Trump denounces White supremacy '38 times' in new campaign video, amid Biden-Harris criticisms

The Trump campaign on Tuesday released a video compiling more than three dozen times President Trump has denounced White supremacy, as his Democratic rival Joe Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris of California continue to claim this week on the campaign trail that he has failed to do so.

The Trump campaign rolled out a nearly 5-minute-long video of the president, featuring video clips from as recently as this month, to his 2016 presidential campaign, and dating all the way back to an interview Trump gave to Matt Lauer in the early 2000s, where he denounced White supremacy and “disavowed” White supremacist groups.

The video comes after Biden and Harris have criticized Trump, casting him as a racist and claiming he has not denounced White supremacy, and also comes as part of the Trump campaign’s final pitch to win over Black voters ahead of Election Day.

“President Trump wants to prosecute the KKK as a terrorist organization and has condemned White supremacy at least 38 times. 38 times!” a senior Trump campaign official told Fox News.

“The Biden campaign continues to sow division and inflame racial tension by spreading this false narrative,” the Trump campaign official added. “Enough is enough.”

The official called it a “dead issue” and said that “anyone who continues to ask about it is using a question to disguise their accusations and smear the president.”

The president has been questioned on his stance toward White supuremacy since 2017, when he said that there were good people on “both sides” after violence broke out between White nationalists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va.

The issue came up again during the first presidential debate.

When asked, Trump responded: “Sure, I’m willing to do that, but I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not the right-wing. I am willing to do anything. I want to see peace.”

The president’s response sparked an intense moment with the former vice president.

“Who do you want me to condemn?” Trump said. "What do you want to call them? Give me a name.”

Biden interrupted and said: "Proud Boys.”

“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by," Trump said. "But I’ll tell you what, I'll tell you what, somebody has got to do something about Antifa and the left. Because this is not a right-wing problem. This is a left-wing problem.”

The Proud Boys have been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and have held multiple events across the nation, alongside other right-wing groups. The gatherings have sparked some violent clashes with left-wing counter-demonstrators.

Biden interrupted, calling Antifa “an idea, not an organization.”

Trump fired back saying, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.”

“When a bat hits you over the head, that's not an idea,” Trump said. “Antifa is bad.”

The president, during a town hall earlier this month hosted by NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie, was asked to clarify his remarks during the first presidential debate.

“I denounce White supremacy, okay,” Trump said. “I denounce White supremacy, I have, for years.”

Trump quipped: “You didn’t ask Joe Biden if he denounces Antifa.”

The president added: “I denounce White supremacy, and you want to know something, I denounce Antifa.”

However, they are not equivalent. Antifa, short for anti-fascist, is a small and loosely organized left-wing movement. According to the Anti-Defamation League, White supremacy is a full-fledged "ideology" that encompasses more than simple racism and bigotry.

The Trump campaign also pointed to the president’s plan for Black America, which designates the KKK and Antifa as terrorist organizations, and calls for making lynching a national hate crime.

“The person who needs to condemn White supremacy is Joe Biden, who praised a former KKK Exalter Cyclops as his ‘mentor’ and ‘friend,’” the Trump campaign said, referring to the former vice president’s relationship with late Sen. Robert Byrd, R-W.V..

Byrd was a former member of the Klu Klux Klan who later regretted that affiliation, renounced his past views supporting segregation and described it as a mistake. Byrd, who died at the age of 92 in 2010, was the longest-serving senator in American history. By the time of his death, he had allies even in the civil rights movement, with the NAACP at the time praising his legacy and his transformation from a former KKK member to a “stalwart supporter” of civil rights.

The Trump campaign also pointed to the former vice president’s running mate’s comments during the presidential primary, claiming Harris said Biden “coddled segregationists.”

But Biden campaign National Press Secretary Jamal Brown fired back, telling Fox News that “through his nearly four years in office, Donald Trump has only ever sought to divide us.”

“He had fanned the flames of hate and given comfort to those who spread it,” Brown told Fox News. “Vice President Biden today laid out a different vision for our future.”

Brown was pointing to Biden’s remarks during a campaign event in Warm Springs, Ga. on Tuesday, where he sought to deliver a unifying message.

“God and history have called us to this moment and to this mission: with our voices and our votes, we must free ourselves from the forces of darkness, from the forces of division, and from the forces of yesterday — from the forces that pull us apart, hold us down, and hold us back,” Biden said Tuesday. “And if we do so, we will once more become one nation, under God, indivisible. A nation united. A nation strengthened. A nation healed.”

Biden, however, also repeated during his speech his claim that Trump had failed to denounce White supremacy.

"Donald Trump fails to condemn White supremacy, doesn’t believe that systemic racism is a problem, and won’t say that Black lives matter," Biden said.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has released a series of ads in an effort to win over Black voters, while attempting to cast Biden as having a “history of racist comments.” One ad, titled “Joe’s Own Words,” compiles several comments Biden has made, dating back to the 1970s.

Other ads the Trump campaign is sharing include ones focused on criminal justice reform and featuring Alice Johnson; one featuring Herschel Walker, who discusses what the president has done for the Black community; one claiming Biden is “all talk, no action,” one about a homeless veteran who received a second chance, and credits the president; and another featuring Duke Tanner, who received clemency from the president.

The ads will be cycled in and out of the YouTube masthead, which the Trump campaign has secured already 20 times throughout the 2020 cycle. The masthead, according to the campaign, reaches more than 74 million voters a day.

A senior Trump campaign official told Fox News that the masthead is a seven-figure buy, and described it as “the most valuable piece of real estate on the internet.”

The campaign has also secured the YouTube masthead for the final 72 hours before Election Day.

 

Democrats Packing The Court Cartoons

 

Hunter Biden, the Wall Street Journal and the decline of media gatekeepers

The thing about “fake news” is that it suddenly seems authentic when it’s on your side.

For all of President Trump’s attacks on the “enemy of the people”--and some criticism from the Bernie Sanders wing that derides the corporate-controlled media--nonpartisan journalists can still be useful in the role of umpire. And that’s why the president, and politicians of all stripes, try to orchestrate favorable coverage, especially on controversial issues.

This enables them to point to a news story as validation of whatever political charge they’re hurling at the moment. Such stories give their rhetoric a certain gravitas, a patina of credibility.

But--and here’s the rub--nowhere near as much as in the past. A huge swath of the country no longer trusts the elite media, which has been battered by Trumpian attacks as well as their own increasingly blatant biases and blunders. Many people no longer believe the fact-checkers will deliver the facts. Many reflexively dismiss a story in the New York Times or Washington Post, no matter how well-documented, as trash because of the perception of political animus. 

They were once the gatekeepers, the big papers, networks and magazines who mainly controlled what you read, saw and heard. But the rise of the web and social media destroyed their stranglehold on the news. And that, despite the vitriol and misinformation that are part of the Twitter and Facebook culture, was a healthy thing.

The downside of their forced abdication is the absence of neutral referees, the inability to agree on a common set of facts, that has been a hallmark of the Trump era, as major news outlets have turned sharply left. Who, in the past, could imagine a president walking out on “60 Minutes”?

And that brings us to Hunter Biden.

Ben Smith, in his New York Times column, describes how Trump campaign operatives tried to give the story--the batch of emails and a former Hunter business partner accusing Joe Biden of involvement--to a Wall Street Journal reporter. “The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president,” who told one crowd the Journal was working on an exciting story.

But when Journal reporters--who operate separately from its conservative editorial page--took too long with their digging, the Trump folks, who wanted the story out before the final debate, got antsy. Rudy Giuliani delivered some of the same documents to the New York Post, which like the Journal and Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch but operates independently. The Post’s story, alleging the former vice president was involved in Hunter’s foreign dealmaking, drew plenty of criticism (and was censored by Twitter and Facebook, which have essentially become the new virtual gatekeepers).

The ex-business partner, Tony Bobulinski, issued a statement implicating Biden the night before the debate, and the Trump campaign brought him to Nashville for an appearance the next day. Breitbart, which used to be run by Steve Bannon, the ex-White House aide who was working with Giuliani, published the entire statement.  

The result is the latest Hunter stories were birthed in a hyperpartisan storm, rather than with the imprimatur of the Journal news pages.

Worse, from the Trump campaign’s point of view, is that the Journal ran a short news story saying “corporate records reviewed by the Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden.” Fox’s news division, reviewing the same records, reached the same conclusion. At both outlets, conservative opinion people disagreed.

There was a barrage of online denunciations from Trump supporters after I laid out these facts on “Media Buzz.”

On one side, you have Bobulinski’s account and an email saying that “H” (presumably Hunter) would reserve 10 percent of the millions of dollars from China for the “big man” (presumably Joe).

On the other side, another ex-partner says Joe Biden was not involved, while two news organizations failed to find evidence to contradict that. And in any event this happened in 2017, when Biden was out of office, and the China project never went anywhere.

Conservative partisans don’t want to hear this; they’re convinced the former VP is guilty as hell. Liberal partisans don’t want to hear this; they think the media shouldn’t even touch the subject. That includes NPR, whose managing editor said last week that “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.”

Of course it’s a story, with many unanswered questions. Overall, Hunter Biden’s foreign influence-peddling looks awful and is an embarrassment to his father. But we already knew that.

Smith writes that the last two weeks have proved “that the old gatekeepers, like the Journal, can still control the agenda.”

I wouldn’t use the word control. A blue-chip newspaper like the Journal carries more weight than a highly partisan website, but it’s a vast echo chamber out there, and no news organization has the clout to either certify or shut down an allegation that’s “out there.” There are too many ways for a shaky charge, a video snippet or a conspiracy theory to go viral, too many audiences that believe the establishment press is lying to them.

That’s why the gatekeepers are a shadow of their former selves, just some brand-name voices in the national cacophony.

 

Democrats say Republicans will regret Barrett confirmation, slam 'manipulation' of Supreme Court

Shortly after Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the  U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, Democrats warned Republicans that they would regret their decision to hold a vote so closely to an election.

"The Republican majority is lighting its credibility on fire ... The next time the American people give Democrats a majority in this chamber, you will have forfeited the right to tell us how to run that majority," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said during a floor speech Monday.

"My colleagues may regret this for a lot longer than they think," he added. 

Nominees once needed 60 votes to be confirmed, but Sen. Mitch McConnell changed the standard in 2017 to allow for a simple majority. That move allowed for the confirmation of President Trump's previous two nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. 

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., first eliminated the 60-vote threshold in 2013 to overcome GOP stonewalling of President Obama's nominations to the lower courts and the executive branch. Known as invoking the "nuclear option" at the time, Reid kept the higher standard in place for the Supreme Court. 

The comments by Schumer appeared to be similar to those made by McConnell back in 2013 after the Democratic-controlled chamber eliminated the 60-vote threshold. 

“You’ll regret this, and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think,” McConnell said in 2013, according to the Hill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also released a statement criticizing Trump and the GOP Senate for "committed an act of supreme desperation" so close to Election Day. 

Pelosi argued the confirmation, which she called a manipulation, was made so Trump and Republicans could "achieve their years-long campaign to destroy Americans’ health care"

“The President’s Supreme Court manipulation threatens the very values and rights that define and distinguish our nation: a woman’s constitutional right to make her own medical decisions, the rights of LGBTQ Americans, the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain for fair wages, the future of our planet and environmental protections, voting rights and the right of every American to have a voice in our democracy," Pelosi wrote in a statement.

Democratic senators warned that Republicans have lost the right to complain if they win back the majority.

"Will Democrats go to new, extraordinary lengths to maximize their power given the extraordinary lengths Republicans have gone to maximize their power? This is not a conversation that is ripe enough yet, but what do Republicans expect?" said Sen. Chris Murphy D-Conn., as part of the chamber’s debate over Barrett.

"Do we just unilaterally stand down and not choose to use the same tools that Republicans did in the majority? ... I think there are now new rules in the Senate, and I think Republicans have set them," he continued, according to the paper.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., released a statement calling the confirmation a "sad day for the Senate and for the Court."

"My Republican colleagues put the rule of ‘because we can’ over the traditions and precedents of the Senate, the principles we hold dear as an institution, and the integrity of the federal judiciary," he said.

The Supreme Court said in a press release Monday that Barrett will be able to start her new role after Chief Justice John Roberts administers her judicial oath on Tuesday. Justice Clarence Thomas administered the constitutional oath at Monday's ceremony.

Fox News' Ronn Blitzer and Edmund DeMarche contributed to this report

 

Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to Supreme Court, 'Squad' members call for expanding the bench

Members of the progressive "Squad" of House Democrats didn't skip a beat on Monday, calling for court-packing almost immediately after Judge Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation to the Supreme Court.

"Expand the court," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said in a terse response.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., followed: "Expand the court."

Monday's vote came after weeks of partisan bickering over the rationale for confirming justices before an election.

"We are going to take back the White House [and] Senate next week with a resounding mandate from the people to fight back against Trump’s illegitimately stacked judiciary," Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., tweeted after Barrett's confirmation. "We must expand the Court if we’re serious about the transformational change the people are crying out for."

After Senate Democrats previously indicated they would take extraordinary measures in response to a Barrett confirmation, former Vice President Joe Biden declined to say whether he would pack the courts.

Another "Squad" member, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., tweeted a photo of herself, with the words: "We reject this injustice. We will fight for our rights. We will legislate our values."

Just before the Senate's vote on Monday, Biden floated the possibility that he could move justices to other courts. 

“There is some literature among constitutional scholars about the possibility of going from one court to another court, not just always staying the whole time in the Supreme Court but I have made no judgement," Biden said at a campaign stop in Chester, Pa.

He went on to say that "there are just a group of serious constitutional scholars, have a number of ideas how we should proceed from this point on."

Biden's predecessor, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, urged followers to vote Republicans out of office. 

"Senate Republicans just pushed through a Supreme Court justice who will help them take away Americans' health care in the middle of a pandemic. For them, this is victory. Vote them out," she said.

 

Amy Coney Barrett sworn in as Supreme Court justice at White House

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, fresh off her confirmation to serve as an associate justice on the nation's highest court, took her constitutional oath on Monday at the White House.

The Supreme Court said in a press release that Barrett will be able to start her new role after Chief Justice John Roberts administers her judicial oath on Tuesday. Justice Clarence Thomas administered the constitutional oath at Monday's ceremony.

Thomas has long been considered one of the more conservative justices on the court, along with Barrett's mentor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Echoing her mentor, Barrett underscored the need for a separation of powers between the judicial and legislative branches.

"It is the job of a senator to pursue her policy preferences," Barrett said to an audience on the South Lawn of the White House. "In fact, it would be a dereliction of duty for her to put policy goals aside. By contrast, it is the job of a judge to resist her policy preferences. It would be a dereliction of duty for her to give into them. Federal judges don't stand for election. Thus, they have no basis for claiming that their preferences reflect those of the people."

The separation of duty is what makes the judiciary distinct, she said.

"A judge declares independence not only from Congress and the president, but also from the private beliefs that might otherwise move her," she said.

The Senate confirmed Barrett with a 52-48 vote. All 45 Democrats and two independents who caucus with the Democrats opposed her confirmation.

Controversial from the start, her confirmation prompted a wave of backlash on Monday. Almost immediately after the Senate voted, Democratic lawmakers panned the decision while some called demanded leaders "expand the court."

Barrett's confirmation solidified a conservative majority on the nation's highest court, and gave Trump another victory as he headed into election day.

Whoever wins on Nov. 3 will likely have major consequences on the Supreme Court as an American institution. Former Vice President Joe Biden has mostly refused to answer questions about whether he would pack the courts.

On Monday, Biden said that he might be open to shifting Supreme Court justices to lower courts if elected president, noting that he hadn't made any judgment yet on the issue.

“There is some literature among constitutional scholars about the possibility of going from one court to another court, not just always staying the whole time in the Supreme Court but I have made no judgment," Biden said at a campaign stop in Chester, Pa.

He went on to say that "there are just a group of serious constitutional scholars, have a number of ideas how we should proceed from this point on."

"That's what we're going to be doing. We're going to give them 180 days God-willing if I'm elected, from the time I'm sworn in to be able to make such a recommendation."

During an interview with "60 Minutes," Biden said he would set up a commission that would make recommendations for reforming the court system. 

"I will ask them to, over 180 days, come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system because it's getting out of whack," he said.

Fox News' Tyler Olson contributed to this report.

 

Biden Fracking Cartoons

 

Polls show President Trump won debate against Biden

 

Following Thursday’s final presidential debate, President Trump shared multiple polls on Twitter that showed as much as 96 percent of participants claimed he won.

Experts have said the President’s performance was measured, controlled and on message. In the meantime, analysts noted Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden often struggled to present coherent ideas and made several gaffes throughout the 96 minute event.

Election experts have predicted President Trump’s performance could have even been good enough to win over undecided voters.

The two candidates went head-to-head in Nashville, Tenn. and debated on a number of issues currently pressing the American people. The President opened up the debate and touted his administration’s response to the coronavirus. He highlighted the great strides American companies have made to bring a swift end to the pandemic.

“We have a vaccine that’s coming, it’s ready, it’s going to be announced within weeks and it’s going to be delivered,” said President Trump. “We have Operation Warp Speed.”

When he spoke about healthcare, Biden said he would replace the ‘Affordable Care Act’ with his own personal plan and argued his policy would drive insurance competition. President Trump pushed back against his opponent’s idea and noted his healthcare plan is a political ploy to attempt to bring socialism to the U.S.

“When he talks about a public option he’s talking about destroying medicare… and destroying your social security,” the President noted. “And this whole country will come down.” Additionally, President Trump slammed Biden for being a puppet for “the left” and warned voters that his opponent wants to close up the country. The President added that this threatens to destroy the national economy.

“We can’t lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does,” said the President. “We can’t close up our nation…or you’re not going to have a nation.”

Throughout the debate, President Trump hammered down on the Biden family and accused his opponent of accepting bribes from foreign entities. He stated that the Democrat owes an explanation to the American people in regard to the Hunter Biden email scandal.

The President wrapped up by reminding voters that he originally ran for president back in 2016 in order to fix “America from the control of the radical left.”

“You know, Joe, I ran because of you,” the President stated. “Because you did a poor job. If I thought you did a good job, I would have never run.”