“Everyone Is Miserable”: Inside the Plummeting Biden Team Morale

Over a week out from President Joe Biden’s calamitous performance during the first presidential debate, a sense of doom is setting in among White House staffers, according to a report from Axios.

“Everyone is miserable, and senior advisers are a total black hole,” one White House official told Axios. “Even if you’re trying to focus on work, nothing is going to break through or get any acknowledgment” from those in charge, they added.

There has been some speculation that Biden’s inner circle, specifically Deputy Chief of Staff Annie Tomasini, Jill Biden’s top adviser Anthony Bernal, and longtime aide Ashley Williams are working overtime to keep dissent from the president’s ears. The result appears to be a rising tide of discontent from others in the president’s employ.

“The only thing that can really allay concerns is for the president to demonstrate that he’s capable of running this campaign,” said one high-ranking official from the Democratic National Committee. “Everything else feels like Weekend at Bernie’s by his inner circle to prop him up.”

To try to counteract the growing sense of dread, Biden’s campaign circulated an all-staff memo on Wednesday, including internal polling that shows the president neck and neck with former President Donald Trump, a slightly more optimistic finding than that of other polls published this week.

Still, Biden has insisted to staffers, and a group of Democratic governors, that he will continue his campaign to stay in the White House.

Fallout from Biden’s disastrous debate performance continues to outpace his campaign’s insistence he’ll remain in the race, with what CNN describes as “many top Democratic circles” already moving to assess who Kamala Harris’s vice president should be.

Two dozen top Democrats—described by CNN as an unnamed yet “widening group of leading party officials, operatives, and donors”—have looked into Democratic governors as potential vice presidential picks for Harris, with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear leading discussions. Democrats have also floated Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as possible contenders.

CNN reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere, who wrote the article delving into possible contenders, stated that within hours of its publication, even more Democrats reached out with ideas about who Harris’s running mate should be. The assessments on potential running mates for Harris, CNN notes, are born from certainty among top Democrats that Biden’s reelection campaign is doomed. The names being floated are part of a quasi-mutinous effort to make a compelling case for Harris despite the Biden campaign’s firm stance that he won’t step aside.

One unnamed Democratic senator described the situation to CNN using a lengthy football allegory, describing Biden as a failing “star quarterback” and Harris as his backup quarterback. That senator argued that a Harris ticket is more realistic than backing an alternate from outside the campaign, saying, “The idea of our suddenly drafting someone from a school with a different playbook who hasn’t played a single game in the NFL is a huge risk.”

“We start talking in the huddle: Do we put in the backup Q.B.? The backup knows our team, the backup knows the plays, the backup has played in the NFL,” the senator told CNN. “The crowd in the stands full of passionate fans starts chanting: ‘Put in the kid from Alabama!’ ‘Put in the Q.B. from Wisconsin!’ All just because the backup threw an interception earlier. But we know the backup and have confidence in them.”

“[Biden]’s in such bad shape,” one Democratic House member whom CNN described as a “Harris doubter” told the outlet. “But I’ve also had conversations with Democrats about [Harris] from some key groups that have been skeptical in the past who believe everyone will rally to her if she’s the nominee.”

“It’s a straight shot, and she’s ready to roll,” former Ohio Representative Tim Ryan told CNN. Ryan said he’s received a flood of agreement in private after publicly calling for Biden to step aside and back Harris. “We’ve got to be decisive too. It plays right into the stereotype that Democrats are weak. With one fell swoop, you can change so many different narratives.”

The appraisals of possible Harris running mates are largely speculative and appear intended to gauge which combination would make for the strongest duo to defeat Trump and his still-unnamed running mate. Still, the push to firm up a strong case for an ideal Harris ticket has pulled the Democratic Party even further from the Biden campaign’s hard-line insistence that he will remain on the ticket—and echoes efforts from major Democratic donors working to use their money to coerce Biden into dropping out.

After 14 years of government led by the Conservative Party, the U.K.’s center-left Labour Party won a landslide victory early Friday, ushering in a new era of government as the party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, moved into 10 Downing St.

But none of that was remarkable to Donald Trump, who, in a brief message posted to Truth Social, congratulated one of his longest foreign allies on winning his first seat in the U.K. Parliament.

“Congratulations to Nigel Farage on his big WIN of a Parliament Seat Amid Reform UK Election Success,” Trump wrote in a since-deleted post, referring to the right-wing populist party which won four seats in Friday’s election. “Nigel is a man who truly loves his Country! DJT.”

Farage, who flew over to the United States to support Trump’s 2016 bid for president, overturned a conservative majority in Clacton, Essex, to win the seat from the Conservative incumbent, Giles Watling, by more than 8,000 votes. Shortly after his win was announced, Farage told reporters that Reform’s rise would be the “beginning of the end of the Conservative Party.”

“This is just the first step in something that is going to stun you all,” Farage said at a press conference. “There is a massive gap on the center-right of British politics, and my job is to fill it.”

But ousting the Conservative Party, which got the boot after years of compounding failures like Brexit, is already underway. (Indeed, Trump’s tweet recalls his cheering on of Brexit, which he saw correctly as a sign of a rising global right-wing populist movement.) Next on the agenda would be winning over voters of the Labour Party, according to Farage, who outlined a plan to win the 2029 general election.

“What is interesting is, there’s no enthusiasm for Labour, there’s no enthusiasm for Starmer whatsoever,” Farage said. “In fact, about half of the vote is simply an anti-Conservative vote. This Labour Government will be in trouble very, very quickly. We will, now, be targeting Labour votes. We’re coming for Labour, be in no doubt about that.”

Farage said that Reform intends to hold another press conference at 2:30 p.m. British summer time, which would detail “the next steps for our political revolt.”

President Joe Biden met with a group of Democratic governors on Wednesday in an attempt to reassure them that his candidacy is still viable, after a disastrous debate performance last week and mounting reports that he’s become less lucid over the course of his presidency.

Some Democratic governors did not mince words with the president in the closed-door meeting, and told him that support for his candidacy was going down the drain in their respective states. None of the governors who met with Biden flat out told him to quit the campaign, as some top Democrats have already done, but a few raised their concerns about his candidacy, according to The New York Times.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who attended the meeting virtually, told the president that he’d seen a surge of calls from constituents for Biden to withdraw from the race, two people who were briefed on the call told the Times.

Maine Governor Janet Mills remarked that voters didn’t feel that Biden was up to the task of campaigning, and New Mexico Governor Michell Lujan said she was worried that Biden might lose the election in her state.

Although Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey remained quiet in the meeting, she told her fellow governors on Monday that she’d told Biden’s chief of staff that the president’s position was “irretrievable.”

The Times also reported that because Biden announced his intention to keep running at the beginning of the meeting, some felt that actual debate over his candidacy was off the agenda.

To be clear, after the meeting, some governors re-upped themselves as staunch Biden supporters. New York Governor Kathy Hochul and California Governor Gavin Newsom, whom some were floating as a possible candidate to replace Biden, both tweeted their support of the president. Others, like Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who issued a dire warning to Biden about rescuing his floundering bid, remained notably silent.

A.J. Delgado, a former staffer on Trump’s 2016 campaign, shared bombshell texts alleging that the campaign “settled multiple” gender discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits. The texts, reportedly between Delgado and former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, came to light in new filings Delgado made as part of her ongoing discrimination lawsuit.

“Jenna, [between] us, do you know of anyone who complained of gender discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, or sexual harassment, in the 2020 campaign? Do you know if the 2020 campaign settled any lawsuits regarding such?” texts allegedly from Delgado ask. “Yes. Off record—Boris. The campaign settled multiple suits,” a text reply allegedly from Ellis reads. “Have your investigator subpoena Michael Glassner,” the texts advise, apparently referring to the Trump 2020 campaign strategist.

While the “Boris” named in the text exchange isn’t clear, it could be Boris Epshteyn, strategic adviser for Trump’s 2020 campaign. Forbes’s Zach Everson noted while alerting to the filing that Epshteyn was arrested in 2021 following numerous complaints of groping women at a club.

The text exchange follows earlier sworn declarations by Delgado asserting that Trump’s 2016 campaign repeatedly used middlemen to send hush money with the direct intention of obscuring discrimination settlements from the public and from the Federal Election Commission.

“In other words, the payment would be routed through a middleman, to hide the fact that the Campaign had settled, from the public and the FEC,” Delgado stated in her earlier sworn court declaration. “I thus have direct, personal experience with the Defendant-Campaign hiding settlement payments to women, routing them through a ‘middleman law firm,’ which to the public would only appear as payments ‘for legal services.’” Immediately following the November 2020 election, the Trump campaign paid $4.1 million for legal services, according to The Daily Beast, alongside “millions in mysterious legal reimbursements to the campaign’s compliance firm, Red Curve Solutions.”

Delgado alleged in a 2023 lawsuit that she was raped by former Trump campaign spokesperson Jason Miller, her superior at the time. Miller denied the rape allegations and brushed off her lawsuit as “simply intended to harass my family while wasting the judiciary’s time and resources.” Delgado’s lawsuit claims Miller first attempted to coerce Delgado into sex in October 2016 by getting her too drunk to consciously consent, after which Miller engaged in a “cycle of sexual coercion, rape, sexual assault, abuse, battery, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking” to continue an affair. Delgado also claims she became pregnant by Miller and that, on informing the campaign she was pregnant, she was cut off from communications with the campaign.

Delgado had earlier alleged to have reason to believe Trump’s campaign paid off women who raised complaints of gender discrimination or sexual harassment, and the text exchange allegedly between Delgado and Ellis filed on Thursday appear to bolster that claim. Jessica Denson sued the Trump campaign for workplace harassment. ProPublica notes four other women have filed similar complaints against the 2016 campaign. Of those, Trump’s legal team used “scorched-earth tactics,” according to ProPublica, to prevent the discrimination lawsuits from moving forward.

Frustrated with President Biden and his campaign after last week’s disastrous debate performance, major Democratic donors say they will withhold their campaign contributions unless Biden leaves the race.

The New York Times reports that major donors including Disney heiress Abigail E. Disney, Hollywood producer Damon Lidelof, and politically well-connected donor Gideon Stein all plan to keep their money to themselves until Biden steps aside. 

Disney said that the Biden campaign and the committees supporting it, such as super PACs, the Democratic National Committee, and nonprofits “will not receive another dime from me until they bite the bullet and replace Biden at the top of the ticket.”

“Biden is a good man who has served his country well, but the stakes are far too high to allow timidity to determine our course of action,” Disney added.

“A new ticket is in the best interest of defeating Donald Trump,” said Stein, who said his family would hold back on $3.5 million in political donations unless Biden withdraws from the 2024 contest.

Losing some of the wealthiest campaign contributors is bad news for Biden, and will add to fears brought on by grim poll numbers and open criticism from other Democrats, as well as muted criticism from White House staff. Two sitting members of Congress, Representatives Lloyd Doggett and Raúl Grijalva, have publicly called on Biden to step aside from the 2024 race, while other House members are circulating a draft letter calling for the same. The more support Biden loses, the greater the pressure will be for him to drop out, and bad press against him could hurt his poll numbers even further.

While the Democratic National Convention isn’t until August, the party was planning on holding a virtual call to formally nominate Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee earlier to avoid legal deadlines for ballot access in certain states. Biden and his family have a big choice to make, and soon: Republicans (and Donald Trump) may prefer Biden, but they are already licking their chops against potential replacements.

Two days after Steve Bannon went to prison for defying a congressional subpoena, a guest on his podcast War Room posited an interesting theory for the alt-right conspiracy theorist’s incarceration.

Last week, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters mandated that all state public schools would be required to keep a Bible in the classroom and use it for daily instruction, all on the basis that “the founders cited the Bible.” And, according to Walters, a little more Bible-thumping could have spared Bannon from the clink too.

“You know, when you look at an issue like this, what you’ve seen in our schools is the radical left, the teachers union have come in, and they pushed indoctrinating of our kids,” Walters told War Room guest host Ben Harnwell. “And one of the things that they’ve done is they’ve taken the Bible out of schools. They say, ‘Listen, you can’t talk about our rights coming from God.’

“I mean, you see what’s happening to President Trump right now, where they’re arresting him,” he continued. “They’re giving this banana republic nonsense in a courtroom. Look what they’re doing to Steve Bannon right now.”

Walters has spent several interviews across different news outlets defending his decision to institute the Bible’s teachings in Oklahoma classrooms. On CNN, Walters skirted questions about his decision and instead claimed that “Thomas Jefferson advocated for freedom of religion, actually, not the establishment of a religion.”

He further insisted on Bannon’s podcast that he was “very proud” that Oklahoma would be the first state in the nation to “put the Bible back in.”

“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,” Walters said, during the state school board meeting when he unveiled the new rule. “It is one of the most foundational documents used for the Constitution.

The Sooner State directive was basically inspired by a similar school policy in Louisiana, requiring public schools to display a copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. But that mandate has already faced its own legal troubles.

Days after it was signed into law by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry—who told GOP donors that he couldn’t “wait to be sued” over it—the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, along with the parents of children enrolled in Louisiana public schools, filed a lawsuit against the state, claiming that such an obvious violation of religious freedoms was unconstitutional.

The dean of Arizona’s congressional delegation, Representative Raúl Grijalva, is calling on President Joe Biden to step aside in the 2024 presidential election, following Thursday’s poor debate performance.

“If he’s the candidate, I’m going to support him, but I think that this is an opportunity to look elsewhere,” Grijalva told The New York Times Wednesday, regarding the incumbent president. “What he needs to do is shoulder the responsibility for keeping that seat—and part of that responsibility is to get out of this race.”

Grijalva becomes only the second Democrat in the House to openly call for Biden’s withdrawal, following Representative Lloyd Doggett on Tuesday. Only last week, Grijalva was defending Biden.

This shows that Biden isn’t just in danger of losing Democrats on the fence, or those in swing districts, but even progressives in safe seats. The 10-term Arizona representative has served in Congress since 2003 in a district that voted for Biden by a considerable margin, and once chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Grijalva joins a host of Democrats who have privately expressed their concerns with Biden in recent days, with some even circulating a draft letter calling for Biden to withdraw.

Outside of Congress, Grijalva’s stance also carries considerable weight, as Arizona is a key battleground state. The Grand Canyon State has only been won by Democratic presidential candidates twice since 1948: Bill Clinton in 1996 and a narrow win for Biden in 2020, edging out Donald Trump by close to 10,000 votes. A post-debate internal Democratic poll shows Trump leading in the state by nearly 10 points, which could also have a ripple effect on Democrat Ruben Gallego’s attempt to win the Senate seat being vacated by the departing Kyrsten Sinema.

With pressure coming from an established member of Congress in a key battleground state, Biden has a decision to make. Democrats and Trump opponents will hope that he makes it soon, as conservatives are already strategizing on how to handle potential replacements.

A U.S. district court in Mississippi ruled Tuesday that three state congressional maps crafted in 2022 by the state’s Republican-led legislature violated the Voting Rights Act and dilute the Black vote in three majority-Black districts.

The lawsuit, filed in 2022 by the ACLU on behalf of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP, argued that lawmakers redrew voting maps that ”dilute black Mississippian votes in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and contain 11 unconstitutional racial gerrymanders in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

According to the court’s decision, Mississippi lawmakers with the Standing Joint Committee presented and approved finalized maps, with no opportunity for public comment or presenting proposed maps, after holding a brief 15-minute hearing to issue new criteria for drawing legislative maps.

The alterations sparked concern among Mississippi legislators who noted the state’s demographics would require the addition of at least four majority-Black districts. Lawmakers pushing through their diluted maps stated that a voting map that reflects the state’s growing Black population “is not a map this state needs,” and pushed forward a voting map that redrew two majority-Black state Senate districts and one majority-Black state House district in March 2022.

A three-judge panel ruled on Tuesday that the maps did violate the Voting Rights Act but “did not establish the redistricting maps are unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

Alongside ruling that the legislative maps would have to be redrawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act, the district court also ruled that special elections would be required for the newly drawn districts.

“This is a win for voting rights,” the ACLU stated on X (formerly Twitter) on announcing the news. “The Mississippi State Conference NAACP is pleased with the decision of finding some of the districts discriminatory to Black voters, although we wish the court had gone further,” said Charles V. Taylor Jr., executive director of Mississippi’s NAACP.

Everybody can breathe a little easier: Mike Flynn is definitely not Donald Trump’s pick for vice president.

X, formerly Twitter, was abuzz Wednesday with rumors that Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser had been officially tapped to join his presidential ticket.

Users were set alight after seeing screenshots of what appeared to be a Federal Election Commission filing registered to Trump and “General Michael Thomas Flynn (Vice President).” The form also referred to a political committee called “Trump-Flynn 2024,” and included the address of a P.O. Box in Arlington, Virginia. The document appeared to be a Form 2, which any candidate must file within 15 days of entering a race.

Many on the internet started to run with the news, fearful that the former president had enlisted the QAnon-pushing conspiracy theorist to help him reclaim the White House. Fortunately for the fate of the free world, the filing was beyond phony.

The original document is not found on the FEC’s website, but on a webpage with a URL ending with upstract.com, which is a news aggregator website. It’s not clear that the website is actually associated with the document. But what is clear is that the whole thing is a moneymaking hoax.

Shortly after posting the screenshot, one user boasted that by posting, they had helped to artificially inflate the betting odds of Flynn’s becoming Trump’s running mate, making a quick buck.

The online fervor still hit a fever pitch, however, and Flynn had to weigh in to put the rumors to rest. “I just saw 2 unauthorized FEC filings referencing my name. They are fake news! I don’t know anything about them, and my office has alerted the FEC,” he wrote on X, before plugging his movie. So there, that settles it.

Earlier Wednesday, Flynn posted his enthusiastic, unconditional endorsement of Trump’s presidential run, asking voters, “Will your children live the American Dream or be enslaved by a corrupt, wasteful government of woke globalists?”