Biden publicly demolishes Trump in brutal speech

Sunday Dose of Democracy:

Biden jabs at Trump: "What a loser"
In a fiery speech to Maryland Democrats, President Biden publicly went after Trump for his corruption and his narcissistic obsession with vanity projects before urging Democrats to stand up and fight back. Hear, hear!

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excerpt:
Hanover, Maryland —

As he rallied Maryland Democrats at a state party fundraiser Saturday night, former President Joe Biden decried the actions of the man who succeeded him in the White House, painting him as vain and corrupt.

“It’s not just his vanity projects, tearing down the East Wing of the White House making room for his ballroom, putting his name on the Kennedy Center, building an arch in his own honor, even hiring his own pool guy to fix the reflecting pool. Woah! What a loser,” Biden told attendees of the gala, which was held at a Maryland casino.

“The reflecting pool reflects something even worse than the narcissism and incompetence at the core of this administration,” he continued. “It’s the corruption, the corruption, the brazen, blatant corruption. Corruption on a scale never seen before in American history in any administration.”

The Bidens’ son, Hunter, seems to be everywhere and talking about everything. He’s drawn a large following on social media – more than 800,000 followers on X – where he’s fired off a steady stream of posts on his past struggles with drug addiction and musings about politics. He’s sat for lengthy podcast interviews, including a two-hour sit-down with the controversial right-wing podcaster Candace Owens.

In an interview on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast, Hunter Biden spoke openly about how one of his father’s most controversial decisions will be remembered.

“He chose me over his legacy. Because no matter what you say that’s going to be one of the first things that is written about him,” Hunter Biden said of his father’s decision to pardon him after insisting he would not do so.

Attempts to shape Biden’s legacy could come into sharper focus in the coming months. The former president has spent much of the year working on his memoir, though an official release date has yet to be announced.

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Trump gets nightmare surprise at his own celebration
The Trump-coopted 250th anniversary state fair is being marred by some serious attendance issues. The smallest crowds you've ever seen, folks. TENS of people!

FOX NEWS = FAKE NEWS LIAR PRETENDS THIS IS A SUCCESS?

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Trump gets nightmare news as his top impeachment witness launches run for Senate
Alexander Vindman for Senate: Alexander Vindman made history as one of the star witnesses in the first impeachment case against Trump — and now he’s running for Senate so he can hold the wannabe dictator accountable from the halls of Congress. Vindman has vowed to take on "a Republican Party that’s failing to deliver accountability and underwriting chaos and corruption," but to win in Florida, he’s going to need some help. Can you chip in to help kick-start his run?

TRUMPISM LUNACY!

30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech
Seth Stern, Jeremy Busby, The Intercept: "The Trump administration attacking the right to publish or report information is a given at this point. The president has threatened journalists for everything from questioning the wisdom of his failed war with Iran to touching the peeled lining of his renovated reflecting pool. Tantrums like those may now feel routine, but this week marked a new front in Trump’s war on information: Daniel 'Des' Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write. He’s one of eight defendants sentenced on Tuesday to a combined 450 years — the first prison sentences against so-called “antifa” handed down under the framework of NSPM-7, President Donald Trump’s sweeping 'counterterrorism' memorandum to clamp down on dissent from the left.

The prosecution’s theory was that Sanchez moved the zines, which discussed anarchism and other anti-government ideas, to conceal evidence in the case against his wife, Maricela Rueda. Rueda attended a July 4, 2025, protest at the Prairieland immigration jail in Texas where a police officer was shot. (She was not accused of shooting him or having anything to do with the shooting but was herself sentenced to 70 years.)

But that nuance is cold comfort: It assumes that simply possessing years-old political pamphlets that said nothing about the protest or shooting could somehow constitute evidence of a crime. Sharing the political ideology of the shooter, the government contended, meant Rueda and her co-defendants were culpable for the shooter’s actions — and by allegedly attempting to prevent officers from finding out about Rueda’s ideology, Sanchez shared in the blame as well. We’ve reached the point in the erosion of the First Amendment where the government considers possession of anarchist zines and membership in a terrorist cell to be more or less the same thing. Once the box of zines was discovered, there was no need to prove Rueda planned or had any idea that anyone would be shot at the protest. What’s worse is that this will likely only ramp up the administration’s efforts to criminalize being in possession of information."

FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

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America’s 250th celebration is Donald Trump’s lost cause
Jason Linkins, The New Republic: "We’re closing in on July Fourth and the nation’s 250th birthday, and right on time, the all-knowing digital algorithm deposited a memory from 2015 on my screen: That year, burning the Confederate flag on Independence Day was in vogue, sparked by the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. My fondness for desecrating rebel iconography is not restricted to either a national holiday or a national tragedy—we should have fully conquered the Confederacy when we had the chance, instead of allowing them to commemorate their traitorousness. Maybe those nine parishioners would be alive today if we’d done a better job discrediting that toxic ideology.

That’s some food for thought here in 2026, as an ailing, flailing President Donald Trump sets his sight on being the ringmaster of the clown show he has planned for the Fourth. When Trump’s not losing wars or setting the economy on fire, he’s busy turning the nation’s capital into an orgy of self-aggrandizement ahead of next week’s semiquincentennial celebration. At Wednesday’s kick-off event for his 'Great American State Fair,' Trump announced that 'America is back.' Where had it gone?

The president proclaimed that 'a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.' All of this is definitely a product of ego, but it’s also highly reminiscent of Confederate kitsch. Trump’s drive to commemorate himself, which has even run afoul of some of his fellow Republicans, is animated by the same idea as the Lost Cause: to lend legitimacy to a period of betrayal and to ensure this malevolent force lives on. Allowing the Confederacy to commemorate itself was a profound failure on our part, and it seeded the earth for the weakening of our democracy.

As Trump plans to sully the District of Columbia’s skyline with his triumphal arch (now with more fist!), I can see history repeating: Trumpism as the new Lost Cause. Trump is now deep into his dotage (and perhaps his inexorable decline). He has no campaigns left to run and no further need to worry about uniting the American people to build some kind of sustainable electoral coalition. These days, the president is motivated entirely by thoughts of his legacy. But the Lost Cause schtick remains the same—only now it’s manifesting itself in his relentless pursuit of various vanity projects and alterations to Washington, D.C.

The possibility that he might not be remembered seems to vex Trump, whose administration moved with the same sort of alacrity to forestall the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center as it did in fighting its inane war with Iran. As Brian Beutler reported in his Off Message newsletter, Trump’s name only came off the building because Ohio Democrat Joyce Beatty, as an ex-officio member of the center’s board, had the standing to sue over the matter and she took the opportunity.

We should look to future Democratic presidential candidates to follow in the footsteps of Beatty and commit to a cosmetic de-Trumpification. It would send a strong signal that the party will brook no attempts to commemorate a discredited president—and that it has the stomach for the civic deworming this nation needs to kick off its next century."

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The hidden pronatalist agenda behind the right's attack on education
Anna L. Philippe, Current Affairs: "Last year, at a Women’s History Month event, Donald Trump called himself the 'fertilization president.' The moniker is an obviously pronatalist one, and it comes alongside a rise of cultural and political concern over the birth rate, particularly on the right. That concern is based on the fact that the United States birth rate has fallen considerably since 2007. Put short, pronatalism describes philosophies, practices, and policies that encourage higher birth rates. Importantly, while pronatalism is in some cases a personal belief ("it would be good if I had several children"), it is also a deeply legislated and institutionalized force. That is, at its fullest extent, pronatalism involves governments incentivising people to have children, often via coercion. That’s how you get a 'fertilization president.' Trump and many of his allies are staunch pronatalists who panic about the so-called birth dearth as an imminent threat to the future of America and Western civilization more broadly.

Significantly, the Trump administration and a coalition of Republican lawmakers have also enacted a full-scale war on abortion rights and access. It’s imperative to understand the criminalization of abortion in the context of pronatalism because attacking abortion isn’t just about philosophical and moral disagreements; it’s about, as feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan said in 2023, 'penalizing any woman who wants to have non-reproductive sex, who wants to have sex for any reason apart from serving the patriarchal reproductive order, producing new bodies.' Abortion, especially in a moment of rising Great Replacement fears, sex positivity, and challenges to cisheteronormativity, is about control.

But beyond attacking abortion and offering women financial bribes, the Trump administration has been pushing forth its pronatalist agenda in less obvious ways. Of focus here is education policy, which has been a stomping ground for indoctrinating young people with pronatalist messaging—often also including pro-family, pro-marriage, and pro-patriarchy messaging, and teaching gender as a fixed binary. What I’ve described here isn’t an attack on women’s bodies, reproductive justice, or education, but a coordinated expression of all three. So it’s frustrating that many education policy reformists consider reproductive justice as a battle fought on another front, and vice versa.

This comfortable intellectual, political, and on-the-ground siloing is precisely what the right has so effectively taken advantage of in recent years. And they’ll keep going. Show up to parents’ meetings, run for your school board, or send your school board a guide to sex education in just one click. Figure out what your kids are and aren’t learning at school, and fill in the gaps when you can with holistic reproductive information. At the same time, education reformists should consider how education policies can alter the reproductive lives of students and contend with how indoctrination bleeds into embodied control. Advocate for robust support for student parents and for people who don’t want children to pursue education without shame. If we want to respond purposefully to this multifaceted attack, this is the path we must take."