his speech was boring and really

J.D. Vance Booed by Entire Crowd During Dumpster Fire Speech

Vance was brutally burned during a campaign stop, ironically at a firefighters’ union conference..

J.D. Vance was greeted by loud boos during an address to the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston on Thursday—and that was only the beginning of an incredibly rough speech for Donald Trump’s running mate.

“Thank you guys—” Vance said as he grabbed the mic to speak, only to be interrupted by loud booing from the audience.

“ Semper Fi guys,” Vance said, seeming to signpost his background as a Marine to get the hecklers to stop. “Sounds like we’ve got some fans and some haters, that’s okay,” he joked.

“Listen to what I have to say here, and I’ll make my pitch,” he said.

here's a longer video of JD Vance getting booed in Boston by a firefighters group pic.twitter.com/dHcCKbiUpR — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 29, 2024

Vance asked his audience, which had voted to endorse Joe Biden in 2019, to “ignore the campaign rhetoric and look at the record,” before predictably diving into campaign rhetoric blaming undocumented immigrants for unsupported claims about increased crime and drug use.

Vance touted projections of how much undocumented immigrants were costing different cities around the country, referring to New York, Chicago, Denver, and Washington, D.C., but didn’t conjure a single number about Boston, where the speech was actually taking place.

“We shouldn’t be forced to spend billions of dollars on people who aren’t even supposed to be here. We should be spending that money on schools, police and fire departments, and our citizens, and under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, we will,” Vance said. The Ohio senator’s imagining of a world where by funding public institutions, you can somehow police the citizenship of those who receive their benefits, was met by a mix of claps and boos.

If Vance thought his earlier plea would be enough to settle down the disruptions, he had another thing coming.

“Now, President Trump and I are proud to be the most pro-worker Republican ticket in history, and I want to talk about why we’re fighting for working people,” Vance said , once again interrupted by loud booing from actual working people.

WOW -- Vance gets booed in Boston when he claims he and Trump are the most "pro-workers Republican ticket in history" pic.twitter.com/hb6EvRl7kV — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 29, 2024

As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz pointed out to the IAFF the day before, during a much friendlier reception, Trump had blocked overtime benefits , opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage, and proposed slashing federal fire service budgets. Walz warned that under Project 2025, Trump would continue to weaken unions.

On stage, Vance’s declaration that he was a “populist, and proud of it,” was again met by some claps and boos. Vance’s cold reception didn’t prevent him from attempting jokes, although he brutally fumbled their delivery in the face of an indifferent crowd.

Vance explained that Donald Trump is a “different kind of Republican and under his leadership, the Republican Party is the party of the American worker,” and asked his audience to take the Republican National Convention as an example.

“It says a lot who each party chose to put up on that stage. At the Republican convention we were featuring everyday American workers—and of course, we had Hulk Hogan. And while it’s tempting, and I’m sure it would make some big headlines, don’t worry any-ev-everybody I’m not going to try to take off my shirt here—” he said , stumbling slightly, to zero crowd response.

Vance: We had hulk hogan. Don't worry. I will not try to take off my shirt here pic.twitter.com/pXZdsvs9pb — Acyn (@Acyn) August 29, 2024

His rough way into a complaint that the Democrats had only invited celebrities fell flat, highlighting his awkward public speaking style and inability to divert from a prepared speech.

As Vance departed the stage, he was met once again by deafening jeers mixed into some applause.

more boos as JD Vance leaves the stage in Boston pic.twitter.com/KO5YKa1EY6 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 29, 2024

Vance’s team is already attempting to spin his dismal reception, lauding his bravery for stepping into hostile territory. Vance’s communications director William Martin posted his own video of the event, showing the “massive round of applause” for Vance as he walked on the stage, but stopped short of showing the booing that would begin once he opened his mouth.

Trump Spokeswoman Flounders When Asked About His Vile Harris Post

Donald trump had shared a grossly sexist post about kamala harris..

Even Donald Trump’s staffers can’t defend his recent chauvinistic tirades against Vice President Kamala Harris.

In an interview with CNN’s John Berman on Thursday, Trump’s national Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt couldn’t seem to offer a rational explanation for why the former president was reposting QAnon slogans and sharing a screenshot of an exchange on X that featured a photo of Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton alongside a comment that read, “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently.”

“You say that Donald Trump was a candidate of stability,” prompted Berman. “Why was Donald Trump over the last 36 hours on his social media re-posting slogans from QAnon and reposting misogynistic, sexist content about Vice President Harris?”

“Well, look, I don’t think your viewers at home are concerned about social media posts. I think they are concerned with the news of the day,” Leavitt started before launching an attack on President Joe Biden’s border policies.

“Karoline, Karoline—do you know why he posted that?” Berman asked. “Do you know why he reposted that content?”

“I haven’t been able to talk to President Trump yet this morning because he’s calling into media interviews unlike Kamala Harris who has been avoiding the press for more than 40 days,” Leavitt said. “And we’re excited that CNN finally has the opportunity to question Kamala Harris tonight about her disastrous record.”

“Again, Americans aren’t concerned with social media posts and silly memes, they are concerned with the problems that are plaguing them and their families right now,” she continued, pointing to three unconnected murders of women by migrants as being more “demeaning” to women than Trump’s rhetoric.

But Berman argued that Americans are capable of deliberating more than one issue at a time.

“When there’s content being reposted that uses QAnon slogans and when there are these sexist, misogynistic posts, it’s interesting to me that you can’t, you’re not—you don’t think they’re bad,” Berman said. “You have no problem with them.”

“I didn’t say that. I said that I don’t believe voters care,” Leavitt said.

JOHN BERMAN: Why was Donald Trump over the past 36 hours reposting QAnon slogan and misogynist and sexist content about Vice President Harris? TRUMP CAMPAIGN SPOX KAROLINE LEAVITT: I don't think your viewers are concerned about social media posts pic.twitter.com/ScJk43PV3m — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 29, 2024

Brian Kemp Pathetically Tries to Explain His Reversal on Trump

Georgia governor brian kemp doesn’t think trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election in his state was that big of a deal..

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp doesn’t think that Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in his state was a big deal, calling it a “distraction” in a Fox News interview.

Speaking to Fox & Friends on Thursday, Kemp was pressed by Steve Doocy to explain what happened between Trump and himself to resolve enmity between the two.

“Well, look, there was a little distraction, obviously, on their side when it came to Georgia. To me, that’s in the past,” Kemp said. “I have been saying that guys, literally for over a year now, that I was going to support our nominee, that we had to win Georgia, the road to the White House runs through Georgia. And I still believe today, we cannot afford four more years of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.”

Trump attacked Kemp at an Atlanta rally earlier this month for refusing to overturn the 2020 election, saying , “He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy. And he’s a very average governor. Little Brian, little Brian Kemp. Bad guy.”

Trump also attacked Kemp’s wife, Marty Kemp, for saying that she wouldn’t vote for Trump, and would instead write in her husband’s name on the presidential ballot in November. At the time, Kemp responded on X, telling Trump to “leave my family out of it” and to stop engaging in “petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past.”

Kemp didn’t vote for the convicted felon and Republican presidential nominee in June’s primary elections in Georgia, but has endorsed Trump for November. However, Kemp’s office has said that the governor will be looking into ethics violations from three new pro-Trump members of the state’s election board, signaling that he may once again thwart Trump’s efforts to interfere in Georgia’s voting process.

Trump infamously told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” in January 2021 . The Trump team’s efforts to stop democracy in the state resulted in felony charges for election interference against the former president and 17 co-defendants. The case is currently stalled thanks to Republican efforts to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as prosecutor, even though she originally filed the charges.

Trump Ally Admits Trump’s Social Media Posts Are Out of Control

Former trump campaign adviser david urban warned that donald trump’s deranged posts on truth social will backfire..

Even Donald Trump’s biggest allies admit that his social media posts are going over the top.

On Wednesday, Trump shared a series of frightening and outright offensive posts on his platform Truth Social, all before 10 a.m. The posts called for the imprisonment of Kamala Harris, Bill Gates, and Anthony Fauci, among other Democrats, as well as a military tribunal for former President Barack Obama. Multiple posts even referenced QAnon, including the far-right conspiracy group’s slogan “WWG1WGA.”

In response, former Trump campaign adviser David Urban, now a pro-Trump CNN analyst, called the erratic posting “ terrible ” and warned that the former president should cease with the ad hominem attacks. 

On Thursday, when asked by CNN host John Berman about Trump’s posts, Urban sarcastically replied that he was “loving it,” before encouraging Trump to stick to politics rather than threats or attacks against his opponents.

“What Donald Trump should be doing—and I’ve shared this with him and I’ll share it with him again every chance I see—stick to the issues,” said Urban. “If you want to attack Kamala Harris, please, let’s do so, but on the issue of immigration, on the porous border, and the failed economic plan of the Biden-Harris administration.”

Trump has had no filter on social media for many years, causing him to get banned from multiple platforms for inciting violence. But as his tone only gets more unhinged, his team is growing increasingly worried.

Republicans Say This is Trump’s Extremist Replacement for Project 2025

Project 2025 has some competition..

When making plans for his potential presidential transition, Donald Trump is looking to a right-wing think tank staffed by former members of his administration and MAGA acolytes. No, not to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—which has become the rock tied to the ankle of the Trump campaign—but the America First Policy Institute.

The group will create its own “America First Transition Project” to kick off Trump’s next term, according to a report from Politico published Thursday.

Earlier this month, Trump named Linda McMahon, the chair of the Trumpist think tank’s board, to co-lead his transition team—an announcement that came abnormally late in the election cycle. A former professional wrestling executive, McMahon previously served as the head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s presidency, and then as chair of a pro-Trump super PAC that raised $83 million for Trump in 2020.

One lobbyist told Politico that AFPI was “in the driver’s seat” of the Trump team’s potential transition.

“AFPI is not becoming the transition,” another person familiar with the Trump team’s transition preparations told Politico. “But by virtue of how they are situated and that we are in a very late timeline for this work, AFPI and the transition may be a distinction without a difference.”

Kellyanne Conway, who chairs AFPI’s Center for the American Child, explained what the think tank had been working on since Trump’s last administration.

“For three and a half years, AFPI has focused on personnel and policy. It was formed by and is teeming with senior staffers from the first Trump Administration whose goal is to be ready on day one,” Conway explained. “Linda McMahon, Brooke Rollins and the team have planned with precision and executed with put-your-head-down type humility.”

Rollins previously served as Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director.

According to an early memo, the group’s staffers have done extensive research on the “management, personnel, policy, financial, and administrative” strategies behind running the federal government and conducted more than one thousand interviews with former administration officials. The group has reportedly analyzed every one of Joe Biden’s executive actions and drafted more than a hundred of their own proposed ones, according to Politico.

Because the group has 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, it does not disclose its donors, but it is well-funded, raking in $23.6 million in 2022. As a nonprofit, AFPI cannot openly support a candidate for office, and thus far it has not directly claimed any influence in the Trump campaign—possibly learning from the mistakes of the Heritage Foundation, from which Trump has tried and failed to distance himself.

But at the end of the day, AFPI isn’t so different from the conservative think tanks that have crashed and burned before it. While the official plan is still being built out, the group’s broad agenda hits on many familiar conservative beats. The group advocates to finish building Trump’s border wall, to deregulate the federal government and limit spending, as well as to increase oil and gas production.

The vehemently anti-union AFPI has attacked unions at the Veterans Administration and the Transportation Security Administration. McMahon has previously advocated for right-to-work laws, which would bankrupt unions by allowing non-union workers to enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining without paying “fair share” fees.

AFPI has also aligned itself with election deniers in Georgia and is currently backing a lawsuit against Fulton County by its own election board official Julie Adams, who is seeking a court ruling on whether her duty to certify election results is “discretionary, not ministerial, in nature,” according to the suit.

Trump’s Arlington Cemetery Fight Has Now Angered the Military

The u.s. army has weighed in on donald trump staffers getting in a fight with an arlington national cemetery employee..

The Army has weighed in on the Trump campaign’s Arlington National Cemetery dispute, and it’s siding with the gravesite official.

A spokesperson for the Army said in a statement Thursday that the military organization believed the official had been “abruptly pushed aside” and “unfairly attacked” by Trump staffers.

“Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds. An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside,” the Army spokesperson said.

“This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked,” they continued. “ANC is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”

The Arlington National Cemetery official who confronted the campaign filed a report over the potentially felonious behavior but declined to press charges, reportedly fearing possible retaliation from Trump’s rabid supporters, according to The New York Times ’s Maggie Haberman. The army said it considers the matter closed.

The military’s judgment follows a multiday scandal for the Republican presidential nominee after he was caught red-handed Tuesday filming video in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where recent military casualties are buried. Campaign staffers reportedly launched into a verbal and physical fight with cemetery officials, who had asked the campaign to stop videotaping. Federal law prohibits politically related activities in the cemetery, including taking photos and videos in support of a political campaign.

The Trump campaign claimed that they had been given permission to videotape by the families of fallen service members, but unfortunately for Trump, that doesn’t change federal law.

Instead, the footage was immediately transformed into a social media–oriented campaign video , where Trump can be seen laying flowers down at a grave and taking photos with people while giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita torched the cemetery official after the incident was first reported, referring to her in a statement as a “ despicable individual ” and questioning her mental health.

Trump’s anti-military rhetoric has been a point of contention for the MAGA candidate in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the reputed Vietnam-era draft dodger came under fire for arguing that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. That comment rubbed veterans the wrong way, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

This story has been updated .

Trump Just Landed Himself More Musical Legal Trouble

Abba is the latest in a long line of artists who don’t want their music associated with donald trump..

“Gimmie! Gimmie! Gimmie!”

Swedish pop supergroup ABBA are torching Donald Trump for using their music without permission during a campaign event in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on Tuesday, demanding that the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign pull any footage of the rally that featured their songs.

Trump reportedly played several of ABBA’s greatest hits, including “Money, Money, Money”, “The Winner Takes It All”, and “Dancing Queen.” The event, which was geared toward a heavy Swedish demographic, also reportedly played a 10-minute clip of ABBA’s live performances, reported AFP .

The Swedes’ record company, Universal Music, told The Guardian that the campaign had not asked for permission to use the tracks and that footage from the event must be “immediately” taken down and removed.

“Together with the members of Abba, we have discovered that videos have been released where Abba’s music/videos has been used at Trump events, and we have therefore requested that such use be immediately taken down and removed,” a Universal spokesperson told The Guardian . “Universal Music Publishing AB and Polar Music International AB have not received any request, so no permission or license has been given to Trump.”

ABBA member Björn Ulvaeus told Swedish newswire TT that Universal would “[make] sure it is taken down.”

ABBA is far from the only musical group that’s gone after Trump for using their music to advance his campaign without their permission. In August alone, Trump has drawn fury from the Isaac Hayes estate, Celine Dion, and Beyoncé for the unauthorized use of their music during campaign events and advertisements.

But the roster of artists who have outright banned Trump from using their music is long and wide. They include Sinéad O’Connor , The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, The Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty , the Village People, and Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler.

New Details Shed True Horror of Trump’s Fight at Arlington Cemetery

The arlington national cemetery official attacked by trump campaign staffers is now afraid of retaliation..

It turns out the fight between Donald Trump’s campaign staff and an Arlington National Cemetery official Monday was worse than we thought. The assaulted cemetery employee was a woman, and she didn’t want to press charges because she was afraid of retaliation from Trump supporters.

The New York Times reports that the woman filed an incident report with the military, but opted not to proceed further with law enforcement authorities at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Virginia, which has jurisdiction over the cemetery. Trump and his campaign have been scrambling to explain away the physical altercation, posting a message of thanks from a military family, blaming the cemetery official, and even accusing her of having a “mental health episode.”

Taking photographs or video at a military cemetery for political purposes is prohibited under federal law, particularly in Arlington National Cemetery’s Section 60, where recent military casualties are buried. After participating in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns on the third anniversary of the Abbey Gate attack in Afghanistan, Trump visited Section 60 with family members of Marines killed in the attack—and with cameras. The cemetery official tried to stop Trump’s campaign staffers from filming and taking photos, leading to them pushing the official and calling her names.

It turns out that the official’s concern was warranted, after Trump released photos and a video of his visit to Section 60, which was supposed to be private and closed to the press. The family of Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, whose gravesite was shown in those photos, issued a statement saying that they did not give permission for the grave to be filmed or used by the Trump campaign.

“[A]ccording to our conversation with Arlington National Cemetery, the Trump campaign staffers did not adhere to the rules that were set in place for this visit to Staff Sergeant Hoover’s gravesite in Section 60, which lays directly next to my brother’s grave,” said Marckesano’s sister Michele in the statement. 

“We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly,” she added.

One politician who was with Trump at the cemetery on Monday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, apologized on X (formerly Twitter) for using photos from the section in a campaign email.

“This was not a campaign event and was never intended to be used by the campaign,” Cox wrote. “It did not go through the proper channels and should not have been sent. My campaign will be sending out an apology.”

The Trump campaign, however, has not. Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance accused the media of blowing it out of proportion.

“Apparently somebody at Arlington Cemetery, some staff member had a little disagreement with somebody,” Vance said. “And they have turned — the media has turned this into a national news story.”

The more the Trump campaign refuses to acknowledge even the appearance of disrespect at a military cemetery, as well as the possible violation of federal law, the more likely the incident won’t go away, especially given Trump’s dismal reputation with military veterans . 

Devastating Fox Poll Should Be “Alarming” to Trump

An analyst warned that donald trump’s “flailing” campaign should be worried about kamala harris’s performance..

Donald Trump’s polling in Sun Belt states should have the former president shaking in his boots, according to one political analyst.

Fox News released polling Wednesday from Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina, which found that Kamala Harris had significantly tightened the gap across the key states. Harris is now leading Trump by one point in Arizona, and two points in Georgia and Nevada. Trump has maintained a one-point lead in North Carolina, where the race is now considered to be a toss-up .

The polling indicates that Harris has expanded the Democratic voting map since entering the race, putting the Sun Belt states back in play for potential Democratic victories. President Joe Biden previously trailed Trump in each of these states.

During an appearance on CNN Wednesday night, political analyst Astead Herndon said that the Trump team ought to be scared by these numbers.

“This should be an alarming fact for the Trump campaign, and I think the trend line has been so consistent, if they are not alarmed there’s probably something wrong there,” Herndon said.

“Because Donald Trump has campaigned the last month—has been flailing, has not found a consistent attack against Harris, has not found a way to break through a news cycle, and has spent his time bringing [in] RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, people who don’t expand his tent to the voters he’s bleeding by this moment,” Herndon said, noting that Trump had failed to grow his vote share, in comparison to Harris.

Herndon noted that the poll results showed the impact of the massive small dollar donations Harris has received since joining the race, which allow her to defend her blue territories while also expanding into regions such as the Sun Belt states. With Biden as the candidate, that region might’ve been a lost cause.

“It’s Donald Trump now that is under both the political and financial pressure—again, most of which is of his own making—to be able not to have the ground game that he should at this point,” Herndon said.

But if Team Trump is panicking, they’re dealing with it their usual way: denial.

The Trump campaign promptly issued their own corrections for the Fox News polls, claiming the news organization has an “awful track record” when it comes to taking accurate polls.

“It’s that time of year again: Fox is releasing atrocious polling,” the statement said.

The campaign published their own “unskewed” results, which had been adjusted based on the differences between Fox’s projected margins in those states in 2020, and their final margins after Election Day. According to the Trump campaign’s math, Trump is miraculously ahead in Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina.

The Trump campaign has repeatedly disseminated “unskewed” polls adjusted based on the difference between election results and recalled votes of respondents, or how they claim to have voted four years ago—a metric that is widely considered to be unreliable .

Earlier this month, the Trump campaign attempted to do the same thing to warp New York Times /Siena polling from the Sun Belt states that found Harris was leading Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent. The poll also found that Harris had passed Trump in North Carolina, leading him 49 percent to 47 percent, and that she had significantly narrowed the former president’s lead in Georgia and Nevada.

With Harris’s newfound edge, it seems that Trump should spend less time cooking the books, and more time getting his ground game together.

Trump Blows Up J.D. Vance’s Pathetic Arlington Cemetery Defense

J.d. vance’s justification for filming at arlington national cemetery fell apart when donald trump posted the video of the event..

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance doesn’t seem to know what the other half of his ticket is up to.

Speaking before a crowd in the battleground state of Wisconsin for a fourth time Wednesday night, the Republican vice presidential pick attempted, once again, to brush off Donald Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery debacle. According to Vance, Trump was wrongly booted from the military burial ground, since it wasn’t as if he was filming a “TV commercial at a gravesite.”

Except that’s exactly what Trump was doing.

“You’re acting like Donald Trump filmed a TV commercial at a gravesite,” Vance said to “the media.” “He was there providing emotional support to a lot of brave Americans who lost loved ones they never should have lost, and there happened to be a camera there, and someone gave them permission to have that camera there.”

Trump utilized the footage for a campaign video where he can be seen laying flowers down at a grave and taking photos with people while giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

He literally posted a video using the footage. pic.twitter.com/H94qjkdRaV — Dr. Temper Tantrum, PVT (@DrTemperTantrum) August 28, 2024

Trump was caught in the act on Tuesday while filming the stunt in Section 60 of the cemetery, where recent military casualties are buried. Campaign staffers reportedly launched into a verbal and physical fight with cemetery officials, who had asked the campaign to stop videotaping. Federal law prohibits politically related activities in the cemetery, including taking photos and videos in support of a political campaign. And just because the families there gave permission doesn’t change that.

The Arlington Cemetery official that confronted the campaign filed a report over the felonious behavior but declined to press charges, reportedly fearing possible retaliation from Trump’s rabid supporters, according to The New York Times ’ Maggie Haberman.

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Arms deals and sexual abuse material: why was Telegram’s co-founder arrested?

Pavel Durov is banned from leaving France as authorities investigate illegal activity on his ‘free speech’ social media platform.

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Whether it be the EU charging Elon Musk for letting disinformation run wild on X or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s data-sharing scandal hearing in front of the US Senate, social media moguls are no strangers to confrontations with governments.

Until now, however, none had faced serious legal action – let alone law enforcement officers at an airport.

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On Saturday (24 August), French authorities bucked this trend and arrested Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov at Paris’ Le Bourget Airport.

In a statement released on Wednesday (28 August), French prosecutors said Durov was under investigation for failing to prevent illegal activity, namely transactions by organised gangs, on Telegram. Durov’s other alleged charges include refusal to communicate with authorities and complicity in the organised criminal distribution of child sexual abuse images.

What changes will Telegram make to its moderation policies?

Last night, Paris prosecutors said Durov, a Russian-born billionaire with French citizenship, has been placed under judicial supervision. The Telegram boss is not allowed to leave France and has to pay a €5m ($5.6m) deposit.

Durov’s arrest comes days after investigations found that Yemeni weapons dealers were using Telegram, X and other social media platforms to advertise arms deals. Many accounts are linked with the Iranian-backed, US-sanctioned Houthi militia in Yemen.  

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Telegram, which is Dubai-based but founded by Durov in Russia in 2013, is built on a model of ‘complete free speech’ and minimal moderation – immensely useful for pro-democracy movements under authoritarian regimes in, for example, Iran, Myanmar or Belarus.

It also makes Telegram a hotspot for misinformation, however. Far-right figures in the UK including Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (alias Tommy Robinson) made prominent use of the platform to spread racist rhetoric and disinformation during a recent spate of riots.

“Telegram does have content moderation in place, but it remains insufficient,” Aleksandr Valentij, cybersecurity lead at digital security firm Surfshark, tells Verdict .

“The platform is home to a significant amount of illegal and harmful content and has unfortunately become a haven for individuals engaged in various criminal activities, including war crimes, terrorism, child exploitation, hacking and black-market operations.”

Telegram had not responded to Verdict’s request for comment at the time of publication.

Telegram in military crosshairs?

In a similar fashion to the brazen advertisements of Houthi-linked arms dealers, Telegram has also become synonymous with militaristic mobilisation.

“A lesser-known but critical concern is that Telegram is reportedly being used to coordinate Russian military activities in Ukraine,” Valentij says. “This includes everything from communication between units to the recruitment of agents and the sharing of coordinates by collaborators for missile strikes.”

Pro-Kremlin military bloggers aside, Russian army figures openly use Telegram. Amid reports of Ukraine successfully testing its first domestic-made ballistic missile on Wednesday (28 August), Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the Belgorod region, used the platform to release a statement saying Ukrainian special forces had attempted an incursion into Belgorod.

Telegram is also home to thousands of war-related forums, from Russian Wagner mercenaries to Ukrainians seeking real-time updates on air raids and loved ones.

Durov’s arrest prompted a wave of posts by Russian military analysts and politicians bemoaning the lack of a ubiquitous, secure messaging service for the Russian army.

“It will be very sad and funny at the same time if it is Durov’s arrest that becomes the catalyst for changes in the Russian armed forces’ approach to communication,” read a post by Rybar, a Telegram account with 1.3 million subscribers founded by a former Russian defence ministry official.

Durov is not the only social media mogul having to watch his back.

While not used for military communications purposes, X has also come under heavy scrutiny of late for slack moderation of illegal and misinformative content.

X owner Musk, who has described moderation as a “propaganda word” for censorship, has defended Durov and called for his release.

Musk has engaged in several political spats in recent months, namely with Prime Minister Keir Starmer amid X’s inflammatory role in the UK’s far-right riots, and Brazilian Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who ordered a block on accounts accused of spreading misinformation. Brazil looks poised to restrict X .

In the past, Zuckerberg, Musk and other technocrats have largely escaped with a fine – the sums little more than a slap on the wrist for some of the world’s richest men.

By arresting Durov, French authorities have set a strong precedent for the rest of the EU to follow as the bloc seeks to enforce its sweeping Digital Services Act.

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Column: Trump’s speech was a dud. What does that mean for his campaign?

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After all the buildup, you almost expected Donald Trump to walk on water to reach the stage.

But on Thursday night, the Republican presidential nominee merely strode forth — before a Vegas-style backdrop of gold letters that screamed “TRUMP” — and positioned himself in front of a colonnaded mock-up of the White House .

The Republican National Convention then sagged to a finish with a rambling, disjointed, 92-minute slog of a speech that followed an evening of testimonials — about Trump’s record in office, his golf game, his taste in music, his dance moves, and a great many other Trumpian triumphs.

Not only did it strain credulity — it also tested the audience’s physical capacity to stay awake.

Times columnists Mark Z. Barabak and Anita Chabria took it all in before dashing to catch their flights home to California, that place haters depict as a stinking hellhole. They left behind these thoughts about the convention’s fourth and final night:

Barabak: This is the 20th national political convention that I’ve covered. I watched others as a kid and have gone back and viewed historical footage.

That was the strangest, most self-indulgent and worst acceptance speech I’ve ever heard. Your thoughts?

Chabria: So boring — and a wasted opportunity. Trump had such goodwill and faced an arena filled with wide-eyed worshipers. But he just couldn’t control his grievances and ego, despite throwing a dash of unity into the mix.

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By the end, I felt like even he was bored. After improvising for way too long, he ambled back to his prepared text, which inexplicably veered off into a deep dive on the Revolutionary War.

But there are two big-picture takeaways for me.

First, this was a strongman performance. Trump simply repeated over and over that every problem, real or perceived, was within his power to fix (no details given). Immigration, inflation, even cancer. He promised to magically make it all disappear, while building an “iron dome” around the United States to protect it from missile attacks.

He even boasted that when he was president, he “could stop wars with just a telephone call.”

It became silly at some point.

My second takeaway is that bread and circuses — the Roman phrase for distracting the populace with spectacle — was in full force. We had Kid Rock, Dana White (head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship) and Hulk Hogan.

What did you think of that weird lineup?

Barabak: In the annals of political history, there will surely be a place for Hogan, who demonstrated — in case we needed any reminding — that the line between politics and entertainment have blurred to the point of invisibility.

That’s not new. Heck, we’ve had a reality TV star in the White House, and he may be back in November for another four seasons.

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The historically Black neighborhood of Lindsay Heights is only few miles away from the Republican National Convention. But the vitriol and partisan politics of the presidential race aren’t what’s on the mind of its residents.

But has anyone in the history of this great republic ever before torn off his shirt at a national political convention to reveal, below his still-rippling muscles, a red tank top supporting the presidential ticket?

“Over my career, I’ve been in the ring with some of the biggest [and] baddest dudes on the planet,” the 70-year-old Hogan said in the growly voice he wields at stage villains. “Donald Trump is the toughest of them all. They’ve thrown everything at Donald Trump. All the investigations, the impeachments, the court cases, and he’s still standing and kicking their butts.”

But enough was enough, Hogan — whose real name is Terry Bollea — declared before the “real Americans” thrilling to his primal call. After the attempt on Trump’s life, Hogan urged them, “Run wild, brother! Let Trump-a-mania rule again!”

It was all good fun, if swagger and pro wrestling are your thing. Fiserv Forum was full of testosterone.

But there was a hint of menace when Hogan asked, presumably of unreal Americans, “Whatcha gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trump-a-maniacs run wild on you, brother?”

We saw what happened on Jan. 6.

From his box, Trump blew Hogan a kiss.

But let’s take a step back. The big question going in had focused on what Trump’s tone would be. He said he’d torn up his planned speech after last Saturday’s assassination attempt and rewrote his remarks to deliver a less pugnacious, more harmonious and unifying message. Do you think he delivered?

Chabria: He had his moments, but they were few.

He began with an account of the assassination attempt that was subdued and genuine.

Then came the ugly.

He claimed that undocumented immigration was “killing hundreds of thousands of people a year” — though it was unclear what exactly he was referring to — and that immigrants were spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.”

He also got one “China virus” in there, and a few election conspiracies, including an ominous take on losing in 2020: “The election result — we are never going to let it happen again.”

At some point, with all the hate, looping and non sequiturs, it became hard to listen to.

Did you make it to the end of his speech, Mark?

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Barabak: I did, but it wasn’t easy.

The lack of substance wasn’t surprising. Trump has always been a once-over-lightly kind of guy when it comes to policy.

I mean, let’s face it: The ex-president is as much or more of an entertainer than a politician. That’s a big part of his appeal. And folks who go to his political rallies to be entertained are probably used to the kind of stream-of-consciousness, discursive speech he delivered Thursday night.

Not so for most of those — probably the majority — who were hearing Trump speak at length for their first time since he left the White House 3½ years ago.

He piled tangent upon tangent, and heaped ad-lib atop ad-lib — about Hannibal Lecter, Venezuela as a convention site, and the size of crowds that singer Kid Rock draws to his concerts, among other weird digressions — which pushed his remarks way past the attention spans of even some of his most loyal devotees. They could be seen streaming from the hall before he finally, mercifully, finished more than half an hour after his scheduled conclusion.

The long and flabby performance was, at the least, a squandered political opportunity. For those who hung in to the end, it was painful.

Chabria: But I also think what he didn’t say was notable.

The word “abortion” has not been uttered once this week. The Republicans literally sought to talk past one of their greatest political liabilities. We need to remember that Ohio’s Sen. J.D. Vance, the vice presidential nominee, has said he would like to see a national ban.

Trump has settled on the “state’s rights” response, but also appointed the conservative Supreme Court justices who undid Roe vs. Wade. He could easily create a national ban on abortion medication through executive action using the Comstock Act, a law from the 1800s that bans the mailing of any item that can be used to end a pregnancy.

So not speaking about the issue was a craven play for votes. We shouldn’t forget that.

Anything else jump out at you?

Barabak: The effort to humanize Trump and smooth his jagged edges remained in full swing, and at times was embarrassing to watch.

Several who’ve brushed up against Trump — business associates, people who manage his properties, one of his army of attorneys, a golf pro at a Palm Beach resort — took the stage to deliver assorted testimonials that were utterly fatuous when they didn’t fall flat.

Linda McMahon, the former pro wrestling executive who served as director of the Small Business Administration under Trump, told of a meeting where one of his grandchildren climbed onto his lap and mussed his hair.

And Trump was TOTALLY FINE with that!

Trump’s attorney in his hush money/election interference trial, Alina Habba, went on at length about the unfairness of his felony conviction before relating a moment during the trial when she was outside the courthouse, speaking to Trump on a cellphone. When a well-wisher near Habba hollered out, Trump heard the voice and asked to speak to his fan. And he did!

The wonderment in Habba’s voice suggested the loquacious ex-president had just turned water to wine right there on the streets of Manhattan.

John Nieporte, the head pro at Trump’s West Palm Beach, Fla., golf club, raved about him as a “great boss and helluva golfer,” exalting Trump’s game from tee shot to the putting green.

“Donald Trump: 21 club championships. Joe Biden, zero,” Nieporte said, as though that settled the election right there.

It was about as emotionally moving as a cardboard box, as though a bunch of rent-a-pals were trotted out onstage after being told: If there’s something nice you’d like to say, choose the most banal thing you can.

Chabria: It was, as you put it, like watching a Friars roast — just one obsequious testimonial after another. I have to admit, some of my favorite shots were the cutaways to Melania Trump and Usha Vance; their body language was revealing.

Mrs. Trump’s face during the Kid Rock performance was one of pure endurance. And Mrs. Vance looked like she was questioning every life choice that led her to this moment.

Those two women, both strong and smart, were my favorite part of the convention.

Mark, what’s your political bottom line on the event?

Barabak: I’d call it largely a success, though it would have been a lot more successful if Trump hadn’t brought it to such a thudding close.

He had four nights — including a chunk of prime time — to put a high gloss on his presidency and disparage Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. He launched his new running mate and mini-me, J.D. Vance. He fired up his MAGA troops. He showed that, physically at least, the attempt on his life hasn’t taken a toll.

(We’ll see how long Trump keeps wearing that supersized bandage.)

That said, it’s unclear what kind of bounce, if any, Trump will get.

Nothing seems to change the fundamentals of this dispiriting presidential contest, or to move public opinion.

If Trump had stopped after the gripping account of last Saturday’s attack and walked off with some words of reconciliation and healing, he’d have been much better off. He might still get a big bounce. Maybe I underestimate voters’ appetite for long-winded incoherence.

But in the end, what happened this week on the shores of Lake Michigan may end up not mattering very much, given Trump’s consistent lead in polls and Biden’s dire straits.

It wasn’t necessarily a waste of time, however. The folks in Milwaukee were awfully kind, and there was plenty of beer, sausage and pretzels. Thanks to you readers who joined us this week.

Now back to our Golden State.

More to Read

Column: Donald Trump’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Convention Week

Aug. 24, 2024

Column: Kamala Harris faced a high bar for her DNC acceptance speech. She soared past it

Aug. 23, 2024

An ex-boyfriend, a bad boss, an operatic tenor. Trump analogies fly at the DNC

Aug. 22, 2024

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Mark Z. Barabak is a political columnist for the Los Angeles Times, focusing on California and the West. He has covered campaigns and elections in 49 of the 50 states, including a dozen presidential contests and scores of mayoral, legislative, gubernatorial and congressional races. He also reported from the White House and Capitol Hill during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations.

Anita Chabria is a California columnist for the Los Angeles Times, based in Sacramento. Before joining The Times, she worked for the Sacramento Bee as a member of its statewide investigative team and previously covered criminal justice and City Hall.

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Labour’s deadly new austerity is not “boring” – but James O’Brien wants you to think that

LBC host James O’Brien is the perfect poster-boy for the liberal corporate media anti-Tory austerity-to-red-Tory austerity pipeline. He’s also a cautionary tale in centrist commentator goes bootlicking for the Labour Party establishment.

There must be something genuinely rose-tinting about speeches in that famous prime ministerial garden to liberal types. Because, fresh out of Starmer’s callous austerity-riddled speech, and O’Brien has backed the red is the new blue prime minister’s “tough choices” bullshit.

LBC’s James O’Brien makes blunder over “boring” austerity

In one fell swoop, James O’Brien dismissed the fears of everyone Starmer had thrown under the bus in his speech. Granted, he wasn’t fangirling after Starmer as if the prime minister was dropping Oasis’s new hit single for our post-Tory broken Britain times, but he may as well have been. Ostensibly, what O’Brien said was just as out of touch:

‘That was a boring speech, by a boring man, dealing with the boring business of getting Britain back on its feet…’ ‘…and if you don’t like that, you don’t like Britain’, says @mrjamesob after Keir Starmer says he’ll bring back trust in politics. pic.twitter.com/mDiu3ZbPvF — LBC (@LBC) August 27, 2024

It would go something like this:

🎵Thiiiiings.. will only get shitter Before they get better 🎵 And if you don’t agree you actually hate Britaaain 🎵 Not sure I’m feeling this centrist remix https://t.co/DOklmL8jz2 — Soweto Kinch (@sowetokinch) August 28, 2024

As it happened though, thankfully, there were no nauseating Oasis reunion quips. Though it wasn’t without Sky News trying:

“You spent a lot of time today ‘Looking Back in Anger’ – but are you happy that Oasis have decided to reform on your watch?” PM Sir Keir Starmer comments on the band Oasis making a comeback. ➡️ https://t.co/rqox6RoNfI 📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/f1eqQ595Lj — Sky News (@SkyNews) August 27, 2024

Fortunately, we didn’t get Starmer making any tone-deaf “man of the people” blunders after his disgraceful speech. Perhaps the media laying into him for his staggering hypocrisy after his frivalous freebies as he cut the winter fuel payment to pensioners and laid the groundwork for more brutal public sector cuts, got to him. LBC’s James O’Brien on the other hand didn’t have a shred of self-awareness. Starmer announcing more of the Tory’s brutal murderous austerity? People on X pointed out that “boring” wouldn’t be the word they’d use for it:

The speech to me was terrifying and not boring. If you’re bored by the prospect of 10 more years of austerity, you’re incredibly privileged so. https://t.co/1l4zrrhLr3 — Chłoddy (@OfSymbols) August 27, 2024

It is only possible to dismiss the prime minister’s promise of “short-term pain” for the country as “boring” if you are positive that you are rich enough not to feel any of that pain. https://t.co/DZq1sAS9on — Karl Hansen (@karl_fh) August 27, 2024

This is so obscene. Keir Starmer will defend multimillionaires & billionaires whilst cutting public spending and saying he’s making tough choices whilst fueling anti migrant rhetoric & complicity in war crimes. Nothing to do with being bored. Ridiculous. https://t.co/MVndaboSRY — Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) August 27, 2024

If you hate Starmer’s speech, you hate Britain?

Of course, while branding Starmer and his speech “boring”, James O’Brien couldn’t help but lay into those lambasting Labour too.

Specifically, he implied that anyone not supporting Starmer’s swathe of austerity policies are essentially unpatriotic.

Ultimately though, what O’Brien was really saying was, if you don’t like Starmerite austerity, suck it up. Of course, this means anyone who opposes scrapping the winter fuel payment for millions of pensions, or those who want Labour to ditch the cruel two-child limit on benefits:

The “wisdom” of James O’Brien: If you criticise Starmer, you hate Britain. If you oppose austerity, you hate Britain. If you want to feed hungry children, you hate Britain. If you want to stop pensioners freezing to death, you hate Britain. O’Brien is Farage for “centrists”. https://t.co/gG7vHlXKIt — Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) August 27, 2024

Novara Media’s Rivkah Brown underscored that O’Brien was being a good little establishment stooge punching down on oppressed communities fighting for more:

The hatred these people have for anyone so audacious as to want more for themselves than to scrape together a measly existence until they die is off the charts, isn’t it. Their new line is that hope is unpatriotic. https://t.co/aeYVSxwDA5 — Rivkah Brown (@rivkahbrown) August 27, 2024

In other words, shut up and be grateful we don’t have the Tories. Except, Starmer’s speech proved again how he practically is a Tory:

Keir Starmer is serving up the same hideous economic crap which wrecked this country. Don’t be conned by “misery now for gain later”. George Osborne said this. The Tory Brexiteers said this. It’s the same speech rehashed 👇 https://t.co/WvN4Eu4LmX pic.twitter.com/77WonxMMuL — Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) August 27, 2024

Boring is the new buffoon

Overall, James O’Brien’s spiel spelled out what we can likely now expect from the shill liberal corporate media.

During the election debates, one audience member told Starmer he was more of a “political robot” than a person. Now, it seems Labour’s liberal media lackeys are playing into this. However, the thing about “boring” is, that it’s a convenient smokescreen for cruel, continuity Tory austerity politics:

English liberal centrism is a cult of boredom designed to usher fascism in the most banal way possible. https://t.co/fcA6kZIL6m — M O X (@EdwardBarton) August 28, 2024

Ostensibly, this image shields Starmer from legitimate criticisms:

Big fan of how Starmer’s supporters keep having to call him boring in order to deflect from much more pertinent criticisms https://t.co/H11FJtN2y5 — TheIainDuncanSmiths (@TheIDSmiths) August 27, 2024

It’s Boris Johnson’s slick buffooning clown branding, with a stale Starmerite twist. They’re peddling a bog-standard Starmer bore, doing ‘grown-up’ politics now he governs the country.

Of course, this is the big liberal con, with a Conservative capital ‘C’. When it comes down to it, Labour is simply using its economic black-hole to cry “tough choices” and throw marginalised communities to the City wolves of Westminster. Liberal broadcasters like LBC  are simply helping them launder this perception to the public, in much the same way the right-wing press did for the Tories:

The billionaire newspapers cheered on austerity under the Tories and spent years legitimising George Osborne’s bullshit. Now the liberal broadcasters are cheering on austerity under Labour. They all agree, but play this red team-blue team game to give the illusion of choice. https://t.co/shxm1ZkkJX — Ross McNally (@RossMcNally_) August 27, 2024

James O’Brien: blaming everyone but the new government

And it seems this is exactly the image Starmer is aiming for too. Stood in the Rose Garden, the government’s new three-word political slogan was emblazoned across his podium. Stand aside “Change”, because now it’s time for “Fixing the Foundations.”

Naturally, it’s also a not-so subtle swipe at the Tories after 14 years of wrecking the UK. Largely though, it paves the way for precisely more of the same austerity politics that did this in the first place.

To Labour media lapdogs like James O’Brien, people couldn’t possibly dislike Starmer because of his politics. It all goes to show how superficial centrist media commentators like O’Brien are. Ultimately, his privileged take on Starmer’s Osbourne throwback proves how little he cares for the people these cruel policies will harm.

The Tories and its right-wing client media killed hundreds of thousands of people. Now, Labour and its liberal media are gearing up to do the same – with suck-ups like O’Brien leading the charge.

Feature image via the Canary

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What Undecided Voters Thought of Trump’s Speech: Mostly, Not Much

The former president did not win them over — not that they like the alternative.

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By Julie Bosman Jack Healy Eduardo Medina Campbell Robertson and J. David Goodman

Former President Donald J. Trump began his prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday with a message of unity, presenting a softer image of himself that appeared aimed at courting undecided voters.

But then he went on for an hour and a half, a long verbal walk through the kinds of exaggerations about his record and attacks on Democrats that have become familiar to voters from Mr. Trump’s previous two campaigns and presidency.

For a group of undecided voters from around the country, who are sharing their thoughts on key moments in the race with The New York Times, the effect was not strong. Some found the speech off-putting. A few found bright spots. None were swayed.

“I still don’t know what I’m going to do,” said Sharon Reed, 77, a retired teacher-turned-farmer in rural Pennsylvania who previously voted for Mr. Trump but is torn this year. “He tried, I think, to be much more unifying at the beginning. But then he got on his high horse there at the end.”

Ms. Reed’s husband, who watched the speech with her and is leaning toward Mr. Trump, was somewhat more positive. “He’s hitting all the points that I like,” Mr. Reed said, mentioning in particular Mr. Trump’s talk about securing the border and “drill, baby, drill.”

Arnel Ramos, 21, a food service worker living in Milwaukee, had hoped that Mr. Trump would talk about his belief systems, and that she would get to know him better before she casts a ballot in her first presidential election.

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Social Media Reacts To Obama's 'Size' Joke About Trump

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

Former President Barack Obama’s brutal slam about Donald Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes during the Democratic National Convention was the joke heard ’round the world.

“Here is a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago,” Obama said of the former president in his speech Tuesday night, before pointing to Trump trademarks such as ” childish nicknames” and “the crazy conspiracy theories.”

But it’s the moment when Obama also referenced Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes,” and stretched his hands to suggest length is Trump’s real concern, that people really responded to.

Some were incredulous.

I cannot believe this moment happened… pic.twitter.com/u14mY9GD9E — Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) August 21, 2024

Obama making a dick joke about Trump wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card lmao pic.twitter.com/o93z5Kj2dO — RPG Enjoyer 🐉 (@BasedRPG) August 21, 2024

Others were impressed with Obama’s comedic skills.

Ok this is a perfect comedic delivery. pic.twitter.com/7ZOUaG9j19 — Jason Kander (@JasonKander) August 21, 2024

The joke quickly went viral, though there was some debate over whether Obama actually was joking about Trump’s physical attributes, his obsession with crowd sizes, or his trademark use of “accordion hands” when he tells a story.

While making a Dick joke, Obama also mocked trump’s patented accordion playing. Now Every time trump plays the the accordion everyone remembers the Dick joke. https://t.co/753MVr4YAE — @revbug.bsky.social (@RevBug) August 21, 2024

Uh, uh... I'm aware I'm a degenerate and may misread things as such, but err... did Obama just use his hands to gesture that Trump has a tiny dick while mocking him for being obsessed with crowd size? Cause uh, I'm writing that into the historical record regardless. — 🔥Reverend Aiden (@SweetFnLucifer) August 21, 2024

Every time Trump does *accordion hands* from now on, which is always, the audience will associate it with this Obama joke. It was brilliant. — Suz Bee (@SuzBee599785) August 21, 2024

However, “dick joke” was the trending term on X, formerly Twitter, over “crowd size joke” or “accordion joke.”

Still, some people had questions, like how long Obama practiced the hand gesture.

I need to know how much did he rehearse that in front of the bathroom mirror. — Carlos A. Sainz Caccia 🇵🇸 (@sainzcaccia) August 21, 2024

Many people ― especially those in the mainstream media ― seem to clutch their pearls over the bit.

Obama actually framed the need for grace in a really powerful way, and dedicated 5-10 minutes of his speech to bridging divides. But he couldn’t help but make a dick joke so that’s all we’re gonna hear about for 24 hours. — Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul) August 21, 2024

Smh @jaketapper is such a fucking giant man baby Love how Anderson yeeted him the fuck off the air when he tried to bait him into a cryfest over the Obama dick joke pic.twitter.com/bEtF05VTPI — T. Fisher King (@T_FisherKing) August 21, 2024

😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/kARXIAtBVY — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 21, 2024

The NY Post. 🥴 pic.twitter.com/tFkCduTMK3 — Hoodlum 🇺🇸 (@NotHoodlum) August 21, 2024

Obama lambasting Trump for how childish he is, and literally not even one sentence later makes a dick joke. You can't write this stuff. — Jordan (@therealjomjohns) August 21, 2024

War criminal Obama made a small-dick joke about Trump during his DNC speech on the national stage—while most Americans are suffering/struggling—and the cultist Blue Maga crowd is gleefully celebrating it like he’s some hero. What fucking world are we in? — Kamala Harris is a Genocidal Cop (@joleekirk) August 21, 2024

Others suggested fair is fair considering how Trump promoted the false birther conspiracy against Obama.

Barack did a dick joke on live TV at the #DNC2024CHICAGO . The Obamas truly give 0 F's. And you know what? Good for them. Trump promoted the racist birther conspiracy, Republicans ran with it, and forced Obama to produce his birth certificate. Let them humiliate Donald. — Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) August 21, 2024

One person noted that Trump’s political career reportedly began in earnest after Obama brutally roasted him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and thought Tuesday’s speech was a fitting bookend.

“Remember, it was Obama gently ribbing Trump at the correspondents dinner that started all this. Now a dick joke might finish it,” one X user wrote.

remember, it was Obama gently ribbing Trump at the correspondents dinner that started all this. Now a dick joke might finish it. https://t.co/Tvwj5DuecD — Cooper S. Beckett (@CooperSBeckett) August 21, 2024

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Biden supporters applaud his speech as boring - and that was a good thing

President Joe Biden after delivering his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on March 1, 2022. (Jabin Botsford/Washington Post)

WASHINGTON - One prominent liberal felt the speech "left a little to be desired" in its ambition. A veteran Republican strategist called it a "missed opportunity to lead." And the conservative leaning New York Post mocked President Joe Biden for drawing fewer viewers than his predecessors did in similar speeches.

But, in the days that followed Biden's first State of the Union address, Democrats felt better about what they heard. Gone was the talk about being a "transformational" president in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon Baines Johnson. Gone was the talk about sweeping legislation changing almost every facet of American life.

That political downsizing made the speech boring, to some, but Democrats believe that slow and steady won the race in 2020, when millions of voters preferred Biden's promises of boring competence over the chaos of the previous four years.

"That speech wasn't a new Joe Biden. He was saying the same things you'd expect to hear from him if he was sitting on the couch in your living room. He was never about being conservative or liberal, he was always Joe," said Jesse Ferguson, a veteran political strategist for House Democrats.

A poll commissioned by NPR and PBS and released Friday found a historically high bump in Biden's approval rating, up to 47%, from 39% just a week earlier. Independent voters jumped up 10 percentage points in their approval of Biden. And one independent analyst noted the surge of support in the president's own party.

"Biden at 90% approval rating among Democrats. That's better than the mid-70s he's been getting," Nathan Gonzales, the editor of Inside Elections, wrote Friday.

Voters are rewarding Biden for rallying the world against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. On his handling of this crisis, his approval among Democratic and independent voters soared by 27 and 17 points, respectively, from a week earlier.

This crisis helped shore up Biden's previously battered image as a global leader after the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer.

That poll landed a few hours after another blockbuster jobs report came from the Labor Department showing that the economy added more than 678,000 jobs in February.

All this could add up to a temporary sugar high for Biden and Democrats, as a new inflation report will arrive next week and surging costs for everyday goods continue to be, far and away, the biggest concern for voters.

Republicans continue to demonstrate more enthusiasm heading into the November midterm elections. Biden's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine could wind up doing little to thwart Moscow's aggression. And the president's legislative agenda remains in a Capitol quagmire amid Democratic infighting, with no new focus coming from his speech Tuesday.

"Biden decided to stay the course. So, his first State of the Union was like most, a boring catalog of 'accomplishments' and a laundry list, in this case, of progressive proposals for the future," David Winston, a veteran GOP pollster who works closely with congressional Republicans, wrote Wednesday in CQ Roll Call.

The last State of the Union address, delivered by Donald Trump in February 2020, devolved into a fiery, divisive rally that ended with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., ripping apart the pages of his speech.

Instead of that WWE approach, Biden stuck to his "laundry list" of proposals, which proved to be popular when voters were asked about them individually.

President Biden, flanked by Vice President Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on March 1. (Jabin Botsford/Washington Post )

But voters recoiled when all those proposals were presented as one massive piece of legislation, ranging in cost from $2 trillion to $3.5 trillion. Many independents felt that Biden had abandoned them.

"Biden did NOT campaign on this. He'd been a voice of moderation & compromise. He got hijacked," Mark Putnam, a consultant who worked for Biden in previous campaigns, wrote on Twitter in October.

On Tuesday, inside the House chamber, Putnam saw the president settling back into the issue set that anchored his campaign and defined his career.

"That Joe Biden in the State of the Union is the Joe Biden that America voted for. He was strong and he was willing to speak the truth to both the far right and the far left," said Putnam, who ran the ad campaign for the super PAC that supported Biden's 2020 candidacy.

He singled out Biden's denouncing the "defund the police" movement as the "most important" moment.

"We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police; it's to fund the police," Biden said Tuesday. He called for more resources and training to handle confrontations like the one in Minneapolis in 2020 that ended with the police killing of George Floyd, which energized the "defund" movement among liberals. But that movement never gained broad support among most voters.

Republicans credited their surprising gain of more than 10 seats in the House in the 2020 elections to their attacks on that theme.

Politically chastened presidents have used the State of the Union to reposition their parties, quite famously in 1995, when then-President Bill Clinton declared the "era of big government is over."

But that came after Democrats lost their majorities in the 1994 midterms, and Biden is trying this course correction eight months ahead of what is shaping up as a very difficult election for Democrats.

To Ferguson and Putnam, Biden is returning to his roots as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman in the 1980s and early 1990s. He struggled at times in the Democratic presidential primary defending his authorship of the overly punitive 1994 crime law, but he understood that the real-world politics of crime are different from what they are among liberal activists on Twitter.

"The solutions are in the middle, where the country can find agreement, and that has been Joe Biden's playbook his entire career," Putnam said.

Those lines didn't win support from liberal icons such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who used an appearance on MSNBC right after the speech to offer some criticism.

"I think there's some themes that are - left a little bit to be desired for key constituencies in the Democratic base," she told her interviewers. However, overall, she gave Biden credit for trying to bridge the nation's bitter political divisions.

"The president's goal was very clear on really projecting a theme of unity, and I think he stuck to that," she said.

Although Biden's popularity plummeted to the levels of Trump's presidency, the president always maintained one key edge over his predecessor: Most people like Biden.

In late January, Gallup recorded Biden's lowest approval rating thus far, 40%, but Biden was viewed as "likable" by 60% of voters.

A sizable bloc of Americans, about 20%, likes Biden as a person but does not like his job performance. That gives him room to come back from the fall and winter depths of his unpopularity.

Just before the 2020 election, 66% of voters liked Biden, while just 36% considered Trump "likable."

And for strategists such as Ferguson, the best approach is to focus Biden on the themes from his 2020 race and five decades of experience in Washington.

Tuesday served as a good first step.

"It was Joe. He told a story of America as a beacon of freedom in the world and then outlined an agenda for the middle class who built that America. People respond to it," Ferguson said.

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‘So Boring’: Trump’s Snoozy Speech Literally Put His Audience To Sleep

Donald Trump in 2016 vowed to become so boring if elected that people will be “falling asleep.”

On Thursday, he may have finally delivered on that promise with a 92-minute speech at the Republican National Convention that tested the patience and attention span of his own supporters.

“There definitely were some folks dozing off,” Ed O’Keefe of CBS News reported . “A few lawmakers snuck out early.”

Footage from the event told a similar story:

People are visibly falling asleep pic.twitter.com/onD8vdCshZ — Brennan Murphy (@brenonade) July 19, 2024

The reviews on social media were much the same as what was seen on the convention floor:

Legitimately, this is the first Trump speech I’ve seen that is so boring. Trump is 78 years old and showing every bit of it tonight. 😴 https://t.co/XYdjUNFqZt — US Rep Brendan Boyle (@RepBrendanBoyle) July 19, 2024

Those anti anti Trumpers who expected a more measured, grown up, uniting Trump…. Are watching this speech in horror. He’s the same guy, but more boring somehow — Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) July 19, 2024

People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena. Trump is boring the audience. — Edward Luce (@EdwardGLuce) July 19, 2024

Watching Trump putting the RNC attendees to sleep. This was the big speech they waited for? Bad ending to another Trump drama. — Web Godfather (@NickLongo) July 19, 2024

Trump is rambling. He’s low energy. He’s old. He’s boring. And he’s a convicted felon who wants to take our country back only for himself. He has not offered any solutions for regular people. Let’s beat him. — Darrin Camilleri (@darrincamilleri) July 19, 2024

This is the most boring Trump has ever been — Gregg Nunziata (@greggnunziata) July 19, 2024

I’m standing 10 feet from the stage, in a sea of diehards, and some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over. pic.twitter.com/7Y7qDfH5fs — Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) July 19, 2024

Weird, bizarre and low energy is how I’d describe this Trump speech. He sounds detached and bored of his own speech. #RNCConvention #RNC — Dr Steven Buckley (@StevenJCBuckley) July 19, 2024

AWKWARD! CNN Deploys ‘Best Cutaway’ For 1 Line In Eric Trump’s RNC Speech

In RNC Speech, Trump Gives Detailed Account Of Assassination Attempt

Trump Utters The 1 Word He Wasn't Supposed To Say During RNC Speech

Trump's 'Remarkably Dishonest' RNC Speech Exposed By CNN Fact-Checker

WATCH: When a Comic Interrupted Donald Trump's Speech to Call Him 'Boring' to His Face

Curated By : Buzz Staff

Edited By: Shaoni Sarkar

Last Updated: November 17, 2022, 11:07 IST

The Good Liars comic was ejected after calling Donald Trump boring. (Credits: Twitter/@TheGoodLiars)

Comedy duo The Good Liars had interrupted Donald Trump's speech yelling out 'this is boring!' and were ejected. The video from 2019 is viral again.

Former US president Donald Trump wants to have a go at Making America Great Again, again. On Tuesday, Trump announced he would be contesting the 2024 US presidential elections, saying, “In order to make America great and glorious again. I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.” Comedy duo The Good Liars took this moment to share an old video from 2019 where they called Trump “boring” in the middle of his speech.

The Good Liars comic yelled out “this is boring!” in the middle of Trump’s speech. The former president paused briefly to absorb what had happened, then called for the man’s ejection. “Get him out of here,” Trump said. The comic was wearing a Make America Great Again cap and when he was being escorted out, he insisted that he “loved” Trump but he was still “boring”. Somewhere in the process, he also asked Trump to “tell some jokes” and “entertain” the audience.

“The time we called Donald Trump “Boring” to his face,” The Good Liars captioned the video, tweeting it out yesterday. The clip has been going viral all over again.

The time we called Donald Trump “Boring” to his face. pic.twitter.com/dgxaYrzmus — The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) November 16, 2022

The Good Liars are a comedy duo who interview conservatives on the regular, and have unearthed many wild claims from conspiracy theorists. Notable among many such interviewees was one guy who believed that Michael Jackson was alive and that JFK was the acting president. Earlier this year, the duo also interviewed a woman at a Trump rally, who believed that US president Joe Biden was actually actor Jim Carrey in a mask.

Trump filed the paperwork on Tuesday to launch his 2024 presidential campaign, two years after his defeat to US President Joe Biden, news agencies reported. “You can’t stay quiet any longer, your country is being destroyed before your very eyes,” Trump said claiming that teachers, the police, entrepreneurs and the public is angered with the government.

Read all the Latest Buzz News here

• donald trump

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Trump fires off more than 50 Truth Social posts in manic ‘fact check’ during Harris’ DNC speech

Trump posted more than 50 times on truth social during harris’s 38-minute speech, article bookmarked.

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Donald Trump couldn’t let the Democratic National Convention end on Thursday without one last attempt to grab the spotlight from Kamala Harris .

The vice president became the first Black woman to headline a major party’s nomination for the presidency on Thursday evening as she officially took on the mantle of the Democratic party.

She delivered a moving speech that touched on her childhood while also broaching the topic of her 2024 opponent and the threat she says that he poses to the country’s future.

All the while, Trump himself was firing back — not in front of the cameras, but on Truth Social , his social media platform largely populated by his own diehard supporters.

In total, the former president fired off more than 50 posts on Truth Social during Harris’s 38-minute speech. Her address, energetic and punctuated by boisterous cheers, sharply contrasted Trump’s own acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last month, which touched on somber notes at the beginning as he spoke of his attempted assassination but quickly evolved into a ramble which lasted 92 minutes.

While Trump’s Truth Social barrage was billed ahead of time as a “fact check”, it was instead a collection of recycled attack lines and what appeared to be random thoughts spun off from the ex-president’s mind.

“IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” Trump questioned, seemingly in anger, at one point in her address. He didn’t elaborate further.

Other responses from Trump to lines from Harris’s speech were more direct and in-depth. They fell on themes Trump’s advisors clearly prepared for attacks — abortion rights and the bipartisan border security compromise that he instructed his allies to kill in Congress earlier this year.

“The Border Bill is one of the worst ever written, would have allowed millions of people into our Country, and it’s only a political ploy by her! It legalizes Illegal Immigration, and is a TOTAL DISASTER, WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE! She doesn’t need a Bill. As President, Crooked Joe and her could have just said, “CLOSE THE BORDER!” like I did – I didn’t have a Bill, I didn’t need a Bill. The Border Patrol respected me, they did their job. We had the Safest Border in Recorded History!” Trump wrote of the bill championed by James Lankford, the lead Republican negotiator, who blamed the former president for its downfall.

On abortion rights, he claimed: “Everybody, Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, and Conservatives, wanted Roe v. Wade TERMINATED, and brought back to the States,” – a factually untrue statement given that Democrats, at the minimum, have long supporter federal protections for abortion rights.

Trump’s “truthing” appeared to be a stream of consciousness in response to whatever Harris was saying in the moment, with little sign that his advisers had pre-written any material.

If there was one theme that Trump did return to frequently, it was the assertion that Harris, as vice president, had three years to pursue the policies which her campaign has vowed to push for in her administration, such as border security and legislation to reduce housing costs.

“She’s done nothing for three and a half years but talk, and that’s what she’s doing tonight, she’s complaining about everything but doing nothing! She should leave the Speech right now, go to Washington, D.C., close the Border, allow fracking in Pennsylvania and other places, and start doing the things she’s complaining about aren’t done,” he wrote in one post. In another: “No specific programs, ALL TALK, NO ACTION — Why didn’t she do it three and a half years ago?”

Trump is so rattled that he keeps hitting the buttons on his phone while he’s talking pic.twitter.com/U1rXcJPpsU — Acyn (@Acyn) August 23, 2024

Later on Thursday, Trump continued his unhappy tirade against Harris on Fox News to Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum as they anchored the network’s coverage of the DNC. As he heatedly accused Harris of wanting to raise taxes, he could be heard accidentally hitting buttons on his phone’s keypad.

Harris’s four-day convention in Chicago ended with another star-studded night; pop star Pink performed, while comedian Dave Chappelle was spotted in the rafters and actor Ben Stiller was also seen onsite. One star not present: Beyonce, despite a quickly-circulating rumor egged on by the likes of Mitt Romney.

Harris and her new running mate Tim Walz will return to the campaign trail in the days ahead likely boosted by another polling bump stemming from their party’s successful convention. Harris had already risen in the polls ahead of the convention , and was on course to overtake Trump in a majority of the battleground states she’ll need to win the 2024 election.

Trump, meanwhile, is set to headline an event with his running mate JD Vance in Nevada tomorrow; the ex-president has held smaller-venue events throughout the week as he has sought to compete for coverage with his Democratic rivals.

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JD Vance booed during firefighters union speech in which he asked members what have Democrats 'gotten you'?

Vance tells firefighters union they have been ‘let down’ after endorsing biden in 2019 election.

JD Vance booed during firefighters union speech

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is booed by crowd at International Association of Fire Fighters Convention.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance was booed Thursday by some members of a firefighters union in Boston while delivering a speech in which he asked members "after supporting Democrats for so long in this union, what has it gotten you?" 

The boos were heard immediately after Vance took the stage at the International Association of Fire Fighters Convention, leading him to say "sounds like we got some fans and some haters." 

"That's okay. Listen to what I have to say here, and I'll make my pitch," Vance continued – but he was met with jeering again later in the speech when he declared former President Trump and himself the "most pro-worker Republican ticket in history." 

Vance, who spoke a day after Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz addressed the same convention, asked the union to question their past support of Democrats. 

TIM WALZ ATTEMPTS TO COURT FIREFIGHTERS DURING SPEECH AT BOSTON CONVENTION: ‘WE’LL HAVE YOUR BACK’  

JD Vance reacts to being booed by some in the crowd at the International Association of Fire Fighters Convention. (Pool)

"In 2019, this union endorsed a Democrat for president with high hopes," the Ohio Republican said. "But sadly, I believe you've been let down." 

"And we have to be honest, my friends, the hard truth is that Kamala Harris is the latest in a long line of Democrats who come by every few years asking unions for money and promising you the moon, but often failing to deliver. After supporting Democrats for so long in this union, what has it gotten you?" Vance continued. "Over the past 70 years, union membership in this country -- and this is not a good thing -- has declined. 

"The influence of unions has declined, and the wages of working people, union and non-union alike have not kept up with the pace of inflation over the last three and a half years," Vance added. "So I want to ask you a question that Donald Trump asked America in 2016. What the hell do you have to lose?" 

CHICAGO SCHOOLS SLAMMED FOR DELAYED CALENDAR, ENCOURAGING STUDENT ATTENDANCE AT DNC  

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks on stage during the International Association of Fire Fighters Convention on Aug. 28, in Boston. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

Vance also asked firefighters to remember the wave of anti-police protests that swept through America in the summer of 2020, saying that "we sure as hell will not bail out the criminals like Kamala Harris did." 

"The criminals, many of whom were going after our firefighters as they tried to keep our cities safe and put out the fires. We're going to put criminals behind bars where they belong, and we will always stand with the courageous firefighters and the first responders who keep this country safe every single day," Vance said. 

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, disembark from their campaign bus in Savannah, Georgia, on Wednesday. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

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"We're going to defend your right to free speech, including your right to speak out about unconstitutional COVID vaccine mandates imposed by the current administration," he also said. "We're going to abolish every single mandate, and we're going to fight to rehire every firefighter who was wrongly terminated with all the back pay that they deserve." 

Greg Norman is a reporter at Fox News Digital.

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This Crew Is Totally Beatable

Democrats just need to believe they can do it.

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

A t the climax of the Republican National Convention last night, former President Donald Trump’s nomination-acceptance speech was a disheveled mess, endless and boring. He spoke for 93 minutes, the longest such speech on record. The runner-up was another Trump speech, in 2016, but that earlier effort had a certain sinister energy to it. This one limped from dull to duller.

Somebody seems to have instructed Trump that he was supposed to have been spiritually transformed by the attempt on his life, so he delivered the opening segment of his address in a dreary monotone, the Trump version of pious solemnity. After that prologue, the speech meandered along bizarre byways to pointless destinations. A few minutes before midnight eastern time, Trump pronounced a heavy “to conclude”—and then kept going for another nine minutes. Perhaps it was the disorienting aftereffect of shock, perhaps the numbing side effect of painkillers.

Whatever the explanation, Trump demonstrated in Milwaukee that President Joe Biden is not the only national politician diminished by the years. Trump too is dwindling into himself, even more isolated from such facts about the external world as elapsed time and audience impatience.

Read: The new Trump is always the old Trump

Formless and digressive as it was, the speech did have one major theme—a theme that underscores why and how the Democrats should be winning this race.

Trump stood on the podium in Milwaukee to sell nostalgia for his term in office. In fact, the Trump presidency ended in disaster, by many measures the worst fourth year of a presidency since Herbert Hoover’s in 1932: pandemic, mass death, economic collapse, rioting, and a surge in violent crime. By contrast, Biden’s presidency is delivering the best fourth year since … whose? Bill Clinton’s in 1996? Ronald Reagan’s in 1984? Calvin Coolidge’s in 1924?

Unemployment has reached the lowest level in more than half a century. The post-pandemic inflation has stopped and gone into reverse. The stock market has soared to record highs. Social indicators too are improving from the chaos left behind by Trump. In each year of the Trump presidency—not just in pandemic 2020, but for each of the three years before that—the rate of marriages and childbirths in the United States dropped. Under Biden, marriages and childbirths are rising again. Drug-overdose deaths are decreasing. The Trump-era violent-crime wave is receding at last.

The contrast could not be starker. Yet, if the polls are correct, it’s not helping Biden.

The Trump theory of his presidency is that Trump deserves credit for the good times of 2017, 2018, and 2019 and no discredit for the crisis of 2020. But both halves of that are backwards. The economy started growing fast in 2014, so Trump arrived in office just in time to claim credit for work that had been done by his predecessors. Managing crises is what Americans hire presidents to do, but Trump’s crisis management was almost uniquely bad. He responded to the pandemic with a blend of denial, callousness, and quackery; then he responded to 2020’s nationwide spasm of riots and the crime spike that occurred on his watch by casting blame upon others.

One of Trump’s skills is that he is a superb marketer of terrible products. Anybody can promote a great steak or an elegant hotel, but Trump’s a genius at touting bad steaks and tacky resorts as if they were actually quality items. He’s doing the same with his record as president. He wants accolades for the strong economy in place when he arrived, while he effaces the memory of the wreck he bequeathed.

The truth is that Trump’s record as president was the same as his record as a businessman: rich until the inheritance ran out.

W hy can’t Democrats make more effective use of the catastrophe left behind by the Trump presidency? Two reasons: one incidental, the other arising from defects in the party’s values and organization.

Here’s the incidental reason: The job of defining what a presidency is all about—in other words, what it wants to do and what it has accomplished—is inescapably the president’s and his alone. If he cannot do that, he concedes the game before it has started. Trump was an unfathomably lazy president. He idled away the equivalent of almost a full year of his presidency on golf courses. When not golfing, he wasted hours upon hours watching—and complaining about—cable news. But however little time he committed to work, one task he did not shirk: demanding and getting credit for good news on his watch.

Come a strong jobs report or a new stock-market record and Trump would boast and brag and ballyhoo. Nothing positive went unadvertised by a president who understood mass media better than the mass media understood themselves.

That has not been Biden’s way. He has seldom succeeded in directing the nation’s attention where he wanted to go. Frequently, he did not try to do so. He worked more than Trump, but somehow mattered less. Jobs and wages might go up; voter opinions about the economy went down. By last summer, real wages were rising faster than at any time under Trump. Yet Americans continued to express negative assessments of the economy deep into 2024. The Biden presidency has too often disappeared into that gap between perception and reality, a gap that a different president might have closed.

Compare two election-year State of the Union addresses: Clinton’s in 1996 and Biden’s in 2024. Clinton began his economic report within the very first minute of his speech:

The state of the Union is strong. Our economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades. We have the lowest combined rates of unemployment and inflation in 27 years. We have created nearly 8 million new jobs, over a million of them in basic industries, like construction and automobiles. America is selling more cars than Japan for the first time since the 1970s. And for three years in a row, we have had a record number of new businesses started in our country.

Biden also had good news to tell:

I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now our economy is the envy of the world! Fifteen million new jobs in just three years—that’s a record! Unemployment at 50-year lows. A record 16 million Americans are starting small businesses and each one is an act of hope. With historic job growth and small business growth for Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. Eight hundred thousand new manufacturing jobs in America and counting. More people have health insurance today than ever before.

But Biden took a quarter of an hour to get to that news.

This Clinton-Biden disparity reveals something bigger than a difference in presidential style. The Democratic Party has profoundly changed since the 1990s. Today, tremendous power within the party has been amassed by groups and factions that speak for grievances. Good news is contrary to their principles and their purpose. Nobody can be happy if anybody is unhappy. They seem to believe that the way to reelect an administration is to detail all the things still wrong after four years of holding office. Here’s the advice Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut was offering Biden on the eve of his disastrous first debate with Donald Trump: “You should spend 80 percent of the time telling the story of how the drug companies screwed people, and 20 percent of the time explaining the solution. We do the opposite.”

Last year, The Washington Post ’s Paul Waldman remarked upon the Biden administration’s “fear of being seen as out of touch—or their fear of being scolded by participants in an elite debate that is invisible to most of the electorate.” That latter observation was exactly correct. Above all else, the Biden administration feared scolding by progressive interest groups. Those groups gain clout within the Democratic universe by accusing and disparaging. They imagine that the same techniques might work for an incumbent Democratic president with a record to defend, seeking to persuade swing voters. They don’t, and they won’t.

T he Republican National Convention cast a bright light on the party of Trump’s weaknesses: its extremism, its cultishness, its lack of welcome to the majority of Americans. The central idea implicit in the vice-presidential nominee’s speech was the superior Americanness of those with seven generations of ancestors buried in U.S. ground over those whose ancestors are buried in other places. The central idea in the presidential nominee’s speech was “me, me, me, me, me” for more than an hour and a half.

This crew is as beatable as any reactionary minority faction ever was beatable.

Read: The Democrats aren’t even trying

Democrats seem to be convinced by the hope that the way to inflict the beating is to change leadership. But the biggest defect of the present Democratic leadership was imposed by the Democratic followership: the reluctance to accept the fact that four years of non-Trump leadership have accomplished an enormous amount that is worth defending.

With a predator’s cunning, Trump has always understood that the first step to winning the confidence of others is to project confidence in oneself. Trump has used that understanding for his own crooked and criminal purposes. But the same understanding can be put to good use by better people.

Believe! Or lose.

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The Defeat-Harris, Get-Trump Politics of Protest

Trump’s Plan to Raise Your Taxes

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Here’s How Long Trump’s Insanely Boring RNC Speech Lasted

It appears that not everyone at the Republican National Convention was loving Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech Thursday night. What began as an intense retelling of Trump’s attempted assassination at a rally on Saturday gradually devolved into the same meandering, anti-immigration fearmongering Trump has touted throughout his campaign.

Dispatches on X, formerly Twitter, from within Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum said that Trump had a little trouble holding the crowd’s attention, as his speech stretched to one hour and 32 minutes, the longest nomination acceptance speech on record .

“People starting to leave. Loud chattering on fringes of the arena,” wrote Edward Luce, an associate editor at the Financial Times, who weighed in a little over an hour into Trump’s speech. “Trump is boring the audience.”

Around the same time, The Atlantic ’s Tim Alberta wrote that even in the middle of the crowd, people were growing impatient. “I’m standing 10 feet from the stage, in a sea of diehards, and some are getting restless. Checking phones, stealing glances at the teleprompter, whispering about when it will be over,” he posted.

Wajahat Ali, a columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote that there were “a lot of concerned faces in the RNC crowd right now.”

“Definitely a different energy from an hour ago. I think some people are going, ‘Uh … what’s happening,’” he said.

While the energy in the room started high, with a wild appearance from Hulk Hogan and a weird rap performance from Kid Rock, Trump couldn’t keep the excitement alive as he worked his way through all the same beats as ever, sounding a bit more subdued than in his typical rants.