HOW MANY LIES DID HE TELL LAST THURSDAY?

Posted from Seth Abramson’s Substack:

Donald Trump's Shocking Box Score: 602 Lies in Just 40 Minutes, An Unprecedented Tsunami of Deceit That Is Disqualifying

The debate performance Trump just turned in was the most shameful in U.S. political history. It doesn’t matter who’s running against him because he’s nonviable. And now some breaking news confirms it.

The Breaking News

Yes, Mr. Trump lied every 3.9 seconds he was speaking in Thursday night’s debate in Atlanta.

But we’ll get to that shocking—and wholly unprecedented—revelation in a moment.

We begin, instead, with major breaking news that’s being reported exclusively here at Proof: a new poll by a U.S. pollster with an “A+” rating for accuracy from ABC News reveals that Trump voters who’ve told pollsters they’re “Democrats” are leading the charge for President Biden to end his campaign—with Democrats uninterested in the idea.

This shocking revelation is buried in the cross-tabs of a new Survey USA poll that no one in major media has reported on, possibly because it goes against the narrative being pushed by most major-media editors: that everyone wants Joe Biden to retire.

Here’s the blown-up version of the relevant portion of the above image, which shows responses to the question, “Should Joe Biden continue to run for a second term? Or should Joe Biden step aside and allow another Democrat to run for President?” on the basis of who the respondent told Survey USA they were voting for in November:

What we find is that 78% of “Democratic” Trump voters—yes, you read that oxymoron correctly—want Joe Biden to drop out of the race, which is not surprising because they have already decided to vote against him (and lest you wonder if in fact these Democrats became Trump voters after the debate, wonder no further: the CNN Post-Debate Poll showed us that a maximum of 5% of all likely voters in America changed their vote in any way—to include switching from a Trump vote to a Biden one—because of the debate).

Among Biden supporters—the group major media is trying to convince us desperately want President Biden off the Democratic ticket—only 1 in 4 want a new candidate.

But even this is misleading, and not just because the poll was taken in the immediate aftermath of the debate, when emotions were still running high. Yes, we might expect that 26% number to drop to 18% or 20% once emotions cool, but isn’t that still higher than would be ideal? No, it’s not—not if you followed the 2024 Democratic primaries.

In the 2024 Democratic primaries, the percentage of Democratic voters who wanted Joe Biden to be the party’s nominee—looking here only at those states where anyone else was on the ballot for voters to pick—ranged from lows of 63.8% (New Hampshire) and 70.1% (Minnesota) to highs of 96.2% (South Carolina) and 95.2% (Idaho). You will notice, and I can tell you that this trend continues even if you look at every primary, that President Biden performed best in the primaries in blood-red states Democrats can’t possibly win in November; in those states, only die-hard institutionalist voters come out to vote in the Democratic primary in a non-competitive Republican state. By comparison, if we look at the states that matter most this November, we find that the sentiment that someone other than Biden should be the nominee was always present:

• Arizona: 10.7%

• Colorado: 17.5%

• Georgia: 6.9%

• Maine: 17.2%

• Michigan: 18.9%

• Minnesota: 29.9%

• Nevada: 10.7% (but leading Biden opponent Dean Phillips not on ballot)

• New Mexico: 16.5% (but leading Biden opponent Dean Phillips not on ballot)

• New Hampshire: 36.2%

• North Carolina: 12.7% (but leading Biden opponent Dean Phillips not on ballot)

• Pennsylvania: 12.1%

• Wisconsin: 11.4%

We see here that while Biden fared best in the primaries of the six battleground states that determined the result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election—namely, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—even in these battleground states an average of 11.8% of Democratic voters wanted to see someone else instead of President Biden as the party’s nominee.

In the next set of six “purple” (or, as it were, “battleground”) states—Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, New Hampshire, and North Carolina—this figure positively balloons to 21.2%. But even this figure is low, because Dean Phillips did not appear on the ballot in two of these six states: New Mexico and North Carolina.

Because the first debate of the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle was held a truly astounding four and a half months before Election Day, and because major media has been in an actually unprecedented anti-incumbent feeding frenzy for the last 48 hours—the period during which the Survey USA poll was taken—we can be sure (as much as one can ever be in polling) that the current 26% of Democrats who say they want Joe Biden off the Democratic ticket will decline over time; as I said, we might expect it to be at 18% to 20% by the time of Democrats’ rather late 2024 convention, then lower once President Biden is formally the nominee and beyond any possibility of removal.

What the primary data above tell us is that the sentiment that President Biden should be replaced on the Democratic ticket was approximately the same after the debate as it was before the debate, meaning that the debate had no meaningful effect on the issue and it is lobbyists, donors, politicos, journalists, and D.C. lawmakers—uniquely self-interested political operators—who want President Biden to end his political career, but not the voters who will actually decide this election.

But, as already noted, there’s a key exception to this general rule.

That exception is Trump voters—more specifically, Trump voters who are claiming to be Democrats, indeed Trump voters who are so in the bag for Mr. Trump that they’re willing to tell a pollster they’ll definitely vote for him just days before his sentencing on 34 federal felonies. Those are pretty clearly committed Trump voters. And what those committed Trump voters are doing, presumably with their eyes wide open, is massively skewing poll results about President Biden ending his campaign in a way that major-media coverage of the issue is obscuring, with the result that the Survey USA Poll’s top-line number shows about one-third of Democratic voters wanting Biden gone—still much lower than the 90% of journalists and lawmakers who do—when the reality is that the real number is (a) likely half that, and (b) unchanged from before the debate.

In other words, there’s no compelling evidence that the debate in Atlanta moved the needle on Democratic voters’ opinion of President Biden. But what of independents?

There have now been two post-debate polls, and both appear to show President Joe Biden gaining ground on his MAGA rival Donald Trump rather than losing it.

The first poll is the Morning Consult Poll. Before the debate it showed the candidates tied; after the debate it showed BIDEN +1.

In a very close race like this one, a gain of 1% over just a day or two is significant.

s this conclusive? No, of course not. But what it does mean is that there’s absolutely no polling evidence to substantiate the major-media claim—and D.C. politico fear—that the debate cost Joe Biden support among the people who really matter: voters.

Some readers who are extremely into polls will note that the Morning Consult Poll referenced above—which put Joe Biden ahead of Donald Trump nationally, in a way rendering irrelevant any opinions voters might hold about who the candidate should be—did hold some startling figures that would naturally cause Democrats concern. For instance, 47% of Democratic voters told Morning Consult that they want Biden gone.

The problems here are manifest, however: (1) a similar question was not asked about Trump, so we’ve nothing to compare dissatisfaction with Joe Biden among Democrats to; (2) we don’t know how many of those “Democratic voters” are (once again) actually Donald Trump supporters (remembering here that in the Survey USA results, Trump voters were able to misleadingly increase the level of apparent satisfaction with Biden by as much as 10%); and (3) when we drill down on these numbers we find surprising additional findings, like the fact that 40% of independent voters thought Joe Biden won the debate.

Is 40% a great number? No. But given how Joe Biden performed on camera, that figure represents an incredible degree of openness to Biden’s age and bearing among a cadre of voters who could decide the 2024 election. By comparison, CNN reports that only 28% of all voters thought Donald Trump won the first debate of the 2020 election cycle.

More importantly, even despite its data on Democratic voter dissatisfaction with Joe Biden, Morning Consult had to concede in its post-poll press release that the most consequential finding in its poll was that “President Joe Biden has lost no immediate ground to Trump.” In other words, even those who would prefer Joe Biden not be the nominee are resigned to him now, which is basically the same situation the nation was in during the Democratic primary. The debate simply didn’t move the needle.

The Worst Debate Performance in American History

Proof has already catalogued some of Mr. Trump’s most egregious lies at Thursday’s debate in Atlanta—from saying the pandemic ended in January 2021 to insisting every American wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, from endorsing the neo-Nazi Great Replacement Theory to bizarrely accusing President Biden of starting the war in Ukraine, from using the word “Palestinian” as a slur and appearing to accidentally admit that Vladimir Putin secretly revealed his plan to invade Europe before the invasion occurred—so the purpose of this report isn’t to analyze the tsunami of deceit Trump unleashed on American voters in Atlanta via anecdote, but rather via Big Data.

In short, Proof is going to do what major media has thus far refused to do and count up the lies Trump told as part of his Thursday Gish gallop—a gaslighting technique used by con men and domestic abusers to make coherent debate impossible (and an especially vile and effective practice if your debating opponent is a lifelong stutterer).

There’s no known defense to the Gish gallop, largely because it’s almost unheard of in public life. Why? Because only sociopaths engage in this practice, so it generally occurs behind closed doors rather than, as here, on a nationally and internationally broadcast debate in which the sociopath in question is auditioning to be the next U.S. president.

The most one can do in the face of the Gish gallop is issue negatory summations prior to any debate response—that is, placeholder blanket rejections of everything said by the opposing party in lieu of having the time or space to rebut every lie just uttered.

Over and over during Thursday’s debate, President Biden issued precisely the sort of negatory summations one would expect an intelligent debater to use in the face of a Gish gallop, such as these monologue-heading statements from the sitting POTUS:

1. “He’s lying. That is simply not true.”

2. “Once again, he’s exaggerating. He’s lying.”

3. “Every single thing he said is a lie—every single one.”

4. “I’ve never heard so much malarkey in my whole life.”

5. “I’ve never heard so much foolishness.”

6. “I don’t know where the hell he’s been [to be saying what he’s saying].”

7. “He’s dead wrong.”

To be very clear, in addition to the above, President Biden repeatedly and with great specificity rebutted a number of the false claims made by Mr. Trump. But as we will see with the accounting of Trump’s lies below, even if President Biden had been permitted to be the only speaker at Thursday’s debate and had been allowed to speak for 90 minutes without interruption or interjection from either the moderators or Mr. Trump; even if he didn’t have a bad cold; even if he didn’t have a lifelong stutter; even if he weren’t apparently experiencing the debilitating effects of cold-and-flu meds on eighty-one year-olds, he wouldn’t have been able to sufficiently rebut every lie Trump deliberately and callously told American voters in Atlanta.

That’s why the Gish gallop is custom-made for sociopaths—you only use it when you either don’t care about consequences or simply can’t conceive of experiencing them.

And on that note I’m going over to the Swing ;=Left meeting to address post cards. You should, too,.

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