Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
The first time the moderators countered his obvious dog-whistle lies I was absolutely blown away. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Then I started laughing and didn't stop.
The correction was really well done and completely natural by both moderators, I almost didn't register what happened. Love to see it.
Donald's whimpering rebuttal of "but but I saw it on TV" objectively did the most damage to his image of everything I have seen to date.
This. He sounded like a 5yo.
That's insulting to 5-year-olds. Many of them can actually complete sentences before going on to the next thought.
Especially from the guy who made the phrase “Fake news” famous.
He’s definitely sundowning.
It still blows me away that he managed to take over the term “fake news”.
It was introduced as a way to explain how social media was leading gullible people into MAGA, but he turned it into a term for persecution of MAGA by conventional media.
It was actually an incredible move. I can’t think of anything he’s spun that well since 2016.
My favorite moment from the whole thing was when Harris offhandedly mentioned that his rallies were bad, and he spent a full minute of his rebuttal time insisting that his rallies were awesome, then started arguing with the moderators when they fact checked him. You could see that that, above everything else that went on, rankled him. It really highlighted the narcissism.
The highlight for me for the whole debate was not Trump's pet-eating outburst but the perfect setup and execution Harris did to bait him into that unhinged rant instead of talking about immigration.
She "invites" people to go to Trump rallies. She follows up the point about people leaving rallies early with a note along the lines of: you're about to watch Trump not talk about you. Sure enough, he fell into the trap, and Trump talked about what he cared about most at that moment.
It took him like 2 minutes to do everything she said, right in front of him, that he would
The thing is, he looked visibly confused. As if he truly believes that the things he sees on TV are absolute truth.
Too bad they let him continue to lie about the thing they just fact checked, let him talk beyond his allotted time, reapond when it wasn't his turn, and shut down Harris the one time she tried to respond out of turn.
The moderators crossed an extremely low bar on fact checking last night, but did everything else the same way they always have.
All his talking didn't help him at all. I don't think the Harris side cared about him self-destroying his image and giving lots for the talk shows later to make fun of.
It's complicated, since the Harris campaign wanted him to have more opportunities to ramble, interrupt and get mad. They were very much counting on him being himself and comparing that to someone who can speak in coherent sentences without getting mad.
He shut her down twice. The one time was really over the line. But I loved the moderator saying there is no place in the USA that executing babies is legal. Wtf, 9 month abortions? Lol
That really showed what a shitbag outfit CNN has become under it’s new conservative ownership group. They are a wolf in sheep’s clothing now.
“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” he said. Then he suggested a model: “Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”
Malone’s comments didn’t resonate much beyond a couple of places: At Fox News, which responded with glee, and inside CNN, where they sounded alarm bells.
—New board member and billionaire John Malone, a legend in the cable TV business and one who has deep and longstanding ties with David Zaslav
They barely even fact checked him in the first place. They called him on a total of, what, three things? As opposed to the probably dozens of other complete untruths he uttered, not even just about policy and so forth but actual empirically verifiable elements of reality?
Here's just what I spotted:
There were probably others.
He also essentially admitted that his plan for the war in Ukraine was to just let Russia win. That should be pretty damn worrisome for anyone.
I wish they had pushed him harder on the simple yes or no questions.
Also, Harris missed a perfect opportunity to point out that Trump has been the only president that has advocated a gun ban. "take the guns and figure out due process later"
I'm sure he was completely truthful when he said he didn't read Project 2025. It would be very surprising if he read anything besides Mein Kampf.
The only way he actually read Mein Kampf is if it came in picture book format
I learned that what he does actually has a special name. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.
Conservatives are mad that "they only fact checked Trump", and yeah, there's some truth to that...
But they let him tell so many little lies unchallenged. They only fact checked him on the egregious stuff like "Haitians eat pets" and "post-birth abortions".
Harris may have said some half-truths or omitted context for a few things, but she never told a single non-truth comparable to the things Trump got fact checked for.
The worst actual post-debate criticism I've heard for Harris was that she continues to say that Trump will enact Project 2025 and a federal abortion ban as president, despite his statements denying support for these things. The thing is, Trump is a huge fucking liar, and a Republican, so yeah, she's right to keep saying what he will absolutely do as president, despite his lies to the contrary.
Harris may have said some half-truths or omitted context for a few things, but she never told a single non-truth comparable to the things Trump got fact checked for.
The problem with Harris is that she's a professional politician who knows how to skirt the line. So you can challenge her on a point and she can clarify it in her favor and then PoliticoFactCheck has to do a 500 word article getting to the nut of the issue (and they'll get called liars for their biased interpretation too).
But "Black people in Ohio are eating all your dogs" is much more straightforward and easier to debunk. Same with "infanticide is legal in California".
Trump is a huge fucking liar, and a Republican
He's ForwardsFromGrandma tier racist. Even as lying goes, it comes across as weird and vulgar.
we know definitively that trump is tied to project 2025, so yeah she's going to keep saying that.
Didn't he also get like an extra 5-7 minutes of talk time? He would "answer" a question, Kamala would giver her rebuttal, then he would be like "wait a minute I need to respond to that" and they would let him.
Yeah, definitely a double standard on mic control. Any time he opened his mouth they turned his mic on, she tried once and they did a hard pass. Hell, even while they refuted his dog eating claims his mic was on talking over the moderator.
And that's because all of the media loves Trump. They have a bias, sure, but they know the crazy shit he says sells views/headlines and that's their business, informing the public is a byproduct.
a federal abortion ban as president, despite his statements denying support for these things
They straight up asked him the question, and he refused to answer it. So, she didn't tell a "half truth" - he literally refused to say he would veto a national ban when directly given the opportunity to do so.
As for project 2025, it's his playbook. Whether or not he will specifically call it that, doesn't change the fact it's how he wants to dismantle the federal government.
It drives me crazy knowing that anyone takes this absolute clown seriously.
It drives me crazy that no one asks him normal ass questions. Like: can you elaborate? Can you point at it on a map? Do you know what that word means?
Repeat the lies early and often and the general population will eat it up.
Carlin's quotes about average American voter still rings true today.
This was one reason I appreciated Harris repeating "Project 2025" several times. There's likely voters that didn't know about it, and it's possible her saying it enough got it in their heads to look it up. Can you tell I'm trying to be optimistic?
What’s even sadder is that he would 100% be president right now if he didn’t constantly stick his foot in his own mouth.
Everything about Trump makes him one of the most awful human beings alive, and yet he would be the leader of the free world if he wasn’t also incredibly thin-skinned & stupid.
He was gifted a nonpartisan crisis in an election year. He is so dimwitted and inept that he turned it into a wedge issue. He couldn't handle epidemiologists getting attention he wanted.
If you don’t want to be fact checked, maybe don’t repeatedly insist that Florida’s abortion ballot measure will legalize killing newborns.
The problem is that no one fact checks him in his personal life, so he thinks it’s just a thing his political opponents do. But the reality is that no one thinks it’s worth the time to correct his wrong way of thinking, esp. when he can be a useful idiot and use his wrong ideas to distract from the issues at hand
No mic should ever be placed near this man again.
Pence: Please do not place me near this man again.
Didn't he say he won the debate? What's he mad about?
Should have been locked up ages ago, but seeing him this humiliated almost makes up for it.
“The press is so dishonest in this country, it’s amazing,” Trump said. “Now, I didn’t mind because frankly I was pretty sure that’s what they would do. CNN was much more honorable—the debate we had with Biden was a much more honorably run debate.”
I felt better about the one where I creamed the senile old guy. The one where a younger, Black, WOMAN was awful.
He also said that the full context of his quotes on Charlottesville make it clear that what he’d said was “absolutely perfect.”
It was a perfect phone call!
Nevertheless, Trump claimed the evening had gone well for him. “I’ve been told I’m a good debater,” he said. “I think it was one of my better debates. Maybe my best debate.”
You're right, you've never done better. Way to go, shithead.
Don't worry Mr. Orange, I called emergency services for you.
Shut HIM down. Lying sack of shit fully believes his own shit. That is strongly indicative of mental deviance enough to disqualify any politician
I'm not sure there were opportunities to fact check harris and the one point where trump said it was disproven the "fact check" basically takes trump at his word that trump wasnt talking about the nazis.
Which is a black mark on snopes for allowing an unprovable statement as a fact by a guy known to lie and walk back his missteps.