By Robert Ariail, courtesy Charleston City Paper.
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JULY 2, 2024 | Watching presidential debates is not high on my agenda. Most years, these debates do little for real news, and serve mostly as arguments between the vying candidates.
But for 2024, I sat for nearly two hours and listened to Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
From the debate, here are two major thoughts:
- Donald Trump was as unbelievable as I thought he would be.
- Joe Biden stumbled at first, but consistently came up with an amazing variety of facts that were spot-on, and showed his mind is alert. It was amazing that he could remember all that!
One way to look at the debate is to fact check what the candidates said. We found that CNN produced a thorough fact check of this debate. In it, CNN scored it 30-9, as Donald Trump misspoke on 30 occasions and Joe Biden was off-base with his facts nine times.
Some key points in the CNN analysis:
Trump’s repeated falsehoods included his assertions that:
- Some Democratic-led states allow babies to be executed after birth,
- Every legal scholar and everybody in general wanted Roe v. Wade overturned,
- There were no terror attacks during his presidency,
- Iran didn’t fund terror groups during his presidency,
- The US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has, that Biden for years referred to Black people as “super predators,”
- Biden is planning to quadruple people’s taxes,
- Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops for the US Capitol on January 6, 2021,
- Americans don’t pay the cost of his tariffs on China and other countries,
- Europe accepts no American cars,
- He is the president who got the Veterans Choice program through Congress, and
- Fraud marred the results of the 2020 election.
Biden made at least nine false or misleading claims in the debate. He:
- Used false numbers while describing two of his key Medicare policies,
- Falsely claimed that no US troops had been killed on his watch,
- Repeated his usual misleading figure about billionaires’ tax rates,
- Baselessly claimed that Trump wants to eliminate Social Security,
- Falsely said that the unemployment rate was 15 percent when he took office,
- Inaccurately said that the Border Patrol union had endorsed him before clarifying that he was talking about agents’ support for the border bill he had backed, and
- Exaggerated Trump’s 2020 comments about the possibility of treating Covid-19 by injecting disinfectant.
For details of this analysis, go to this link.
But what have we seen? The Eastern-packed media, and many Democrats, suddenly panicked after Biden’s early stumbling. It’s as if they were already waiting to call Joe aside and say “Don’t run,” with the debate giving them their chance. Even the august New York Times, and the suddenly-finding-its-voice Atlanta Journal Constitution, were calling for Joe Biden to get out of the race. Unmitigated panic!
Why should Joe Biden get out of the race? We have enough faith in the American people to feel that the bulk of Americans in this country who see through the bombast and blunder of Donald Trump and his threatening to become a dictator. Joe Biden has continued to guide this country as the preeminent economic and military power in the entire world, and it’s going to remain that way. The people of the United States have our problems, but we are not a failing nation because of the current leadership.
A majority of Americans are smart enough to realize this, and will bring our country back in line by rejecting the Trump lies, philosophy and his return. So, settle down America, and hold on for a wild ride.
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