Ash Backwards
“I’m being very nice. I’m being very, very nice. But at some point, I fight back, and it won’t be pretty.” So said President Trump in response to John McCain’s acceptance speech at the National Constitution Center, where he was presented this year’s Liberty Medal. McCain, showing the strain of his cancer, delivered brief remarks. This is the line that made its way to Trump (and should be heard by all): “To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.” You can watch his whole speech (and Joe Biden’s intro) here.
+ DC is still spinning from the latest of example of Trump putting his bonespur-riddled foot in mouth with Monday’s outlandish suggestion that past presidents didn’t meet with families of fallen soldiers. And surprise, he doubled-down today (and he’s still wrong). But he has (once again) successfully shifted the conversation away from his role as commander in chief, to Obama’s performance.
+ NYT: “Two leading senators have reached a bipartisan deal to provide funding for critical subsidies to health insurers that President Trump said last week that he would cut off.”