#2020 presidential debate

[littleapocalypsekitten]

I went looking for Presidential debate memes and my Gen-X ass was not disappointed.

[deqncas]

Welcome back November 5th 2020 !!!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Oliver Willis at Daily Kos:

Confronted by presidential debate moderator David Muir on his incessant lies that he won the 2020 election, Donald Trump insisted that he did not acknowledge his loss “at all.” Responding to Muir quoting a previous Trump statement that he lost the race “by a whisker,” Trump said he had only made the remark “sarcastically.” “There’s so much proof, all you have to do is look at it,” Trump said, advancing once again his election conspiracy. “They should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval.”

At Tuesday’s debate, Donald Trump repeated the lie that he “won” the 2020 election. FACT CHECK: Trump lost the 2020 election.

See Also:

HuffPost: 2 Months Before The 2024 Vote, Trump Reprises 2020 Election Lies That Led To Jan. 6

[luesmainblog]

incase y'all don't remember this gem from the last election

[derseprinceoftbd]

We're all going to die because the slightly less fascist but more antisemitic and xenophobic economically illiterate old fuck can't fucking make a fucking coherent argument to save all of our lives

Are you hearing this shit.

It should have been Hillary. It should have been Hillary. It should have been Hillary.

It should always have been Hillary.

[strawberri-draws]

sketchbook oc doodles from class today—I love sketching with pen

[reactionimagesdaily]

[klanced]

mx katie klanced are we voting voltron straight through in the worst fandom poll or genshin. your troops await

i am so sad i missed this poll. i am now going to hold you all hostage and force you to read my outrage. i know this ship sailed literally two weeks ago but LISTEN TO ME!!!!!

anyway i cannot BELIEVE that voltron lost to south park. the category was "most annoying fandom." this is distinctly different than "most annoying show" or "worst show," and it is NOT synonymous with "most unhinged fans." okay? for this poll, what matters is the group character and cultural staying power of the fandom that organized around the show.

an annoying fandom must be:

incredibly vocal and prominent, to the point that even the most reluctant and detached layperson still has some vague idea of the fandom's biggest discourse/fights, usually entirely against their will; and

annoying, in the sense that the fandom's presence (or even a mere reference to their presence) is enough to actively disrupt or impede one's ability to enjoy online internet spaces; and

the fandom is annoying BECAUSE of the source material in question.

point 1 is fairly subjective, as it's all based on one's own experience or perception of a show's cultural diffusion across the broader public consciousness. so i weigh it less heavily when ranking how annoying a show is.

for point 2 i would argue that south park is annoying, and south park fans are annoying, but the south park fandom itself is NOT as annoying (i.e., the fandom is the least annoying aspect of south park). this is because i firmly believe you can differentiate between south park fans versus the south park fandom.

[[actually if i can be frank -- does south park actually have an organized fandom? obviously they have fans, i have seen them in the twitter wilds (usually in the context of out-of-context incredibly well-developed yaoi art/content of? 10 year olds ?????????). but is there actually a cohesive fandom that routinely interacts and develops concepts together? is there a collective identity ??????? my gut reaction is no, but this is very much an online space i don't enter, so what do i know? i also have no idea what that fandom can even talk about, other than the yaoi (although you could easily say this to the voltron fandom as well). whatever, for this argument i will presuppose that there IS a organized south park fandom with a fairly coherent and cohesive identity.]]

anyway, what i wanted to highlight is that there are certainly incredibly annoying individual south park fans who are outrageous, vulgar, and vile. so you would think that, if you put all these annoying individuals into a single collective, that single group would have skyrocketing amounts of annoyingness. but that doesn't seem to happen. i cannot recall any specific complaints about the south park fandom; personal stories involving individual south park fans, sure, but what does the fandom actually do on a broad scale?? if there is any sort of discourse or mobilization, it seems to be fairly contained and localized.

so how can a collective fandom somehow be less annoying than its individual parts? this brings me to point three: an annoying fandom MUST be annoying BECAUSE of its source material. and this does not apply in the south park fandom's case.

to qualify as an annoying fandom, it is not enough to be a group of annoying fans loosely connected by a shared interest; rather, the source material ITSELF must be the inciting incident that galvanizes the group to organize and THEN become annoying.

is the south park fandom annoying? to some extent yes, of course. but i would argue that the south park fandom is annoying, not specifically because of the show in question, but rather because the fandom is comprised of persons who were already predisposed to being annoying, regardless of whether or not they had ever watched south park. this is a subtle but incredibly important distinction.

south park's vulgar and vile humor certainly enables its most annoying fans, but the continued annoying activities of said fans are NOT dependent on the show's existence. a shithead south park fan was always going to be a shithead, now they just have cartman to idolize.

i have spent a lot of time talking about south park. let us now move on to voltron and the voltron fandom.

in contrast to south park, the voltron fandom qualifies as an annoying fandom because its annoying activities were entirely dependent on the existence of voltron the show. would individual voltron fans still have been annoying even if they had never stumbled upon voltron? of course. but the voltron fandom was an organized collective of people that specifically came together to BE ANNOYING ABOUT VOLTRON. and then they made it everyone else's problem.

the voltron fandom was like an ouroboros devouring its own tail; a symbol of infinity, referencing the literally never-ending fighting; and it survived entirely by maiming and cannibalizing itself. the voltron fandom actively ruined every online space it entered. i saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by voltron.

honestly, i would argue that the voltron fandom's impact has completely altered the way online fandom functions to this day. the voltron fandom capitalized on the momentum started by the steven universe fandom and other early 2010s online fandoms, and spawned an entire new flavor of fandom discourse that was obsessed with morality and virtue. truthfully, it feels disingenuous to frame what happened as something innocuous as "fandom discourse"; it almost feels like a disservice to the levels of personal faith, passion, and vitriol people poured into voltron. the terms "pro-shipping" and "anti-shipping" have been around for ages, but the voltron fandom turned "pro" and "anti" into genuine identity markers.

this post is already way too insane so i need to quit while i'm ahead. but i would just like to conclude by reiterating that south park has annoying fans but not necessarily an annoying fandom, whereas the voltron fandom was annoying specifically BECAUSE it was the voltron fandom. i think the south park fandom could dissolve tomorrow and assimilate into other similar fandoms without a problem. whereas the voltron fandom was like lightning in a bottle; the activities of the voltron fandom are quintessentially wrapped up in the specific details, characteristics, and attributes of voltron. if voltron's characters or story was even slightly different -- if, say, every character was a college-student for example -- then the nature and activities of the fandom would have been irrevocably different.

and that is why voltron is the more annoying fandom and SHOULD HAVE SWEPT SOUTH PARK IN THE POLL.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Donald Trump, in response to a question during a 2020 presidential debate with Joe Biden, insisted that he closed down his bank account in China before his first campaign. But six years’ worth of Trump’s tax records, released Friday, reveal that wasn’t true.

“[I] had an account open, and I closed it,” Trump said with some irritation to moderator Kristen Welker, NBC White House correspondent, in the final debate of the campaign in October 2020. “I closed it before I even ran for President, let alone became President.”

Rep.-elect Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), who served as the Democrats’ lead counsel in the first impeachment inquiry into Trump, noted that the former President had bank accounts in China until 2018, from 2015 to 2017, according to his tax records.

“Generally, you only have bank accounts in a foreign country if you are doing transactions in that country’s currency,” Goldman tweeted Friday. “What business was Trump doing in China while he was President?”

Trump, who had accounts in a number of countries and collected income from more than a dozen foreign nations while in office, paid more in taxes in 2020 to the Chinese government than he did in American federal income tax that year, his returns revealed.

Trump also lied a month earlier to then-Fox News commentator Chris Wallace, who pointedly asked him during the first presidential debate in 2020 if he’d paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, as The New York Times had reported (which Trump immediately blasted as “fake news”).

Trump angrily responded — twice — that he had paid “millions of dollars.” His returns revealed that indeed he had paid just $750 in federal income taxes in each of those years. Trump and his wife Melania paid no federal income tax in 2020, the last full year he was in office, according to the tax records.

In addition, Trump did not annually donate his $400,000 presidential salary to charity, as he has claimed. He declared no charitable contributions of any kind on his 2020 returns.

Among the early revelations emerging in Trump’s tax records, some of the most troubling involve his financial entanglements abroad while he was President, “highlighting a string of potential conflicts of interest,” Politico noted.

Trump had multiple bank accounts in a number of foreign countries, and collected millions of dollars in income from more than a dozen nations ― including Panama, the Philippines (whose onetime dictator, former President Rodrigo Duterte, he has praised) and the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration.

While presidents routinely place assets in blind trusts while they’re in office, Trump’s eldest sons continued to openly operate the Trump Organization and forged deals around the world with nations affected by the Trump administration’s policies and expenditures.

Trump’s returns reveal hefty financial losses in the two years before he became President, some of which he carried forward to reduce tax bills.

Trump enjoyed an adjusted gross income of $15.8 million during his first three years in office. He paid $642,000 in federal income tax in 2015, $750 in 2016 and in 2017, just under $1 million in 2018, $133,000 in 2019 and nothing in 2020.

[hezigler]

The Vice Presidents

[uniqueeval]

Our Reporter on How Trump Is Preparing for the Debate

Ahead of Donald J. Trump’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Jonathan Swan, a senior political correspondent for The New York Times, learned how Mr. Trump is preparing. Source link

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jamison Foser at Finding Gravity Substack:

Today the Biden campaign announced President Biden’s intention to debate Donald Trump twice in debates “hosted by news organizations” but outside the framework proposed by the supposedly-nonpartisan (more on that in a minute) Commission on Presidential Debates, setting off a flurry of indignant tweets from the kind of pundits who aim performative indignation at Democrats in order to carefully position themselves in the consciousness of their fellow pundits as perfectly “balanced.” It’s all a bunch of nonsense, Joe Biden is right to blow off the Commission’s proposal, and you should regard with great skepticism those portraying this as some grave assault on democracy.

The Biden campaign’s stated reasons for disagreeing with the CPD plan are unassailable. According to Biden Campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, “The Commission’s schedule has debates that begin after the American people have a chance to cast their vote early, and doesn't conclude until after tens of millions of Americans will have already voted.” Indeed, the Commission proposed three presidential debates, two of which would occur after votes had already been cast in a dozen states, including potential swing states like Minnesota, Virginia, Ohio, and Arizona. The concept of “Election Day” as a single specific day is outdated: More than 80 percent of all states now allow votes to be cast before “Election Day,” which is now properly understood as the last day on which a voter can cast a vote, not the day. As O’Malley Dillon noted, the Commission is “out of step with changes in the structure of our elections and the interests of voters.”

O’Malley Dillon further explained: “The Commission includes rules that candidates were called upon to follow, and yet it was unable or unwilling to enforce the rules in the 2020 debates. The result was far from-indeed entirely inconsistent with— the orderly and informative process the voters deserved in 2020 and should be able to expect in 2024.” This is a big one: In 2020, the Commission set rules that “specif[ied] that each candidate gets two minutes to respond to questions posed to them by the moderator as well as time to respond to one another.” But it made no real effort to enforce those rules for the first debate, which Trump spent trampling. As the BBC noted at the time, “President Trump constantly interrupted Democratic candidate Joe Biden leading to a series of chaotic exchanges in which both men talked over each other.”

Despite the fact that Trump interrupting opponents was a hallmark of his 2016 debate performances, the Commission completely failed to put in place a mechanism for enforcing its rules. The Fox News host the Commission chose to moderate that first 2020 debate later claimed “I guess I didn’t realize — and there was no way you could, hindsight being 20/20 — that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning of the debate but the entire debate.” Who could possibly foreseen that Donald Trump’s approach to the 2020 presidential debates would be precisely the same as Donald Trump’s approach to the 2016 presidential debates?

[...] More broadly: The Commission on Presidential Debates is bad at its job and has been for a very long time. I won’t quote from Dan Pfeiffer’s 2020 excellent takedown of the Commission because it is worth reading in full. To it I will add that Janet Brown, who has been the executive director of the Commission for every day of its 37 years of existence, is a Republican who worked in the Reagan administration.2 If you’re going to have a debate commission led by representatives of the two major political parties, as is the fundamental premise behind the CPD, the executive director should rotate (or should be a joint post) — it certainly shouldn’t be led every day of every year for its entire existence by a Republican. 

President Joe Biden is correct to sideline the Commission on Presidential Debates that have long favored Republicans.

See Also:

HuffPost: Commission On Presidential Debates Faces Uncertain Future As Biden And Trump Bypass It

[lukeslywalkers]

They need to drop this man’s mugshot so I can abuse it as memes for Pressure Cooker

[diamondnokouzai]

i feel like all kamalas answers are meaningless buzzwords. when theyre not just a fourth grade current events report about bidens presidency.

[andhumanslovedstories]

Eight years ago I was so deeply invested in the American presidential election, I listen to multiple weekly podcasts, I was on twitter, I checked the polling updates, read the articles, watched the news, I could tell you the political happenings of every week of 2016, and we were on the road for a large portion of it so we had to work for it. We watched one of the presidential debates in a Las Vegas Panera before heading back to our campsite. I did something similar for the 2020 election because jesus christ what a fucking Historical Year. Now it’s 2024, and gearing up for the grind once more is such a dismal feeling. I don’t want to have to have an opinion on Nicky Haley’s viability as republican candidate. I don’t want to follow another twelve Trump trials. I don’t want to watch everyone even slightly left of center once again devour each other as we polarize about it’s a bigger war crime to vote for Biden or not vote for Biden. Everything is going to get so unpleasant and it’s so important and the stakes are so high and it’s gonna suck the whole time. I’m trying to think of one funny thing that could plausibly happen that would fill me with joy and not terror for the future of America and also the world, and so far I’ve only come up with Jeb Bush giving a presidential campaign another go.