Reposted from Dailykos
We all know that Trump is deranged. He has a very clear habit of twisting reality into whatever paranoid conspiratorial delusion is convenient.
She needs to come right out of the gate and say “My opponent is a habitual liar who constantly distorts reality to whatever fits his disturbed paranoid delusions. His nearly every statement is false. He can’t help himself, he lies on reflex. It’s automatic for him, like breathing.”
His delusions follow a pattern. He always uses them to blame others and concoct some crazed weird theory that simply doesn't follow reality or fact.
When asked a question during the upcoming debate — before she gives her own answer she needs to instead give his answer then explain why it’s deluded.
Asked about the economy, she needs to state:
My opponent would claim that he had the “greatest economy ever” — but that is a deluded lie. Any accredited economist would confirm this. When he left office he had lost over 6 million jobs. He had the worse jobs record since Herbert Hoover. The economy was in free fall. 2000 Americans were dying per day. Schools and businesses were closed and shuttered. GDP was crashing. He added $3 Trillion to the deficit and $8 Trillion to the debt.
Joe Biden saved our economy. He’s created and recreated 15.2 Million jobs. My opponent would claim that “107% of these jobs have gone to migrants.” This is another lie. Americans are back to work. Wages are growing and have been higher than inflation for the last 15 months. Inflation has fallen to 2.5% — lower than it was during much of my opponent's administration. The deficit has been reduced by $1.3 Trillion. The GDP is high. My opponent has repeated stated that under Biden there would be “a recession” but the the Stock Market and DOW are growing. Unemployment is at the lowest rate in the last 50 years.
Asked about inflation and prices, she needs to state:
My opponent claims that prices “have climbed 50%, 60% and 70%.” This is a deluded lie. Higher costs are the result of his failures to handle Covid properly. He threw out the Pandemic Response Plan. He didn’t have a plan for providing PPE. He didn’t have a plan for Testing. He didn’t have a plan for vaccine distribution. As a result, the US suffered more Covid casualties than any other country on earth even in proportion to our number of citizens. When Covid was at it’s height and Oil prices started to crash, it was Trump who pushed the Saudis and OPEC+ into cutting production. This caused Oil prices to skyrocket eventually to $115 per barrel. Prices have since dropped back down to $78 per barrel, but the Oil companies haven’t reduced gas prices accordingly. They continue to line their pockets and profits off the backs of the American people. Even the CEO of Kroger has admitted to this price gouging.
During a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust trial this week, a senior Kroger executive made a startling admission: the grocery giant had raised prices on essential items like milk and eggs beyond what inflation alone would justify. This admission, made under questioning from an FTC attorney, has cast a harsh light on Kroger’s pricing practices and has broader implications for corporate behavior in the grocery sector, particularly as the company seeks to merge with its primary competitor, Albertsons.
Andy Groff, Kroger’s Senior Director for Pricing, acknowledged during the FTC hearing that the company had indeed raised prices on milk and eggs at a rate higher than inflation. This revelation came after the FTC presented an internal email from Groff to other Kroger executives in March, where he observed that “retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation” for these staple items.
I stand here to fight against price gouging and protect the American consumer from predatory pricing. The Inflation Reduction Act — which I was the tie-breaking vote on — has brought Trump’s Inflation down from 9% to just 2.5%. We will continue fighting for the American people.
By using this type of rhetorical JuJitsu she renders his response irrelevant. If he repeats the false claim that she just predicted — He proves her point. This also eliminates the need for her to rebut his false claims. Just do it upfront. Build your rebuttal into every answer.
More examples over the jump.
My opponent claims that the “Border is wide open” when this is simply not the case. Border crossing had gone up, but that is not something that is entirely under our control — it’s based on conditions in Central America and around the world which are driving people to flee their home countries. I was never “border czar” my task wasn’t to “control the border.” I was tasked with re-engaging with El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala — an engagement that my opponent dropped during his his term — to help reduce migration. We put programs in place that brought migration from those countries down by 63%.
In one example of her “listen, act, then follow up” approach, Harris traveled to Guatemala and Mexico in June 2021. A month later, she rolled out a five-pillar strategy that revolved around working with in-country partners to address the root causes of Central American migration, noting that “migration to our border is also a symptom of much larger issues” and admitting from the start that “progress will not be instantaneous.” She subsequently visited Honduras in January 2022. In March 2024, she welcomed Guatemala’s new president, Bernardo Arévalo, to the White House for more discussions. This approach suggests that Harris could govern in a manner where decisions are carefully thought out and where a multitude of factors are taken into account before acting.
In its three years, the five-pillar strategy has produced more than $5.2 billion in commitments from companies and organizations to invest in the region while supporting local development in areas of high emigration. And there are signs that migration from the region is now slowing. The number of Guatemalans encountered at the southwestern border last month (11,485) was the second-lowest since November 2020. The number of Hondurans (8,896) was the lowest over the same period. Overall, the proportion of migrants encountered at the US border who are citizens of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador has dropped from 49 percent (March 2021) to 18 percent (June 2024).
Since then, President Biden has taken executive action to further reduce border crossings bringing them down 57% overall since last December. Crossing now are less than they were at the end of my opponent’s Administration, but we can and should do more. And we would have done more if my opponent hadn’t strong-armed his GOP associates into killing the Bipartisan Border package the Biden Administration negotiated for months.
My opponent argues that I committed a “Coup” against Joe Biden. There is no evidence of this. [Vp Harris] was a strong supporter of Biden’s reelection up until the moment that he called her to announce he was stepping down and endorsing her instead. She never urged him to step aside. She never acted through surrogates to push him out. No one has reported anything contrary to that. Harris herself has described the call where Biden passed the baton to her.
In her sit-down interview alongside her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris told CNN's Dana Bash that on July 21 she received a phone call from Mr. Biden while she was with her family.
That same day Mr. Biden posted a letter to social media announcing his shocking decision to end his campaign.
[...]
The family was "sitting down to do a puzzle, and the phone rang and it was Joe Biden, and he told me what he had decided to do," Harris said. "And I asked him, 'Are you sure?' And he said, 'yes.' And that's how I learned about it."
The vice president did not directly answer a question about whether Mr. Biden offered his endorsement over the phone, or if she specifically asked for it.
"He was very clear that he was going to support me," Harris said.
My opponent claims that the civil and criminal cases against him are “warfare” from Biden. Biden has reestablished a firewall between the White Hosue and DOJ that was set up after Nixon. There has been no communication between the White House and DOJ over any of Trump’s cases. Merrick Garland has specifically said he would resign if he received any pressure from Biden over his cases.
Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress Wednesday that "no one" has told him to indict former President Donald Trump, after Trump claimed in an interview that President Biden told Garland to indict him.
Garland, testifying before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee for the first time since special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in two cases this summer, emphasized the independence of both Smith and the Justice Department. Trump, in a "Meet the Press" interview that aired Sunday, claimed that Mr. Biden told Garland to indict Trump.
"Biden indictments. Excuse me, Biden political indictments. He said to the attorney general —" Trump told NBC's Kristen Welker, who interrupted him. "—he said to the attorney general, 'Indict him.'"
At Wednesday's hearing, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff asked Garland if the president of the United States asked him to indict Trump.
"No one has told me to indict," Garland said. "And in this case, the decision to indict was made by the special counsel."
My opponent is now a convicted felon because he violated the law by trying to manipulate the 2016 election. He has been found liable of business fraud, of defamation and sexual assault. These are not cases brought by the DOJ, these are not cases which were brought by Joe Biden. These cases are the result of his own unlawful predatory actions.
My opponent claims that we have “defunded the police” and that crime is rampant in “Democrat Cities” — this is false. Crime is at a 50-year low and has dropped 20% since the high rates seen in his administration.
"Last year, the United States had one of the lowest rates of all violent crime in more than 50 years," Biden told top police officials from cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit, Buffalo, New York; Milwaukee, Charlotte, North Carolina; and DeKalb County, Georgia.
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In an election-year dart at Biden's Republican predecessor and likely rival in 2024, Donald Trump, the White House noted that the United States experienced the largest ever increase in murders in 2020, the start of the pandemic.
Violent crime rates dropped sharply last year, including a 12% decline in homicides nationally from 2022 to 2023, according to a crime analysis by AH Datalytics, after spiking during the first two years of the pandemic.
[...]
Detroit and Chicago both invested more than $100 million for public safety initiatives, including hiring new officers, expanding mental health community violence interventions and youth intervention programs. Chicago saw a 13% drop in homicides and Detroit saw an 18% drop in 2023, it said.
Philadelphia invested in group-violence intervention and community crisis intervention, the White House said, and experienced a 20% drop in homicides and a 28% decline in nonfatal shootings last year.
The top ten most violent cities in America are predominantly in Red States with lax gun laws established by Republican legislatures.
Cities in blue states,8 based on how a state voted in the 2020 presidential election, are consistently safer from guns than cities in red states, regardless of which party is represented in city leadership.
From 2018 to 2021, red-state cities experienced larger increases in gun violence rates than blue-state cities.
In 2023, blue-state cities are experiencing larger declines in gun violence rates than red-state cities.
Not only do blue-state cities on average experience lower rates of gun violence in each year of the study, but now, gun violence rates appear to be decreasing faster on average in these cities than in red-state cities. Put simply, the data do not back up the blame-game politics of Republican lawmakers such as Texas Gov. Abbott and Rep. Jordan.
If we’re going to further reduce violence and gun crime we’re going to need to better use our resources, not simply “defund the police” but put better funding into schools and public services such as mental health first responders and we’re going to need some common-sense gun laws that prevent people suffering from a mental decline and suicidal depression from access to dangerous weapons.
And so on.
She needs to undercut his arguments and show that they are part of his ever-expanding “blame game” of attacking others over things that he himself has wrought. He failed at Covid. The country was torn apart and exploding at the seams during his administration. He didn’t protect “Law and Order.” He tried to use the military to “just shoot” and “crack skulls” of peaceful protests, encouraging law enforcement to escalate the violence.
He tried to overthrow the elections with fake electors and a violent mob who attacked the Capital.
He doesn’t deserve to be on a debate stage vying to again be leader of the free world.
He should be rotting in a cell on Riker’s Island.
And he’s fucking delusional.
Awesome plan
This is great idea!