The new 2024 election optics

We are big supporters of President Joe Biden. There have been many posts here outlining his accomplishments and tremendous successes, including:

–strengthening America’s economy and creating a record number of jobs;

–leadership and respect around the world, as well as expanding NATO;

–protecting the rights of women and minorities;

–successfully placing hundreds of federal judges on the bench, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson;

–forgiving over one hundred billions of dollars in student loans (despite Republican efforts to stop it); and more.

Likewise, we have laid out the reasons why President Biden deserved Democratic support for his presidential re-election efforts, such as the fact that he is the incumbent president who decided to seek another term, and that he won the 2024 primaries (with over 14 million Democratic votes) very handily.

But reality has taken a different turn. Whether events of the past few weeks are fair or not, President Biden has announced that he will no longer seek the nomination for president in 2024. Instead, Biden has fully endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the job.

Normally, we would want to spend days grieving over and processing what happened. However, with the 2024 elections just 105 days away, and the Democratic National Convention (where the presidential and vice presidential candidates are formally nominated) only 27 days from now, there is no time for that. Instead, we grieved for about half an hour, and then pivoted to Vice President Harris.

Donald Trump, convicted of 34 felonies

The mainstream “news” media threw themselves a big party over the last two weeks. Ever since President Joe Biden, with a cold, a lifelong stuttering problem, and after crisscrossing the western hemisphere from Normandy to Los Angeles, had a bad performance at the presidential debate on June 27 (arguably only for the first 20 minutes), the “news” outlets have run stories about him nearly 24/7. The coverage has been relentless and unfair, for example, focusing on the few people in Congress who say Biden should withdraw from the election (or who are wishy-washy), rather than the overwhelming majority who support him to beat Donald Trump. While President Biden just gave a forceful speech at the NATO Summit, the coverage instead focuses on “Biden’s Fitness Under a Microscope.”

What do these media outlets want? One answer is: eyeballs and money. The Guardian revealed their media business plan with this headline yesterday: “‘Blitz primary’: the scenario that could turn replacing Biden into a ‘riveting spectacle.'” The other thing many such outlets want is to defeat President Biden and the Democratic Party. These big media corporations increasingly skew Republican. For example, David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery (which owns CNN) just tried to play coy about not favoring one presidential candidate over the other. However, he gave away the game by saying that:

We just need an opportunity for deregulation, so companies can consolidate and do what we need to be even better.

Of course, Zaslav and everyone else knows that such talk of “deregulation” is the classic language of the Republican Party.

What these media outlets are not talking much about during their anti-Biden celebration is Donald Trump. Trump has reportedly been mostly in hiding since the debate, recognizing that the media are doing a better job of bashing Biden than he, Trump, could ever do. When Trump does emerge briefly from the golf course, it’s to tell lies and spout bizarre “false grievances” such as “we don’t eat bacon anymore.”