MAGA Pushes New Conspiracy to Prep for Trump Losing Biden Debate

With Donald Trump’s debate with President Joe Biden approaching on June 27, conservatives are quickly scrambling for excuses in case Trump performs poorly.

Speaking to Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump Monday night on Fox News, Sean Hannity speculated that “the Joe Biden that we’re talking about tonight; I don’t think will be the Joe Biden we’re gonna see on debate night.”

“I think the Joe Biden we see on the debate night is gonna be the guy that we saw at the State of the Union,” Hannity said, using some gibberish to mock the president. “He’s going to be all hyped up, hyper-caffeinated, whatever ‘it’ is.”

It’s not the first time Hannity has speculated about Biden taking some kind of drugs to go head to head with Trump, and he made similar remarks last week on his TV show evoking Republican complaints about Biden ruining their “Sleepy Joe” narrative at the State of the Union earlier this year.

“Whatever Joe drank, ate, took before the State of the Union—maybe it was just Red Bull and caffeine pills. I don’t know,” Hannity said last week. “Whatever it was, that was not the normal Joe. We never saw it before, and we haven’t seen it since. But we will see it for the debate.”

It’s also telling that Hannity’s latest remarks came in an interview with Lara Trump, who told the conservative pundit in May that she thought the debates would be rigged in favor of Biden.

Hannity’s remarks were echoed by Representative Ronny Jackson, who went on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast Monday and speculated with the son of the convicted felon about the drugs he thinks Biden is taking.

​​“Some of those are drugs that are engineered to try and help with your cognition. Some of them are just to try and make you more awake—the amphetamine-type drugs like Adderall and things of that nature, and then there’s things like Provigil that increase your alertness,” Jackson said. “So, I think they’re probably trying to find just the right mix of stuff that can wake him up and make him a little bit more alert and with it.”

Under Jackson’s watch as Trump’s personal physician while he was president, the White House Medical Unit reportedly prescribed those very same drugs along with other sedatives and stimulants in large quantities to officials in the Trump administration, even earning nicknames like “Candyman” or “Dr. Feelgood” within the White House.

It seems like Jackson should be looking in the mirror when speculating about Biden, or perhaps he is engaging in projection. Or Jackson should be keeping an eye on his former patient. Over the weekend, Trump repeatedly called him “Ronny Johnson” at a Detroit rally, fumbling through his remarks while bragging he had aced a cognitive test for the umpteenth time.

In a rude reminder of how debased U.S. politics have become, a close ally of President Joe Biden revealed the secret sauce behind his approach to helping the Democratic nominee prep for his debate in the 2020 election cycle: embody Donald Trump at his “Trump-worst.”

In a new book, The Unraveling, former White House counsel Bob Bauer explained the mechanics behind his unusual approach, which ultimately projected Biden as a poised, no-nonsense candidate beside the notoriously bombastic forty-fifth president: Be “as personally insulting and unhinged as Trump can be.”

To help Biden prepare for their first face-off on September 29 in Cleveland, Bauer wrote that he “got into the role” and “watched hours of tapes of the 45th president, as a businessman, a 2016 candidate, and then in office, and read transcripts of his extemporaneous remarks on every conceivable topic,” according to an advance copy obtained by The Daily Beast.

He also took notes from Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, observing that the younger sibling really knew “how to get under her brother’s skin.”

But unlike other debate prep approaches to Trump, Bauer writes that he didn’t attempt to look like the former president. Instead, he was laser-focused on verbal insults, hand gestures, and the intonation of Trump’s voice.

“I needed to become comfortable with heaving insults at Joe Biden,” he wrote.

The results were clear. Bauer’s conditioning helped Biden remain calm and collected during the two debates, and the prep even helped to elicit arguably the most iconic line of the match-ups, with Biden asking Trump: “Will you shut up, man?”

Meanwhile, political advisers and news outlets have attempted to identify Trump’s own battle tactics for the presidential debates since he first appeared as a legitimate candidate in 2016. The Atlantic argued that Trump relies heavily on a rhetorical approach called the Gish gallop, which they describe as a “torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments” in which one can bury their opponent.

One political insider told Politico Magazine that Trump has “no strategy, just kill and eat.” And Vox created a seven-part taxonomy of Trump’s approach, observing that he “turns tough policy questions into simple stories,” filibusters until the clock runs out to avoid giving details, and leans on his poll numbers and meaningless, three-word slogans.

Four years later, it’s not entirely clear what strategy Biden will employ for his next face-off against Trump, scheduled for June 27 in Atlanta. But whatever it is, let’s hope it’s a good one.

They say a lie travels around the world before the truth has time to put on its pants. Lies shoot through MAGAworld before the truth even has time to wake up and figure out what the heck is going on. On Monday, far-right accounts began circulating videos purporting to show fencing and barricades lining the Supreme Court. The only hitch? There aren’t any fences or barricades around the Supreme Court. The claim originated out of thin air.

QAnon conspiracy theorists and, of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene shared the footage, with many speculating the fences and barricades were put up ahead of an impending ruling from the Supreme Court on presidential immunity. “Are they afraid that the left is not going to like the ruling?” asked one far-right aggregator account in a now-deleted post. “This could be for the Presidential Immunity case later this week,” speculated Greene in response. According to The Daily Beast, the account MTG boosted deleted its bogus post, with Greene’s speculation continuing to stick around like a dense fart before she finally quietly deleted it on Tuesday.

NBC News court reporter Daniel Barnes posted a photo outside the Supreme Court debunking the spreading rumor, quote-tweeting serial plagiarist Benny Johnson’s assertion that there was fencing around SCOTUS. Barnes’s debunk was succinctly captioned, “No there’s not.” Turns out much of the footage Johnson used originated from a post made by D.C. radio reporter Mitchell Miller reporting around the building following protests ahead of the high court overturning Roe v. Wade in May 2022.

The Supreme Court has until July 1 to issue its decision on presidential immunity, a case Trump brought to the court that will determine whether he can claim immunity from federal charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A federal appeals court unanimously denied his claim in February, declaring, “We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.” The Supreme Court has multiple options on how to decide the case, with some indications in April that they may kick it back down to lower courts.

The Supreme Court has a hilarious opportunity to rule against Trump and foil the aspirations of his staunchest supporters concocting nonsense for clicks. In the meantime, there are plenty of better options to meet your thirst for content other than spinning silly yarns. Subscribing to The New Republic is a fantastic one.

Right-wing media behemoth Sinclair Broadcast Group has doubled down on its misleading reporting about President Joe Biden, insisting that they stand by their coverage despite basing their assumptions on highly questionable edited footage and verifiable misinformation distributed by the RNC.

The cable news network has advanced a coordinated story across 86 of its local news websites over the course of June, targeting Biden’s age and physical ability based on social media posts made by RNC Research, a wing of the Lara Trump–run Republican National Committee. But some of the stories went beyond the facts and into the realm of fiction, including accusing Biden of physically freezing and being in a “stupor” during a White House Juneteenth event. Another article baselessly claimed that Biden had pooped himself at a D-Day memorial event in France, all based on a video of the president sitting down, reported freelance accountability journalist Judd Legum.

Responding to an issue of Legum’s newsletter, Popular Info, which examined the company’s deceptive tactics, Sinclair responded that the claims were “FALSE.”

“We do not ‘work with’ any political party and to insinuate otherwise is spreading disinformation,” Sinclair’s corporate account wrote on X. “Our political reporting includes sources/comments/posts/research from both sides of the aisle. We stand by our journalists and their reporting.”

In a private notice, Sinclair further accused Legum of failing to be “objective” while examining its reporting tactics—tactics that included automatically syndicating identical, questionable stories across dozens of its affiliates on the same day at the same time, seemingly without any editorial discretion or vetting time allotted to the local editors and reporters staffing the channels.

But denying the accusations didn’t stop Sinclair from trying to clean up its image. Shortly after responding to Legum, Sinclair’s national desk published a new story acknowledging that Donald Trump has his own “problems stumbling over words and mixing up dates.”

Donald Trump visited a half-assed, half-white event at a Black church on Saturday, in a desperate and botched attempt to stir up support among Black voters in Detroit—but none of that is as bad as what he did next. 

Trump went on to deliver the keynote speech at the Turning Point USA “People’s Convention,” alongside his old buddy, far-right activist Charlie Kirk. 

Kirk, a meme-loving fascist who is known for getting booed off of college campuses and then whining that the girls there don’t like him, happily announced that he’d be partnering with the Trump campaign earlier this month. For someone trying to court the support of the Black community, taking the stage with someone as openly racist as Kirk is nothing less than mind-boggling. 

Earlier this year, Kirk tried to make waves by suggesting that the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, was a “mistake” and that the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped to create a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy,” which he believes to be harmful to white men like himself.  

Last year, Kirk posted to X (formerly Twitter), “Whiteness is great. Be proud of who you are.” Earlier this year on his podcast he fretted over flying in an airplane flown by a Black pilot. 

“I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified,’” he said, before insisting that it’s not what he believes, but how DEI initiatives make him feel. To Kirk, unabashed racism is a necessary “thought crime,” one that sets him apart and gives him power. 

Kirk founded Turning Point USA in an attempt to consolidate the conservative youth movement and then systematically draw them further and further right. Trump hopes to harness this power to reach the conservative youth vote, which Kirk purports to influence, but honestly, even that doesn’t seem like it’s going well. 

If Trump’s Black church roundtable failed to draw in Black audience members, it seems that Turning Point USA’s pull for the youth vote was also unsuccessful: The crowd skewed distinctly old, according to Mother Jones.