Monday, July 29, 2024

Nothing Is Out Of Bounds In Attacking Kackling Kamala


One of the challenges of defeating Kamala Harris is figuring out just what to slam her on. There are so many powerful lines of attack to use against this leftist hack that it takes some consideration to figure out which is the most effective. But already, some Republicans are trying to help leftists place some of the most potent attacks are being put off limits. We’re being told there are certain things we just can’t say about her. We’re not supposed to mention that she’s a goofy weirdo with an evil laugh. We’re not supposed to mention she’s an incompetent DEI hire. And, of course, we’re not supposed to talk about her sordid history of sexual ladder climbing.

No. We hit her with everything. 

We must talk about whatever is important to any audience at any given time. Not every attack is appropriate from every critic; some attacks are more generally effective than others, while some attacks are effective with niche groups but ineffective with other groups. We need to pick and choose from her smorgasbord of atrocities. But there will be no declaring that some attacks are just too mean and, therefore, illegitimate. If you don’t have the stomach to point out her creepiness, her DEI incompetence, or her past as an eager protΓ©gΓ© of powerful dudes, don’t presume to lecture those who do.

Many people I respect want to avoid the harsher personal critiques, but they think that for a good reason – because they believe other attacks are more effective. It’s not that these people are weak. It’s that they want to win and, therefore, prefer what they consider to be stronger attacks. These are tactical differences, and there are good arguments that there are better lines of attack than those three above. For instance, the Trump campaign is pursuing her pinko policies as its main line of attack. I tend to agree, in general. Her communist policies are disgusting, and credit goes to fellow Gulf War veteran David McCormick – if you are a Gulf War vet, you know a little something about total victory – for putting up the first and deadliest ad eviscerating her policy. 

But we should not declare the other lines of attack forbidden. You don’t forgo a weapon in a death match because using it is unsporting. You certainly don’t do it because the truth is somehow unseemly. Our country is in the balance. I’m willing to be unseemly if that’s what it takes. And for some people, we are trying to reach, that is what it takes.

Not all audiences will respond to mocking her hyena cackle or her general weirdness. Some will. The DEI critique will fall flat for some people; however, it is deadly to her in front of other audiences, like the working class and white-collar workers people tormented by incompetent higher-ups put in position because of their skin tone and plumbing. Some people will not respond well to talk about her grody body count, but others think her dalliance with the elderly Willie Brown getting her first political gigs is important and disqualifying.

We do not get to presume to decide what bad facts about Kamala Harris should matter to our voters. They get to decide that. There are a lot of voters out there – like me – who are disgusted by the fact that her dating history gave her a head-start in politics. Maybe it does not bother you, maybe you think it doesn’t matter, but it bothers me, and I think it matters. And the Democrats have been less than reticent about deploying rhetorical sex life bombs on Donald Trump. Where was the “Oh well, I never!” chorus then?

The rap on this line of attack is that it will turn off squishy suburban women. Yes, some will be traumatized, literally shaking and seeking consolation from their cats. But it’s not going to turn off all suburban women. I’m not convinced that suburban women generally want to hand wave away Kamala’s Jezebel act – as if no woman has even been critical of another woman’s antics. Have they ever met women? And a lot of men will respond to this line of attack, too. Why should we ignore appealing to them to avoid offending people who will never support us? 

The fact that some people find talking about her personal resume distasteful doesn’t change the fact that there are many people out there for whom this is an important fact that, if known, will make them disinclined to vote for Kamala Harris. That’s what we’re after – disinclining people to vote for Kamala Harris, not burnishing our credentials as good people who are nice and seemly and would never, ever send a mean tweet. The mean attacks matter to a lot of people, and they have a right to have it matter to them. We cannot tell the customer what he wants; we need to give the customer what he demands.

Again, this is not to say these are generally effective lines of attack or that they would work launched from every speaker to every audience. After all, they could turn off some gettable voters or take up the space of better, more effective lines of attack. Not every message must be delivered by every messenger. For instance, Trump should mock her weirdness because that’s what he does. He should point out that if not for DEI, she would be a shabby HR director at some second-tier marketing company in San Jose. But he should focus, as he has been, on her policies and her participation in Dementiagate rather than dating history, not to be nice but because leaving that can of worms to surrogates is more effective. That line of attack from Trump himself would be counterproductive, so he should not launch it. 

It’s all about getting voters a complete picture of this nightmare woman. It’s not about being nice. We need to spend exactly zero time tone policing our own side. I don’t expect Mike Johnson to get up there and talk trash about how she was Montel Williams’s bimbette, but I do expect him to shut up about the conservatives who do. Some conservative commentators will hit her on that, and we don’t need any prissy scolds performatively chastising them. It’s not our job to tell other conservatives to behave or to deplore them for honestly reporting on Kamala Harris’s many flaws. If she doesn’t like it, she can get in a time machine and choose better boyfriends.

I have even less use for those who would run away from the fact that she is the ultimate diversity child. I find it absolutely bizarre that these Fredocons are telling us that we should cease pointing out that Kamala Harris is an incompetent DEI hire. She is an incompetent diversity hire. There’s no dispute about that, at least until her regime media allies memory hole all the Democrat celebrations of her being a diversity hire like they edited the ones about her being the border czar.

The leftists are already out there trying to get us to stop calling her a DEI dowager. They’ve decreed that it is a racial slur to point out that a person benefited from DEI while at the same time asserting that DEI is necessary, good, and wonderful. It’s all baloney, and we shouldn’t play along with it. The regime media hacks are already calling us “racist,” so who cares if they taunt us a second time? The fact is that DEI is electoral poison, something just hated not only by our own voters but by the kind of voters who we are trying to bring over to the Republican side. Do you think there’s some sort of love for DEI among the working-class guys in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin? No. A DEI advocate is as popular as a herpetic participant at a San Francisco orgy, an image that I cite for no particular reason. 

Why would we give up any line of attack? And why would we give these creeps any credit when it comes to choosing our strategies and tactics? Do we think the regime media is trying to help us? “Conservatives, don’t you talk about DEI because that’s going to make it harder for Trump to win!” Come on. 

It’s totally inexcusable that there are also allegedly conservative-oriented people out there advocating that we forego this powerful weapon. Many of them are the kind of people who, like Jeb!, are more comfortable in failure mode. Winning makes them uncomfortable; doing what has to be done to win even more so. It’s coming from a bunch of soft Beltway people trying to ensure that no one screams at them about being racist while they are picking out organic tomatoes at Whole Foods.

Nothing is off the table; no one gets to tell our voters what does and does not matter. But that does not mean we should not focus, prioritize, and target our messages and use the appropriate messengers. We must be flexible and nimble. We must choose the smart who, what, when, and how to achieve the most dramatic effects on the target. 

But we must embrace the concept that there are no enemies to our rights. We cannot attack each other for how we message. No tone policing. No content policing. If you get some conservative-oriented guy out there talking about how Kamala Harris was passed around like a bad penny or about how she’s the quintessential quota queen, and you don’t like it, shut up. Stop talking. It’s not your problem. It’s not your place to presume to correct fellow Republicans. Let them do what they do. Focus on your own tactics. If you’re not firing at the enemy, you shouldn’t be firing at all.

Let’s get serious about winning, people. Kamala Harris is a clown but a dangerous one who can absolutely win this election. If she does, our country as we know it is doomed. Her policies are poison – and this is probably the best way to attack her in general. But it’s not the only way to attack her. We must have, like with energy, an all-of-the-above strategy. We must hit her everywhere and hard. If you don’t have the stones to play rough, maybe you should go play a different game. This is all about winning. 



X22, And we Know, and more- July 29

 




TikTok heeded CCP demands to censor videos outside China: Classified US intel

 US government case against TikTok heats up with new classified intelligence filings on Friday

Beijing has already succeeded in directing the social video app TikTok to “censor content outside of China,” according to a classified Department of Justice brief filed Friday in a case that casts one of the world’s most popular media platforms as a Chinese Communist Party weapon poised to attack Americans during an election or geopolitical crisis in the same manner as Chinese cyber-spies and hackers that are currently buried within North American critical infrastructure, according to security officials.


The court battle ultimately pits Washington against Beijing in a struggle for hearts and minds waged between the world’s top democracy and its top surveillance state.

The DOJ filings aim to enforce a 2024 law enacted by Congress compelling TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell its short video app and secret-sauce algorithms to a custodian that would be accountable to U.S. national security concerns.

TikTok, used by 170 million, mostly teen Americans, on the other hand, claims it is protected by the U.S. Constitution and can work with security officials to mitigate concerns. U.S. officials say suggested remedies such as a “kill switch” that would turn TikTok off during a crisis aren’t sufficient.

According to U.S. lawmakers and expert testimony, ByteDance is one of many Chinese media and tech companies that can be compelled under Beijing’s national security laws to covertly harvest data from global users and participate in espionage and interference operations.

“A foreign power's secret manipulation of the content on social-media platforms to influence the views of Americans for its own purposes poses a grave threat to national security,” a brief filed Friday by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland says. “Among other things, it would allow a foreign government to illicitly interfere with our political system and political discourse, including our elections.”

Garland’s argument relies chiefly on a sworn statement from Casey Blackburn of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Blackburn’s testimony is highly redacted to protect U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

But the former CIA official’s analysis differs from previously reported U.S. allegations against TikTok in this highly publicized battle.

That is because Washington believes China’s use of TikTok is more than a potential threat.

In some nefarious way Beijing has already used the app globally, U.S. intelligence alleges.

“The PRC is expanding its global covert influence posture to better support the Chinese Communist Party's goals. The PRC aims to sow doubts about U.S. leadership, undermine democracy, and extend the PRC's influence abroad through its online influence operations,” Blackburn’s July 25th statement says.

“Intelligence reporting further demonstrates that ByteDance and TikTok Global have taken action in response to PRC demands to censor content outside of China.”

Blackburn compares the TikTok threat to the presence of PRC hackers, known as Volt Typhoon, that according to FBI investigations are pre-positioned for cyber-attacks against U.S. critical infrastructure networks.

"China's hacking program, which spans the globe and thus affects U.S. partners as well, is larger than that of every other major nation combined,” Blackburn’s statement says.

“Allowing the Chinese government to remain poised to use TikTok to maximum effectiveness at a moment of extreme importance presents an unacceptable threat to national security,” Garland’s brief concludes, citing Blackburn’s evidence. “The Chinese government's maintenance of TikTok as a potential threat is of a piece with its general strategy of pre-positioning its assets for use at a time of its choosing.”

The allegation that China has used TikTok in censorship globally doesn’t indicate where the operation occurred and in what context.

The censorship accusation is made in a blacked out series of paragraphs that are titled “Risks of PRC-directed censorship and algorithmic manipulation.

Prior to these paragraphs, Blackburn states “there is a risk that the PRC may coerce TikTok to covertly manipulate the information received by the millions of Americans that use the TikTok application every day.”

Following pages of blotted out U.S. intelligence that would seem to refer to known cases of such activity outside the United States, Blackburn states:

“Nonetheless, the intelligence community's concern is grounded in the actions Bytedance and TikTok have already taken overseas and in the PRC’s malign activities in the United States, that while not reliant on Bytedance and TikTok to date, demonstrate its capability and intent to engage in maligned foreign influence and the theft of sensitive data.”

FBI counterintelligence officials are also cited in DOJ evidence filed Friday.

“The FBI assesses that the PRC could use its AI capabilities to augment its influence campaigns such as amplifying preexisting social divisions and targeting U.S. audiences through TikTok’s algorithm by promoting and suppressing particular videos,” a classified filing says.

Other filings says FBI Directory Christopher Wray has testified the U.S. would likely not be able to see China’s control of TikTok while such an operation were occurring.

But “TikTok’s and ByteDance’s tight interlinkages with the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party,” have already been proven, according to the filings.

In one case, in April 2018, “in response to PRC concerns about violating PRC content guidelines, the founder of TikTok publicly pledged to increase the number of censors from 6,000 to 10,000, while creating a blacklist of banned users and developing better technology to boost censorship,” they say.

More broadly, they argue “the Chinese Communist Party seeks to undercut U.S. influence, drive wedges between the United States and its partners, surpass the United States in comprehensive national power, and foster norms that favor the PRC's authoritarian system.”

"The PRC's cyber espionage pursuits and its industry's export of surveillance information and communications technologies increase the threats of aggressive cyber operations against the United States and the suppression of the free flow of information in cyberspace,” the filings continue.

Specifically to TikTok, Blackburn’s filings explain how TikTok's "For You" page, driven by a proprietary recommendation algorithm, could be weaponized for PRC-directed censorship and algorithmic manipulation.

Blackburn also referenced the PRC's broader espionage efforts, including "extensive and years-long efforts to accumulate structured data sets, in particular on U.S. persons to support its intelligence and counterintelligence operations."

He cited past incidents where the PRC's intelligence services stole data on over 147 million Americans from a U.S. credit agency and health data on nearly 80 million Americans from a U.S. health insurance provider.

Finally, Beijing’s sophisticated incursions via social media platforms can only be expected to increase in the run-up to this fall’s U.S. Presidential elections, the filings suggest.

"The PRC's intensifying efforts to mold U.S. public discourse or magnify U.S. societal divisions in ways favorable to the PRC should be a cause for significant concern,” they say.

sam@thebureau.news

https://www.thebureau.news/p/tiktok-heeded-ccp-demands-to-censor?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1444443&post_id=147123475&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=rd3ao&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email


Democracy in Name Only: How Kamala Harris Became Democratic Nominee

The fact that the Democrats have settled on someone as preposterous as Kamala Harris as their candidate is a sign of their contempt for the American people.


Like many commentators, I have described the sudden, almost magical elevation of Kamala Harris to the status of presumptive Democratic nominee for president as a “coup.” “What just happened,” I wrote on July 23, “is essentially an anti-democratic coup. Kamala Harris, who got no delegates—zero—when she ran for president in 2020 and was only chosen as Biden’s running mate because he had promised to pick a black woman, is on the cusp of being handed the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.”

How did that happen?  If you said, “It happened because of the machinations of the deep state,” go to the head of the class. Even Donald Trump has called what just happened a “coup by the Democrats.”

But Mark Steyn makes a good point when he observes that, in many ways, what just happened to Joe Biden was not a “coup” in any ordinary sense. A “coup” (from the French “strike, blow”) suggests an abrupt intervention that brings about a change at the top. The element change is a major part of what a “coup” in this sense means.

Yet what change has the Biden-Harris pas-de-deux brought about?  Until the very morning of the day he announced his withdrawal, Joe Biden and his team were insisting he was in the race till the end.  His debate performance against Trump was a disaster, true, and his poll numbers were in free fall. No matter. He was going to tough it out.

There are a few things to remember, though.  For one thing, Biden’s poll numbers had been in free fall for months. For another, the idea that the debate revealed for the first time  how cognitively challenged Biden was is ridiculous.  It had been obvious for years that he was slipping in and out of senility.  Back in 2020, I described Biden as “an empty cipher . . . a drowsy Howdy Doody puppet, manipulated by a committee of ‘woke’ ventriloquists.”

At the time, I noted, Biden’s “painfully obvious flirtation with senility was as much an asset as a liability, because, though it made for some cringeworthy displays of incompetence, it conspired with COVID-19 to allow his handlers to keep him tucked safely away in his basement for most of the campaign.” Indeed, I had even earlier compared Biden to the aged Achon, a character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief.  The legitimate but inconvenient emperor of the fictional kingdom of Azania, Achon, had been safely confined to a cave for 50 years. After some elaborate negotiations among the real powers of state, Achon is set free and is carried to the capital to be invested as emperor. Alas, his long captivity left him bent and senile. He dies upon his coronation.

Biden lasted a bit longer.  But the point is that the Council of Elders that manages The Narrative knew from the start that Biden was past it.  Nevertheless, aided by the propaganda press, they worked assiduously to cover up the truth. “Oh, Joe is sharp as a tack,” they told us ad nauseam. “He’s intensely probing,” etc.

Nevertheless, the appalling truth was leaking out like dark, malodorous scum from a ripped bag of garbage. Indeed, I speculated that the reason the Democratic establishment scheduled the debate between Trump and Biden so early—remember, Trump hadn’t even clinched the nomination yet—was to give Biden one last chance to prove himself.

Obviously, he failed. But that apparently had no bearing on Biden’s commitment to stay in the race. That was the state of play when I got on a plane from London to New York last Sunday morning. “I’m in it till the end.”  By the time I landed, however, Biden’s bizarre announcement that he was dropping out of the race—on his personal, not his official POTUS X account, with no mention of endorsing Kamala—was lighting up the internet.

I have no idea who finally prevailed upon Biden to drop out or what threats or inducements they dangled before him. But it is clear that the action disenfranchised voters.  The existential Muzak that had been filling the corridors and elevators of our lives was full of encomia to “democracy.” Here at last, we saw up close and personal what the Dems meant by “democracy.”  They meant, as I have been fond of pointing out, rule by Democrats. That’s what “democracy” means in their lexicon. It has nothing to do with voting, rules, or process.  It has everything to do with maintaining power for oneself and denying it to the other side.

This was the point of Mark Steyn’s curious quibble about whether what we have just witnessed with the cashiering of Biden and the elevation of Kamala was really a “coup.”  In a deep sense, Steyn argues, “The operation was the inversion of a coup: it was to prevent the possibility of any change.”

Just before his election in 2008, Barack Obama famously (or infamously) said that we were on the threshold of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”  He was right about that.  But the irony was that the transformation entailed the establishment of political stasis. Throughout his first term, Donald Trump endeavored to change some important things, to roll back that “fundamental transformation” that Obama had overseen. The FBI and other agencies of the regulatory state, abetted by the propaganda press, intervened to stymie him at every turn.  He was investigated, indicted, impeached, nearly bankrupted, and, just a week or so ago, shot.

The Dems love the rhetoric of “change,” just as they cherish the word “democracy.”  Their actions show that they are hostile to both.  Change is incompatible with the maintenance of their perquisites and privileges, just as genuine democracy is fraught with peril for the establishment.  Take democracy seriously and who knows? You might wind up with someone like Donald Trump.  As I have often observed, that was Trump’s original, unforgivable sin: being elected.  Above all, his democratic election was an affront to democracy, or at least to “Our Democracy™.”

What happens now? I do not know. I think Mark Steyn is right: “The goal of the Permanent State remains the same: nothing will be permitted to change.”  Once again, Donald Trump has the temerity to challenge that dispensation.  He is much better organized this time around, and he seems more determined than ever.  The fact that the Democrats have settled, at least for the moment, on someone as preposterous as Kamala Harris as their candidate is probably a sign of desperation, at least in part.  But it is also a sign of their contempt for the American people, and contempt is an attitude that is, in the metabolism of political life, never far from hubris.

Traditionally, nemesis is the regular concomitant of hubris.  I know that Dems—and, indeed, many Republicans—disbelieve in the operation of such quaint, antique moral processes.  That very fact may be another sign of their hubris.

In any event, I like to think that the movement Trump represents may finally dissolve the iceberg of greedy woke sentimentality that holds America hostage.



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Democrats Declare Florida in Play for Kamala, and the Reason Is Hilarious


Bonchie reporting for RedState 

After a week of polling following Joe Biden's sudden departure from the 2024 presidential race, the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is officially tight. The former president holds a small lead nationally and in the battleground states, giving Democrats new hope. It's also leading to some outright delusion. 

On Saturday, several videos from The Villages, Florida, began to circulate on social media. They claimed to show a massive turnout for a golf cart parade promoting Harris. 

If you don't know who Barbie Hall is, she's a Democrat running for Congress in The Villages. That congressional seat is currently held by Republican Daniel Webster, who won by nearly 30 points in 2022. In other words, this is a very red area of Florida, which itself is now a very red state. 

Still, Hall was posting all day about how much of a big deal this supposedly was. In fact, her proclamations made it all the way to the top of the Democrat food chain. Here's DNC Chair Jaime Harrison declaring that Florida is now in play. 


Nikki Fried is the former Florida agricultural commissioner turned failed gubernatorial candidate (she got blasted in the primary by Charlie Crist, an almost equally bad candidate). But because failing up is a Democrat tradition, Fried was immediately put in charge of the Democratic Party in her state. That's gone about as well as you'd expect.

So, just how big of a deal was this golf cart parade? The current population of The Villages is around 79,000 people. According to Hall, there were "over 200 golf carts" at this event (which seems like an overestimation based on the videos). Let's be generous and say that every single golf cart contained two people. That's 400 people showing up at the height of Harris' honeymoon period to drive around for a little while. Does that sound like a big deal to you? Or does it sound completely irrelevant and not at all indicative of anything happening in Florida? 

Frankly, I hope Democrats actually believe this stuff. Please go dump millions of dollars in finite resources into the Sunshine State in the vain hope that Nikki Fried and company can deliver it in November. Heck, start placing ad buys right now. Have the vice president hold a rally down there.

I've made no bones about the fact that I think Harris is a legitimate threat and tougher to beat than Joe Biden. She can absolutely win this thing if Republicans don't take her seriously, but there's a difference between respecting one's opponent and abiding by their delusions. Florida is not in play, no matter how many golf cart parades The Villages has.



Here's How Long the Trump Camp Was Preparing for Biden's Exit

Matt Vespa reporting for Townhall 

The June 27 debate blew the lid off the cover-up operation aimed at keeping Joe Biden’s mental health decline under the radar. The Democrat-media complex took a gamble, and it blew up in their face. Joe Biden got torched by Donald Trump, sparking an internal panic within the Democratic Party and a media backlash for covering up the president’s apparent mental slippage. We’ve noticed Joe’s decline for years and were mocked and written off as conspiracy theorists by the legacy media. Now, they got whipped rightly for not being able to penetrate the White House guardrails when they easily could, out of fear of losing access to the president or, worse, helping Trump in his bid to win his job back. It was an inexcusable oversight, leading to a flurry of stories about how everyone and their mother at home and aboard knew Biden had run out of gas. 

The Wall Street Journal, who, to their credit, did a lengthy piece about Joe’s mental decline, got roasted but weathered the liberal media hysterics and came away totally vindicated. The Trump campaign also was prepared for every eventuality in this race, including Joe quitting. Even before his election-killing performance in June, the Trump team has been preparing for Biden to bolt since May (via Politico) [emphasis mine]: 

The subject line: “Nominating An Alternative Democratic Presidential Candidate.” 

The 11-page memo, labeled “CONFIDENTIAL DRAFT” outlined the ways in which another candidate besides Biden could become the nominee. The scenarios included: “Biden step[ping] aside,” an “insider rebellion,” and an “act of God.” 

“Something happens and Joe Biden and the [Democratic National Committee] have no choice but to nominate a replacement at the convention or special meeting of the DNC,” the memo says. The memo was first reported by Axios.  

The existence of the memo underscores how the Trump campaign has for months been eyeing the prospect of facing a non-Biden opponent. Those preparations accelerated after the June 27 debate, when Democrats mounted a pressure campaign to get Biden to remove himself from the ticket. 

The document delved deeply into Democratic Party rules — describing, for instance, how delegates could launch an uprising at the convention and deprive Biden of the nomination. It forecasted a scenario in which delegates who were critical of the president’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict could “vote against [Biden] based on conscience.” 

At the same time, Republicans were closely tracking news coverage. A separate document, which was distributed May 27 and titled "Press Stories Re: Biden Stepping Aside, Convention 'Escape Hatch,'" compiled stories that raised the prospect of an alternative candidate to Biden becoming the nominee. It also highlighted the names of other potential candidates who were mentioned, including Vice President Kamala Harris. 

The Trump campaign was also preparing an assault on non-Biden candidates. After the debate, it began preparing opposition on several potential Democratic rivals, and also began discussing who could be a possible vice presidential candidate. And it began crafting videos, which could later be used to target whoever Democrats picked. On Sunday, after Biden dropped out, Republicans released a commercial attacking Harris on immigration — an issue that Trump has made a centerpiece of his campaign. 

After the debate, Biden faced an unprecedented rebellion from congressional Democrats, donors, and even media members. Multiple publications called for him to step down following his abysmal debate performance. His media rehabilitation tour did little to sway his detractors, and it was an overall mess. ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed the president following his debate disaster, came away thinking Biden couldn’t hack another four years. His NBC News sit-down was equally painful, and the president’s BET interview, where he forgot Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s name, calling him “the black man,” only reinforced the ‘dump Biden’ crowd that this wasn’t going to get better, and that’s. likely true. The president started to crumble in safe states like Virginia. The longer he remained in the race, the more radioactive he became to the party—a point rammed home by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Biden was looking at a Jimmy Carter-style loss to Trump. On July 21, the president finally admitted he didn’t have the stamina to do the job and quit.