Trump Keeps Spreading Notorious Abortion Lie in Biden Debate

Donald Trump repeatedly insisted during Thursday night’s presidential debate that Democrats have advocated for abortion legislation that will allow doctors to kill newborn babies.

“He can take the life of the baby in the ninth month, and even after birth, because some states—Democrat-run—take it after birth,” the former president said. “Again, the governor, former governor of Virginia, ‘put the baby down, then we decide what to do with it,’ so he’s, he’s willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby. Nobody wants that to happen, Democrat or Republican. Nobody wants it to happen.”

“That is simply not true,” Biden responded.

Biden was right, both as a policy, and as a point of definition, a fetus cannot be aborted after it has been born. That’s not abortion, it’s plainly infanticide. A policy of infanticide was not the standard of care under Roe v. Wade.

Trump’s right about one thing, nobody wants that to happen, including President Joe Biden, who promised to restore Roe v. Wade if elected.

On Thursday night, half an hour before the first 2024 presidential debate between Biden and Trump, Biden posted on X (formerly Twitter) an image of himself holding a canned drink called “Dark Brandon’s Secret Sauce” with the caption, “I don’t know what they’ve got in these performance enhancers, but I’m feeling pretty jacked up.”

The canned drink, which is available for sale for $4.60 each, lists its ingredients as “MAGA tears, mysterious orange liquid, melted chocolate chip ice cream.” The stunt appears to be winking at a conspiracy that’s been circulated by Team Trump ever since the debate was scheduled, claiming Biden’s predestined debate success would be the result of him getting pumped up with drugs.

Hours before the first Biden-Trump presidential debate on Thursday, House Republicans tried reviving an old 2020 debate conspiracy theory in hopes of helping out Donald Trump.

The theory, elevated by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, is based on a statement published in October 2020, signed by 51 former intelligence community leaders casting concern over the release of emails purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden. Republicans claimed the statement was a “coordinated hit against President Trump.”

The House Judiciary GOP also claimed the “51 former intel officials coordinated with the Biden campaign to publish a statement to discredit @NYPost reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Biden family’s influence peddling.” That alleged “influence peddling” stems from yet another conservative conspiracy concocted by an FBI informant with ties to Russian intelligence who was charged with lying to Congress for claiming Hunter and Joe Biden were paid $5 million apiece to place Hunter Biden on the board of a Ukrainian energy company to protect the company from investigation.

The letter at the base of the conspiracy theory was published on October 19, 2020—and it didn’t confirm or deny the authenticity of the Hunter Biden emails. It only noted that the distribution of them appeared “deeply suspicious” and contained “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” To that end, the letter stated:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.

But since its release, Republicans have insisted the letter was crafted by the CIA at the behest of Biden—pointing to the fact that he brought up the statement in one of the 2020 presidential debates against Trump. (At the time, most experts agreed that Trump lost both presidential debates handily.)

In reality, the statement was written by officials acting in their individual capacity (which is why they all signed it under their names!). Yet some of those who signed had active contracts with the CIA, a point of disdain in the intelligence community as it poses a conflict of interest and throws the CIA into the political muck. That’s really only a boon for conservatives, who have enjoyed years of insisting Trump was cheated out of a second term by the CIA and FBI.

Republicans have tried to add a new twist to the old conspiracy theory by pointing to a recounting from former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, who in April 2023 testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Morrell detailed receiving a call from Anthony Blinken, who at the time was an adviser on Biden’s campaign, about the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s emails.

“[Blinken] asked me if I thought that the Russians may have been involved in any way in the emergence of these emails,” Morell said in his testimony, noting that he hadn’t seen the New York Post story prior to Blinken’s call about it. Asked what the intent of the letter was, Morell responded, “One intent was to share our concern with the American people that the Russians were playing on this issue. And, two, it was to help Vice President Biden.” Asked why he wanted to help Biden, Morell responded, “Because I wanted him to win the election.”

Conservatives have incessantly confused the Hunter Biden situation, claiming—as with the Fox News segment cited in the video published by the House Judiciary GOP account—that the concern expressed by the 51 signatories about Russian interference in the distribution of Biden’s emails was not about the distribution. Instead, conservatives argue, the intelligence community, Biden campaign, and Democrats all colluded to claim Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake in its entirety. That’s simply not what the letter says.

As Raw Story’s Daniel Hampton notes, the timing of the released testimony is suspicious, seemingly intended to give Trump a reheated talking point to throw at Biden during Thursday’s debate. It also appears to be its own attempt at election meddling, a way for Republicans to get back at the “spies who lied” for releasing their letter that was issued three days before the last presidential debate of 2020. In any case, meddling sure is a funny way to condemn meddling. Join The New Republic’s live debate watch party at 9 p.m. E.T. here to see if it comes up.

Republicans are still hung up on diversity, equity, and inclusion principles somehow being a factor in the 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment, where toxic chemicals were released into the town of East Palestine, Ohio.  

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg appeared before the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure Thursday to discuss the committee’s 2025 fiscal budget and oversight of the department, but the conversation quickly went off on a tangent about the derailment. 

“Norfolk Southern, in their annual shareholders report, said that they were going to focus on DEI initiatives over anything else, and that’s what led to that accident,” Representative Mike Collins said to Buttigieg, who quickly responded in the negative. 

“I’ve never seen a single shred of data or evidence associating what happened—and somehow trying to blame that on women and minorities, that really is not consistent with what the [National Transportation Safety Board] found,” Buttigieg said, referring to an NTSB report on the disaster released earlier this week, with Collins trying to speak over him the whole time. 

Collins has blamed the recent rise in freight train derailments on DEI for more than a year now instead of actual factors, such as deregulation, railroad companies lobbying politicians for weaker laws that made the rails less safe, or the poor working conditions imposed on rail workers. He seems to have given weight to nonsensical conspiracy theories instead of the obvious reality: Corporations are putting profits over safety. 

It’s no surprise that Collins would blame DEI, as it’s conservatives’ favorite bugbear these days, becoming a useful euphemism for racism and bigotry. Republicans in Congress introduced a bill to ban DEI from all government offices and contracting earlier this month, and blaming DEI was among the many conspiracies thrown around after the Baltimore bridge collapse in March. Last year, DEI was blamed for the Hawaii wildfires, and Ron DeSantis has practically used most of his time as governor of Florida to launch a statewide crusade against DEI.

Who’s to say Donald Trump won’t try to sneak in DEI in Thursday night’s presidential debate? After all, he and his supporters have already announced plans to fight the made-up problem of “anti-white racism” if the convicted felon returns to the White House. 

Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction is going to try to push Christian nationalism into the state’s schools by requiring every teacher to have a Bible in their classroom and use it for lessons.

“The Bible is a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system,” Ryan Walters said Thursday during a state school board meeting. “It is one of the most foundational documents used for the Constitution.

“Every teacher, every classroom in the state, will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” Walters added.

This rule blatantly violates the Constitution, but in Walters’s defense, he’s not great at citing historical precedent. He has previously denied that the infamous Tulsa race massacre had anything to do with race.

The move comes two days after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a religious charter school couldn’t receive public funds, otherwise it would violate the establishment clause, which prohibits the government from establishing or favoring a particular religion over others. Walters tried to intervene in the case but was denied three times.

It seems that the ruling, as well as a new Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms, has inspired Walters to make a move of his own. He even cited the state Supreme Court case in Thursday’s meeting, promising to take his new rule to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Louisiana has already been sued over its law, with the case likely headed to the nation’s highest court. The law’s backers have tried to defend the measure, only to fail miserably. In Walters’s case, he might defend his rule by enlisting the woman behind the anti-LGBTQ+ social media account Libs of TikTok, Chaya Raichik, who already supervises Oklahoma’s school libraries. However, one wonders how Raichik, an Orthodox Jew, feels about teaching the New Testament in schools.

Walters likely won’t have the support of Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, who led the charter school lawsuit and called the state Supreme Court decision “a tremendous victory for religious liberty.” But Walters may have the backing of Oklahoma’s Governor Kevin Stitt, who said the ruling sent a “troubling message.” In the end, the support that matters will likely have to come from the U.S. Supreme Court, whose rulings on religion in public schools have tilted toward the Christian right.