Roaming Charges: Politics on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown
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“It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.”
— Henry Miller
+ Last Saturday a 20-year-old kitchen worker named Thomas Crooks, described as a loner nerd by friends, asked his father if he could borrow the family AR-15 semi-automatic rifle for some target practice at the local shooting range. Dad handed him the gun and sent young Tom on his way. But Tom bypassed the shooting range and drove 45 miles north from Bethel Park to Butler, Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump was presiding over an outdoor rally. Along the way, Crooks stopped to load up with 50 rounds of ammo and buy a five-foot tall ladder.
Crooks arrived at the scene in Butler after the Secret Service and local cops had swept the area. He used his ladder to climb to the roof of a small warehouse about 450 feet from where Trump was speaking. The warehouse was outside of the primary security area under the supervision of the Secret Service and had been handed over to local police and sheriffs, those heroic figures so often valorized as the “sovereign leaders” of rural America by MAGA. Three police snipers were inside the building Crooks used as his shooting perch, but none of them were on the roof.
Several rally-goers told the local police they’d seen a man (or man-child) walking the perimeter of the site and then climbing onto the roof with a gun. Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe said one of his deputies climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who saw the officer and turned toward him, pointing his AR-15. Rather than confront Crooks, the deputy dropped to safety. A few seconds later Crooks started firing. One of his eight shots nicked Trump’s ear and others hit three people at the rally, killing one and seriously wounding two. Crooks was then shot and killed by the Secret Service’s “counter-sniper team.” He was wearing a T-shirt with the logo from Demolition Ranch, a youtube channel featuring gun and demolition porn.
Trump, dribbles of blood streaked across his face, was marshaled off the stage by the Secret Service, while pumping his fist and shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Trump was taken to a local hospital, where his ear was swabbed, and he was quickly sent on his way. Trump spent much of the next day playing golf.
As for Trump’s would-be assassin, Crooks didn’t seem overtly political. His politics were the politics of the gun. He searched online for the names of Biden and Trump, equally, it seemed and was likely to have pulled the trigger on the first one who entered the sights of his AR-15. There was just a dime’s worth of difference between them as far as he was concerned. Crooks is the next variation on Kyle Rittenhouse, a fucked up white kid, working a dead-end job in a shabbily run nursing home, who ventured forth bound for glory with a semi-automatic rifle in the Republic of the Shooter.
+++
+ Crooks fits the profile of every young, alienated white mass shooter since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into the lunchroom at Columbine looking to settle scores with anyone who’d bullied, laughed at or ignored them in gym class–only now the semi-automatic rifles can be bought more easily, openly carried nearly everywhere and amped up to full-auto with a bump stock.
+ Laura Bassett: “A white Republican man shot a white Republican man because of critical race theory?”
+ One of Crooks’ classmates at Bethel Park High School told the New York Times that as a freshman Crooks became a frequent object of ridicule by bullies at the school. “Those other kids would always say, ‘Hey, look, at the school shooter over there. They would tease him about his poor hygiene, body odor. He was an easy target.”
+ The family of Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Crooks is listed in a 2016 Trump campaign database as gun-owning Republicans who live a “gun-owning lifestyle.” The Trump campaign targeted them for pro-gun messaging. When the FBI searched the Crooks’s home, they found more than a dozen guns.
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/mussolini-680x789.png)
+ There’s no question that the Trump shooting will increase the power of the very same “Deep State” institutions so many MAGA people fear and believe were behind the plot to assassinate him.
+ FDR not only survived an attempted coup plotted by Wall Street tycoons in 1933 but he was also shot at while riding in an open car in Miami during that same year. One of the errant bullets killed the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak.
+ Nixon after George Wallace was shot in 1972 at the Laurel Shopping Center parking lot in suburban DC: “We must all stand together to eliminate this vicious threat to our public life. We must not permit the shadow of violence to fall over our country again.” There’s no originality to American politics anymore. The same trite banalities are recycled over and over.
+ Trump was shot with a 5.56×45mm bullet, commonly called a Five-Five-Six NATO round– the standard cartridge for NATO rifles. No way the US stays in NATO if he’s reelected.
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/natoround-680x497.jpeg)
Five-Five-Six NATO round.
+++
+ One of the principal victims of the Trump shooting appears to be the Biden campaign, which stood down in the aftermath of the shooting, as if they were conceding the election to Trump.
+ I’ve never seen a party go from 8 years of sustained hysteria over a coming political apocalypse into a state of near-catatonic passivity faster than the Biden Democrats…
+ Biden waited hours to make any kind of statement on the shooting. Then when he did, he botched it, saying “There’s no place for violence in American politics. In America, we resolve our differences at the battle [sic] box. You know, that’s how we do it, at the battle [sic] box, not with bullets.”
+ The official White House transcript of Biden’s Trump shooting press conference where he repeatedly referred to the Ballot Box as the “Battle” (respelled “Battol” by his nursemaid staff) Box…
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BIDENBATTLEBOX-680x428.jpeg)
+ A few hours after it was reported that Biden said he’d be willing to step down on the medical advice of his doctor, the White House announced that Biden had tested positive for COVID-19, the latest victim of the pandemic he said, “I, and I alone, ended.”
+ Biden’s doctor sent out the following note on the president’s condition…
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/GSuNc1GbEAA1JTE-680x1001.jpeg)
+ A “non-productive cough with general malaise” sounds like not only a description of Biden’s health but his entire campaign.
+ Before the COVID diagnosis (or at least its public announcement), Biden had met with Hollywood mogul and Biden advisor Jeffrey Katzenberg in Las Vegas, who warned the president that the patience of big donors in the party “is wearing thin, and their cash soon will, too.”
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/bidensick-680x156.png)
+ Yes, you are. But this is not a recognized defense against complicity in genocide.
+ At a raucous meeting last weekend with House Democrats, Biden shouted down Rep. Jason Crow, the Colorado Democrat, who asked him about the importance of “national security” to Democratic middle-class voters. According to an account by Julia Ioffe in PuckNews, which was not disputed by the White House, Biden blustered: “First of all, I think you’re dead wrong about national security. You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who did the Pacific Basin! Tell me who did something you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son!!…We’ve got Korea and Japan working together! I put AUKUS together! Anyway…Things are in chaos and I’m bringing some order to it. And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever…”
“It’s not breaking through, Mr. President to our voters,” Crow calmly insisted.
“You oughta talk about it!” Biden blurted. “On national security, nobody has been I better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me ONE! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”
+ As for the weird line about Biden doing “something you’ve never done with your Bronze Star, Crow, a Democrat from Colorado who sits on the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, is a former Army Ranger, who served three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions during the Battle of Samawah. Biden, like Trump, received five deferments from the draft during the Vietnam War.
+ There’s something psychologically twisted about Biden diminishing the meaning of his son’s bronze star to promote his own lofty achievements in foreign policy, which largely consist of a nuclear submarine deal with Australia, an internecine bloodbath in Ukraine and a genocide in Gaza.
+ Biden’s rant was downright Nixonian in his hubris and sense of self-importance, though in more garbled syntax than Tricky Dickie ever used, even after a few glasses of wine had twisted his tongue.
+ A note about Nixon’s drinking. Most people had him pegged for a whiskey guy. But Nixon favored fine wines, particularly Chateau Lafite Rothschild (at $650 a bottle), which he jealously reserved for his own consumption. Even at state dinners, Nixon ordered his staff to serve his guests vin ordinaire, with towels wrapped around the bottle’s labels to hide the origins of the cheap table wine they were being offered.
+ Later that day, Chuck Schumer had a one-on-one meeting with Biden in Rehoboth, where the Senate leader told Biden it would be in the “best interests of the country, the party and Biden” if he withdrew from the election. Schumer’s office didn’t deny the report and told ABCNew’s Jonathan Karl, the senator relayed “the views of his caucus.” ABC also reported that House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered the message, followed by Obama himself.
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+ Was it Biden’s assertion earlier this week to the NAACP that “I know what a Black job is: it’s the Vice President of the United States!” that was the final straw for Obama?
+ Ezra Klein: “It’s not just that Schumer told Biden he needed to step aside. It’s that Biden didn’t step aside, and so now the meeting is being leaked to build pressure and signal to others that they can act.”
+++
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/bidensquinting-680x397.png)
+ It’s gotten so bad that Biden now has trouble even reading off the Teleprompter. During his Vegas speech to the NAACP, he squinted at the screen and still misread text promising a 5 percent cap on rent increases for a cap on rent increases larger than $55.
+ This week a desperate Biden suddenly endorsed imposing term limits for Supreme Court justices, but not for himself, even though he’s 82, and has served 6 terms in the US Senate, two as vice president and one as president.
+ The longest-serving Supreme Court Justice was William O. Douglas who served for 36 years, 7 months. Biden served 36 years and 12 days in the Senate. Eight years in the White House as Veep and 3 years and 7 months (so far) in the White House as president. A total of 47 years and 7 months in federal office.
+ A Tale of Two Joe’s: Joe Stalin was elected to the Politburo in 1917 and held some kind of office in the USSR for the next 36 years, until his death by stroke in 1953. His long political tenure was 12 years shorter than Joe Biden’s. Over their decades in office, both Stalin and Biden oversaw genocides and developed personality cults, Stalin’s in the millions, Biden’s in dozens of paid staffers. There the parallels end, however. Stalin did defeat the Nazis; Biden seems determined to let their ideological grandchildren take over his own country.
+ Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 at the age of 75. He was replaced by 69-year-old Yuri Andropov, who died a year and a half later. Andropov was replaced by 73-year-old Konstantine Cherneko, who died a year later. Five years later the Soviet Union was in ruins. Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is probably the movie of our time, but it’s much too funny for our current predicament.
+++
+ In 1988, Biden suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms that he says “changed him into the man he wanted to be.” That “changed man” treated Anita Hill dismissively (1991), wrote the most racist and punitive crime law in US history (1994), wrote a counterterrorism bill that expanded the federal death penalty against people who hadn’t committed murder and became a model for the Patriot Act (1996), proposed cutting Social Security (1995), voted against gay marriage (1996), backed the gutting of welfare (1996), voted to repeal Glass-Steagel, setting the stage for the financial crisis (1999), voted for the Patriot Act (2001) and the Iraq War (2002/3), voted against bankruptcy protections for students (2005) and armed a genocide (2023/4).
+ You know your country is in a terminal tailspin when an overwhelming majority of its citizens want both candidates for president to withdraw.
+ According to a new AP poll: 70% of the country wants Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, including 65% of Democrats and 77% of independents. 57% of the country wants Donald Trump to withdraw.
+ This is the real Biden, equating the assassination attempt on Trump to college kids protesting genocide–not the guy in Detroit on Friday night reading the Sanders/AOC wish list like a political hostage on camera.
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/bidenreuters-680x240.jpeg)
+ Dan Berger: “Is Trump the first US presidential candidate to run unopposed?”
+ Biden had a full-blown delusional episode this week during his kid-glove interview with Speedy Morman: “By the way, I’m the guy who did more for the Palestinian community than anybody. I’m the guy that opened up all the assets. I’m the guy that made sure the Egyptians opened up the border to let goods through.” The interview aired shortly after Israel dropped 5 US-made 2000-pound bombs on a Palestinian refugee camp in a humanitarian safe zone that killed 100 people, half of them children, and wounded 300 others.
+ Around 4 in 10 voters (38%) say they are less likely to vote for Biden because of his handling of the war in Gaza, according to a Century Foundation/Morning Consult poll taken in July.
+ Many progressives hope that Harris, if she becomes the candidate by fiat of Democratic party elites, will use polling like this to call for a dramatic shift of US policy on Israel. But even if she was inclined to make this rhetorical change, it’s complicated, as long as Harris remains Veep and Biden president. See the experience of the hapless HHH, who couldn’t unshackle himself from LBJ on Vietnam and recruit the alienated youth vote he needed to defeat Nixon. How can Harris openly revise or critique the policies of the very government she’s still second in command of? It’s why one of them needs to resign or her possible campaign is likely doomed before it even launches.
+ Sports journalist Bob Costas: “Biden had a chance to be seen by history as a statesman and a patriot. He spared the nation a second Trump term, he could have gone out in a gracious fashion. Now, we can no longer indulge his delusions.”
+ Much of the nostalgia for the good old Biden of yesteryear is political hokum. He’s always been a scheming politician with very conservative political instincts. Only months before the 1980 elections, Biden publicly attacked Jimmy Carter for being soft on crime. In his four years in office, Carter had managed to reduce the federal prison population by 25 percent. Biden, seeking to advance himself as a conservative Democrat, saw an opening and zeroed in on Carter’s lenient drug policies, saying, “I’m trying to alarm the policymakers. I’m saying that business as usual won’t work.”
+ Biden to Black Entertainment Television (BET): “When I originally ran…I said I was gonna be a transitional candidate, and I thought that I’d be able to move from this just pass it on to someone else. But I didn’t anticipate things getting so, so, so divided. And quite frankly, I think the only thing age brings a little bit of wisdom. And I think I’ve demonstrated that I know how to get things done for the country, in spite of the fact that we couldn’t get it done. But there’s more to do, and I’m reluctant to walk away from that.”…
+ “In spite of the fact that we couldn’t get it done.”
+ The enthusiasm gap (pre-shooting) is a canyon …
% satisfied with their Party’s presidential nominee:
R’s (Trump): 71%
D’s (Biden): 33%
D’s in 2016 (Clinton): 54%
+++
+ The populist, anti-elite party is running a ticket of graduates from two Ivy League schools: Penn and Yale.
+ According to one of Vance’s friends from Yale, Jamil Jivani, the tipping point that flipped Vance from a relatively sedate Never Trumper into one of the most fanatical MAGA-trons on the Hill was the hostile reaction to Ron Howard’s treacly film of Vance’s book Hillbilliy Elegy. Jivani described the mocking reviews as “the last straw.” Blame it on Will Menaker: “Hillbilly Elegy: Mawmaw and Peepaw use hill people wisdom to help huge, fat pussy get an internship at The Heritage Foundation.”
+ Before JD Vance’s conversion to MAGA, this is what he had to say about Trump…
“Might be America’s Hitler”
“I’m a never Trump guy”
“Never liked him”
“Terrible candidate”
“Idiot if you voted for him”
“Might be a cynical asshole”
“Cultural heroin”
“Noxious and reprehensible”
+ Of course, none of these aspersions bother Trump. Vance has surrendered, bent the knee and kissed Trump’s feet. And Trump will parade him around like a captured warlord, until he tires of him and begins subjecting him to ridicule and humiliation.
+ Dime’s Worth of Difference, Update: Ron Klein, Biden’s former chief of staff, and JD Vance once worked at the same venture capital firm, the DC-based Revolution, which was started by Steve Case, the founder of AOL.
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/klainvance-1-680x551.png)
+ Trump, who hit the golf course the day after the assassination attempt, has yet to contact the wife of the man who was killed by a bullet meant for him at his Pennsylvania rally. Because Trump wouldn’t, would he? These aren’t people he really wants to talk to or has anything in common with, except their mutual love of Trump…
+ Vance’s wife, Usha Chilukuri, clerked for both Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts. Usha was born in San Diego to parents who’d recently moved to the states from the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, India. Usha is a practicing Hindu. Her interfaith marriage to JD was blessed by a Hindu priest. All this came as bracing news to many hardcore MAGA-trons, including the execrable Nick Fuentes who said on his white nationalist podcast: “Who is this guy, really? Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
+ Here’s JD Vance (Yale Law grad) ranting about the corrupting influence of higher education: “When I think of this movement of national conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is wisdom and there is a wisdom to what Richard Nixon said approximately 40 or 50 years ago, he said, and I quote, ‘The professors are the enemy.'” Professor diss aside, Nixon would be seen as both a cultural and economic Marxist by this group of fascist clowns.
+ Re: Vance’s assertion (quoting Nixon, approvingly) that “professors are the enemy.” Vance’s wife, Usha, has two degrees from Yale and one from Cambridge. Both of her parents are college professors. As a lawyer, she represented the Regents of the University of California and Usha herself taught American history at Sun Yat-Sen University in…wait for it…Guangzhou, China.
+ Vance on what he would’ve done on January 6: “If I had been VP, I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”
+ Vance on retaliating against the Left (meaning anyone to the Left of Joe Manich, I presume): “We should seize the institutions of the Left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program … And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say, ‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
+ Fox News’ Brit Hume on J.D. Vance: “Did [Vance] get it because he was really the best qualified to be president or did he get it because he sucked up effectively to the nominee?”
+ Here’s JD Vance’s text to a friend calling Trump “America’s Hitler.”
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/vancetext-680x680.jpeg)
+++
+ A campaign whose most ardent supporters are divorced men features a twice-divorced man paired with a man who opposes divorce, even in cases of spousal violence.
+ Most divorced men plan to vote for Trump, while single women are the most likely to vote against him.
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/divorcedtrump-680x489.jpeg)
+ The ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter: “The divorced man is such a ripe target of reactionary grievance because he’s someone who once had patriarchal dominance and someone else’s freedom became a threat to it. We are a nation of ex-wives ruled by a confederacy of ex-husbands.”
+ Vance opposes divorce, even in cases of spousal violence: “This is one of the great tricks the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, the idea that well okay these marriages were fundamentally, uh, they were maybe even violent, certainly unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads though I’m skeptical but it really didn’t work out for the kids in those marriages.”
+ Does Vance’s opposition to divorce extend to gay marriages?
+ In 2022, Vance openly called for a national abortion ban, using overtly racist language: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally. Let’s say Reo v. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion, you know let’s say 2024. And then, every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to them to go have abortions in California. And, of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity. If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy? I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually. Hopefully, we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion and California and the Soroses of the world respect it.”
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/vanceabortion-680x680.jpeg)
+ According to documents unearthed by The Lever, JD Vance recently tried to pressure regulators to allow police in anti-abortion states access to women’s private medical records in order to track down and prosecute women seeking legal abortions in other states.
+ JD Vance at the National Conservatism conference, “By the way, I have to beat up on the UK one last time. I was talking with a friend and were talking about, you know, one of the world’s big dangers is nuclear proliferation, though of course, the Biden administration doesn’t care about it. And I was talking about what is the first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon, maybe Pakistan kinda already counts, and then we finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK since Labor just took over.” This is as stupid as it is bigoted.
+ Gabriel Winant on the Vance schtick: “J. D. Vance is the senator from the unconscious, a voice in Washington for unprocessed trauma, psychic repression, and the monstrous outlets such potent forces can find.”
+ Cleveland journalist Pete Kotz on Vance: “A man so willing to torch his self-respect should not be underestimated. The new J.D. is still under renovation. His acting will improve. And with no soul to weigh him down, his options are limitless.”
+ Mitt Romney on Vance, likely buttressing Vance’s appeal to the current GOP: “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance.”
+++
+ Coast Guard gunboats are patrolling the canals of Milwaukee during the RNC Convention. This will probably soon become a permanent feature of all urban waterways in the US…
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/coastguardgunboats-680x892.jpeg)
+ An executive of the gay dating app Grindr described the Republican National Convention as “basically Grindr’s Super Bowl.”
+ Tuesday was Back the Blue night at the GOP convention. It says something about the truly perverse psychological state of American politics that the RNC convention spent last night heaping praise on law enforcement days after local police retreated from confronting the Trump shooter, while in Milwaukee out-of-town cops providing “security” for the RNC gunned down an unarmed black homeless veteran as a threat more than a mile from the convention.
+ Samuel Sharpe, a homeless Black veteran who was a regular at an encampment in downtown Milwaukee, was shot and killed by police today. Not by Milwaukee Police, but by a Columbus, Ohio police officer, in town to help police the RNC Convention, who shot Sharpe a mile from the convention. “Why are cops from Ohio way out here?” asked David Porter, a friend of Sharpe’s. “Had that been Milwaukee PD that man would be alive right now. I know that because they know him.”
+ As if to emphasize their indifference to the victims of the shooting, they’re having an AR-15 giveaway at the GOP convention…
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/AR15GIVEAWAY-680x512.jpeg)
+ Days after a 20-year-old tried to nail Trump with an AR-15, a federal appeals court ruled that Minnesota’s law requiring people to be at least 21 to carry a handgun in public is unconstitutional.
+ While the Democrats–for some reason comprehensible only to Democrats–have “paused” fundraising after the failed assassination attempt, a Trump-owned company is selling sneakers for $299 a pair with an image of his bloodied face after the rally shooting…
+ Biden isn’t the only one who is “sick”…
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/massdeport-680x401.jpeg)
+ Andrea Pitzer: “As an expert on concentration camps, I’ll chime in to say that yes, the Republican mass deportations will include concentration camps.”
+ In an extended post on Twitter, Mark Cuban argued that a lot of tech/crypto bros have thrown their support behind Trump as “a bitcoin play,” arguing that Trump’s inflationary policies and their destabilizing effect on the dollar’s status as a reserve currency will drive up the price of Bitcoin and make them even richer. “How high can the price go,” Cuban wrote. “Way higher than you think. Remember, the market for BTC is global. And the supply has a final limit of 21m BTC, with unlimited fractionalization.
“Keep that in mind as you consider what happens if because of geopolitical uncertainty and the decline of the dollar as the reserve currency, BTC becomes a “safe haven” globally. Which means that BTC could be what countries and all of us look to buy as a means to protect our savings.”
+ Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Marc Andresson and Ben Horowitz, announced they were going to begin sluicing millions into the Trump campaign. According to writer Rick Perlstein, Andresson once said of the rural working class Vance claims to valorize (but actually pathologizes): “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
+ On March 6th, Elon Musk wrote this: “Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President.” This week he endorsed Trump and said he was going to donate $45 million a month to a pro-Trump PAC.
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/muskGOP-680x358.png)
+ The center of what, Hell?
+ RFK Jr’s son apparently leaked a video of a phone call from Trump to RFK after the shooting where he promised him a job in his Administration if he would drop out and endorse him, disclosed what Biden told him when he called him, described the bullet that grazed him as like a giant mosquito bite, and ranted about child vaccines, about which Trump said: “When you feed a baby a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines and it looks like its meant for a horse, not a 10 pound or 20-pound baby … Then you see the baby starting to change radically, I’ve seen it too many times. Then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? You and I talked about that a long time ago.”
+ One campaign has a sense of humor even after an assassination attempt, while the other features an old fart taking potshots at his political grandchildren every day, as they try to take away the keys to his nuclear suitcase…Guess which one’s winning?
![](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/GSt5JRDWgAAPec9-680x750.jpeg)
+ Trump, of course, is scarcely more cogent than Biden these days. Here’s the big news from Trump’s interview with Bloomberg this week: “I’m gonna get you guys a Coke. Would you please come in? Who wants something to drink? Anybody? A little Coke? Cokes and Diet Cokes. One thing I’ll say about Diet Coke, I have never seen anyone thin have a Diet Coke. No, it’s always Diet Coke. And I say it in sort of a friendly way. But people drink Diet Coke. I have never seen a thin person drink it. I’ve just never seen it. These guys come in and they order regular Cokes and they’re thin. So, I don’t know what’s going on with it? So go ahead.”
+ Reuters reported that Biden is “soul searching” about whether to drop out. If Biden’s “soul searching” that means his resignation speech will be written by Jon “Soul of America” Meacham, which will be almost too much to bear…
+ If Biden stands down, he can spend his remaining years–assuming he’s not put in the dock at The Hague or hauled before one of the military tribunals being planned by Trump’s “Secretary of Retribution”–fantasizing that he, and he alone, would have won and blaming the backstabbing Obama elites for a Democratic loss–a much more pleasant twilight of life scenario than the electoral fate that surely awaits him if he doesn’t…
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