean Hannity Monday night, he’d “love to do it during the convention," but "my people say that’s a little complicated.” Trump is hosting a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday night. With the RNC on Monday in Milwaukee, this could be prime time for Trump to make the VP announcement. Because his “people say it’s a little complicated” to do it during the convention, this would give the party a day or so to get their ducks in a row. “You know in the old days they would announce the vice president during the convention.

Gretchen Whitmer’s memoir, True Gretch, couldn’t have been released at a more suspect time. As the Michigan governor disavows calls for Joe Biden to step down as the Democratic nominee, the book and its subsequent national tour seem to indicate that a self-interested plot is in the works. And without any disastrous revelations about shooting her dog, it could very well work.  True Gretch hides Whitmer’s national ambitions behind the facade of a relatable working mom. The memoir is divided into self-help entitled chapters, like “Be a Happy Warrior” and “Seek to Understand,” with examples of Whitmer overflowing with the eponymous virtue in each. She's real Midwestern nice, for example, and once even sent a birthday cake to a state senator who called her “batshit crazy.

The American media is in a credibility crisis following President Biden’s car-crash debate performance last week. How is it that so many reporters and pundits failed to reveal the depth of the commander-in-chief’s decline? Public trust in the media is in the basement — but it’s been tailing off since 2008, when the legacy media landscape in the United States fundamentally shifted.   Before 2008, the legacy media — while always leaning to the political left — had maintained a patina of objectivity. When Bill Clinton lied to the American people about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, they belatedly pounced. When John Kerry’s campaign began to crater, they reluctantly covered it. They were, to be sure, oriented against Republican candidates and policies.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.  “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”  Those were Hemingway’s words in 1926's The Sun Also Rises.   A century later, they apply to Joe Biden, not financially but politically. For him, the sun is not rising. It’s setting.   “Gradually and then suddenly” is the story of Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive decline. “Gradually and then suddenly” is how his army of enablers in the media, the Democratic Party and the donor base abandoned his defense.

After Thursday’s disastrous excuse for a presidential debate, New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that Joe Biden “has no business running for reelection.” Columnist Nicolas Kristof also said he hopes Biden “reviews his debate performance” and “withdraws from the race.” Johanna Maska, a Democratic consultant and former Barack Obama aide, wrote on X: “We cannot do this, Democrats. Joe Biden can’t put a sentence together.” Meanwhile, numerous other Democratic insiders and donors are in a state of panic. So if President Biden won’t make it to November, then who could step up?