Barack obama

Donald Trump must have that Friday feeling. It’s the morning after the night before, when his Democratic opponent disintegrated live on camera before an audience of millions. The purpose of President Biden agreeing to a first presidential debate so early in the cycle was to head off concerns about his frailty and mental acuity. His energetic State of the Union address in March exceeded admittedly low expectations — but Thursday’s bumbling and feeble performance had the exact opposite effect.The entire op-ed page of the New York Times is begging the president to stand down. “I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep,” writes Thomas L. Friedman.

One of the most famous criticisms of Joe Biden over the years came from former Bush and Obama secretary of defense Robert Gates, who wrote in his 2014 memoir that "I think [Joe Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” The former SecDef has repeatedly been asked if he stands by the statement — and each time, he does. Of course, we're a decade removed from that memoir — and in that time, Gates has openly criticized Biden over the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, his administration's approach to Putin and Russia and the slow walking of military aid to Ukraine. So it seems it's safe to say we're at five decades now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Kristi Noem has been taking heat for packing heat on her dog. In an excerpt from her upcoming book, the South Dakota governor admitted to shooting her family’s wire-haired pointer, Cricket. After ruining a peasant hunt and killing her neighbor's chickens, Noem took the pooch out back and sent her to a gravely grave. The news has sent shockwaves across the country — all but tanking Noem's hopes of "softening" Trump's image as a female VP pick — but Noem is far from the first politician to be embroiled in a canine scandal. Barack Obama Hot dogs aren’t the only dogs Obama enjoys. Before becoming the proud parent of his pet Bo, Obama admitted to eating dogs in Indonesia with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week we have the first named vice presidential candidate from a 2024 challenger — Nicole Shanahan, whom I know little about outside of this glossy profile in People magazine. Forget the child of immigrants rags to riches story or any of that stuff. On paper she seems like an extremely wealthy progressive California attorney with all the various interests of such a type — yoga, natural living, meeting your third spouse at Burning Man and so on. But none of that matters, and none of it will matter — which is why this choice strikes me as potentially ingenious on the part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Understand this: no one, absolutely no one, votes for a president based on his or her vice presidential candidate.

As Donald Trump marches to the Republican nomination a third time, Americans are divided into two radically opposed camps. On one side are Trump supporters who believe Democrats stole the 2020 election. On the other are Trump detractors — Democrats and homeless NeverTrumpers — who say that denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election amounts to a desire to overthrow democracy itself. The country is not on the brink of a civil war, and deep partisan divisions are nothing new. But reality itself is contested today in a way that goes beyond anything in earlier US history. The split over the 2020 election is one intensely political manifestation of a wider rift.

The decline and fall of the Ron DeSantis campaign has led several people within the commentariat — which these days means anyone online with the ability to type a thought and hit send in even a semi-coherent way, despite lack of experience, background or the skill to even qualify as a volunteer — to weigh in on how awful, how terrible, how wasteful has been the DeSantis effort to run for the presidency. The effect is amusing, in part because it has led outright idiots to claim that if only DeSantis had refrained from criticizing Donald Trump at all, or if only he had criticized Donald Trump more, he would have succeeded.

During Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, it became common knowledge that the best way to lobby the president on a particular position was to do an interview on the right cable news programs espousing your views. Gone were the days of relevance of Wall Street Journal op-eds during the George W. Bush administration or articles in the Atlantic for the Barack Obama era. If you wanted to change POTUS’s thinking on something, get in front of a camera and make yourself heard. Now, in the context of the Democratic Party’s split over Israel and the war in Gaza, we are witnessing a surprisingly similar public lobbying campaign play out for Joe Biden’s attention — albeit via different methods than cable news.

It feels a bit like Groundhog Day in Washington at the moment. Returning after a week’s vacation, I plugged back in this morning to discover that Donald Trump is bracing for another indictment, this time for his post-election antics in Georgia; that none of his Republican rivals show any sign of making a dent in his primary lead; that Hunter Biden’s misdeeds continue to dog the president; and that Team Biden is gearing up for yet another week trying to win America over on “Bidenomics.”The excuse for Biden’s latest bit of economic salesmanship is the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act. This means we will be treated to tired catchphrases that refuse to catch on, such as “grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.

When Barack Obama set out to fundamentally transform the country, he took for granted that it could be transformed back — and could only look on as America sent a populist billionaire to do just that. The aspiring media mogul has only now discovered that part of a politician's legacy is the successors he leaves behind. It has dawned on Obama that his chief legacy from eight years in office will not be healthcare reform but Joe Biden — and now he is scrambling to cultivate a new champion. Politico is reporting that America's first black president is holding closed-door meetings with the likes of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and moderate Michigan representative Haley Stevens to try to find an heir worthy of the crown.