A sweaty traffic cone had a frozen moment during the QAnon hymn at the NRA convention
Will the decade-long national nightmare finally end with a conviction in the coming weeks or eventually with Trump withdrawing from one of the scheduled debates because he fears a critical error. Shtick will not win a debate.
Donald Trump took some heat from the Joe Biden campaign on Saturday after the former president gave a speech for the National Rifle Association in Texas, and appeared to mess up his words as well as some key facts.
Trump, who was mocked online for bragging during the speech that he was healthier and a “better physical specimen” than fellow former president Barack Obama, also dealt with a bothersome fly during the political campaign event. He called the fly “brutal” as he swatted it away while speaking.
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In another section of the speech, according to Biden’s campaign rapid response team, “A confused Trump” referred “to himself in the third person while reading his teleprompter: ‘Yes oh yes and quickly says President Trump,”” the account quoted.
At the end of the speech, when Trump brings in some musical accompaniment and reads from a familiar-but-passionate script, Biden-Harris HQ described it as, “Trump starts playing QAnon music during his bizarre slur-filled NRA speech.”
Then, as he wound down, in a disorienting shift, sentimental music began to play and Trump furrowed his brow and shook his head to deliver the grim message that America is “a failing nation.”
In a monologue set to melodramatic instrumental music, Trump described the current state of the country as if he were breaking the news to a small child that his mother had just died: “Now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has the highest inflation in 58 years, where banks are collapsing, and interest rates are skyrocketing.”
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The music this dramatic part of his speech was set to, quite fittingly, sounded like an instrumental song that was previously described as a sort of anthem for QAnon, the conspiracy theory movement whose followers believe Trump has literally been anointed by God to save America from human trafficking and the “deep state.”
In a Saturday interview with MSNBC host Katie Phang, Barbara McQuade — who served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan between 2010 and 2017 — said getting the jury to return a guilty verdict against Trump will be relatively straightforward. She said that when first training for her job, her instructors said most not guilty verdicts in cases the DOJ brought happened because they were “complex white-collar cases” in which jury didn’t understand the nature of the charges. She noted that that isn’t the case in Manhattan.
“It’s actually not very difficult, but the prosecution does need to make clear the jury understands that,” McQuade said, adding that jury instructions from Judge Juan Merchan will play a key role.
“The court itself is going to explain the law here, that there does need to be this falsification of business records with intent to defraud by… concealing another crime,” she said. “It doesn’t need to prove that the other crime was committed, just that there was an intent to do so.”
The former president has been in trial for the past five weeks, defending himself from charges that he orchestrated a hush money payment scheme in which he allegedly directed his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to buy the silence of various women claiming to have had extramarital affairs with Trump prior to the 2016 election. And as McQuade pointed out, Bragg’s 34-count felony indictment of Trump isn’t for the hush money payments themselves, but for allegedly falsifying business records to cover up the payments, which he characterized as illegal campaign contributions.
The ongoing Donald Trump hush-money case will be decided by a jury of 12 New Yorkers.
We ran a trial transcript through AI chatbots and asked how they’d decide if they were jurors.
Both ChatGPT and Perplexity said they’d find the former president guilty.
Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity were prompted to imagine they were an ordinary Manhattan resident on the jury, responsible for evaluating the evidence in the trial. Each was asked to review the transcript and base their answer on the evidence and arguments presented. They were told to “choose now whether you would find him guilty or not guilty.”
