Joe Biden drew a huge target on himself this week, with his comments on getting along with stone-cold racists in the United States Senate. Conservative commenter Ana Navarro perhaps best summed up Biden's error, criticizing him for "dragging up these dead racists instead of talking about the live racists."

Biden's gaffe came at an inopportune time for him, seeing as how the first Democratic debates are now less than a week away. All the other candidates had been struggling with whether to attack Biden next week, since he is so well-beloved by Democratic voters. Biden is the clear frontrunner in the race at this point, regularly polling many multiples of the numbers of almost all the other candidates (excepting perhaps Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whom Biden only outpolls by a factor of two). It was tough, before Biden stepped in it, for the other candidates to develop any debate strategy for taking Biden down a peg. But that just got a whole lot easier, due to Biden's own words.

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Joe Biden is having a bad week, at the precise time when all the other Democrats running for president really needed him to stumble. With the first debates now less than a week away, Biden has handed his opponents a number of openings for them to directly attack him -- which, no doubt, some of them will exploit on stage next week. And Biden has no one to blame for this state of affairs but himself.

Biden's first gaffe was quickly eclipsed by his second this week, but it will probably be remembered and brought up by the progressive candidates during the debates. After attending a forum for poor people's concerns, Biden sped off to a fundraiser attended by big Wall Street donors. The optics of this were pretty bad, but Biden made things even worse by what he told them. He'd be a bosom buddy to the millionaires and billionaires, he assured them, and he'd even defend their patriotism when other Democrats attacked them. He swore that nothing would change much for their circumstances under a Biden presidency, drawing a clear comparison to candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (to name just two) who would levy new taxes upon the ultrawealthy. This was all pretty tone-deaf of Biden, considering where the energy is in Democratic politics these days, but the whole thing was quickly forgotten (by the media) when Biden dropped an even bigger gaffe at a different fundraiser.

Joe Biden wants things in Washington to return to a more civil era. That's fine and good, but the way he talked about it was definitely not. He bemoaned the current era where politicians are seen not just as the opposition but "the enemy," and reminisced about how he used to be able to "get things done" even with politicians who held racist views. He even warmly spoke of one of them, stating that "he never called me 'boy,' he called me 'son.'"

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President Donald Trump apparently thinks he can easily beat the 2020 Democratic nominee -- if Democrats would only nominate Hillary Clinton again, that is. The fact that she's not actually running seems to have completely escaped him. Granted, with 24 candidates in the Democratic race, it is rather hard to keep track of them all -- but even so, it's pretty hard to miss the fact that there simply are no Clintons whatsoever in the race this time around. But Trump's never been one to let facts get in the way of a good chant at one of his political rallies.

The mainstream media all went along with the fiction that Donald Trump somehow "launched" his re-election campaign yesterday in Florida, despite the obvious fact that he filed re-election paperwork on his first day in office and reportedly trademarked the new slogan he unveiled last night ("Keep America Great!") during his first month in office. In other words, he's literally been running since Day One of his first term.

Being Trump, of course, this wasn't the biggest fiction Trump told the adoring crowds last night. There were plenty of misstatements and outright lies, which is par for the course in any Trump speech. But his continuing obsession with the 2016 race should be a little worrisome to his own campaign, one would think.

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The first authentic polling trend of the 2020 Democratic nominating contest may now be happening. By "authentic," what I mean is a polling trend that is not merely an "announcement bump." Every candidate (well... every viable candidate) has seen some sort of boost in their polling immediately after making their official announcement, but most of these have since subsided. Now that the field is full, there will be no more such announcements to skew the polling, and any trends must thus be due to actual campaign successes or failures by the candidates. And we're seeing at least the beginnings of the first of these trends: Senator Elizabeth Warren seems to be enjoying a surge.

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It's June, which means that it is Supreme Court season once again. The high court's session wraps up at the end of June each year, and they usually hold back the most contentious cases until the very end. This year, there are two such big cases that could change American politics for at least the next decade or so. But in the meantime, the court has announced a few other decisions worth examining for their political impact as well.

The two cases everyone is waiting for are whether the Census Bureau can include a citizenship question on the main 2020 Census form, and whether the court will adopt a standard for what is and is not acceptable in terms of partisan gerrymandering. More on them in a moment. The decisions announced today dealt with: another bakery which refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple; a racial gerrymandering case; and the question of whether being tried by both a state and the federal government for the same crime constitutes "double jeopardy" or not.

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We have to begin by first ignoring all the rampant criminality spewing forth from the White House -- just for the moment, mind you -- to concentrate instead on looking forward, not back. Because we're less than two weeks away from the first round of Democratic 2020 presidential primary debates, and the Democratic National Committee just announced the lineup for the two nights.

Yesterday, they cut the field down to 20, which left four candidates out in the cold: Steve Bullock, Mike Gravel, Andrew Messam, and Seth Moulton. Today, they held the draw (our prediction: in future, the draw itself will be televised on C-SPAN...) and announced the lineup for each night. In doing so, the random nature of the draw conspired to almost entirely defeat the D.N.C.'s ultimate goal for holding such a draw in the first place -- not to have a "kiddie table" debate.

Learning from the response to the Republican 2016 debates, where candidates were separated into an "adult-table debate" and a "kiddie-table debate" (or, to be less caustic, an "undercard" debate) by their standing in the polls, the Democrats this time around decided to prevent this from happening by randomizing the process. Everyone who qualified would have a clear shot at both nights. They then refined this concept even further -- in an attempt to make the spread even more even -- by deciding to hold two draws, one among those in the top tier of polling and one among the lower. This way, the top tier would get divided evenly between the two nights, which would (they figured) prevent a single top-loaded debate from happening.

They figured wrong. Because out of the top five candidates in the current polls, four of them will be appearing together on the same night, while the other will be taking on a slate of all the lesser candidates on the other night. The only way they could have avoided this would have been to further refine their criteria so that (for instance) "out of the top four in the polling, two will appear each night," or something similar.

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President Donald Trump just made news by admitting what everyone already knew or suspected -- that he'd be just fine with Russia feeding him dirt on a political opponent during a presidential election campaign. He wouldn't see any necessity to inform the F.B.I. if a foreign government offered up negative information, and he furthermore insisted that any other American politician would do exactly the same thing. He's trying to normalize his own amorality, in other words.

To put it mildly, Trump is receiving some pushback. Democrats, of course, are outraged. But the interesting thing is that Republicans are also speaking out against Trump's position. In fact, no Republican senator has yet tried to defend Trump's position. Perhaps because he tried to rope them all in with his claims that congressmen routinely get dirt on their political opponents from Russia, but for whatever reason this was clearly a bridge too far for most congressional Republicans.

Democrats, from the presidential candidates on down, should make as big a stink about this as is humanly possible. But they should train their fire not only on Trump but also on his chief henchman in election interference, Mitch McConnell. Because McConnell is refusing to bring up any election reform bill in the Senate before the 2020 election happens. And, as Trump just proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, this means aiding and abetting any foreign election interference which may happen in the meantime.

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What do you do when reality doesn't match up with how you'd like things to be? For most of us, we either pursue some form of escapism (binge-watch television, drink to excess, book tickets to the International Space Station, etc.), or we just knuckle down and admit that reality can be a real bummer at times. Hey, that's life, right? But for Donald Trump, the easiest response is to just go right ahead and attempt to redefine reality into what he'd like it to be. After all, if millions of his followers can be hoodwinked into believing something that is patently false just on his say-so, then that gives it a sort of reality all on its own, doesn't it?

Case in point was the recent report by the New York Times that, when faced with rather dismal internal campaign polling numbers which showed him losing several key states to the Democrats (Michigan, Florida, etc.), Trump instructed his campaign staff to just outright lie about the numbers. Furthermore, Trump then began insisting that not only was he ahead in every single state they've ever polled, but also that Trump's numbers are actually now the best they've ever been. Trump is nothing if not a big fan of superlatives. But outside Trumpworld, this has to be seen as nothing short of a world-class cabin cruise down that famed river in Egypt, "De Nile."

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Donald Trump has one go-to tactic in what passes for his political toolbox: personally create a crisis, rail loudly about it and make threats, and then "solve" the crisis and claim it was the biggest victory of all time. He's used this tactic over and over again, and he really doesn't care who pays the price for his political flim-flam job -- Dreamers, farmers, manufacturers, consumers, or anyone else. But an interesting thing just happened with his most recent deployment of flim-flammery: absolutely nobody bought it this time around. The media didn't fall for it and the public certainly didn't fall for it. Maybe this boy has cried "Wolf!" once too many? Because it certainly feels like something has changed.

Perhaps it was the constricted time scale which helped usher in this newfound skepticism. The entire "crisis" only took place over roughly one week's time, from beginning to end. Usually Trump counts on people forgetting that he personally caused the crisis in the first place, which (if successful, especially in the media) allows him to focus everyone's attention on his "solution" to the crisis (which usually consists of some form of going back to the status quo ante). But when the whole charade happens within a single week, it's downright impossible not to remember what (and who) started it.

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The field has been set, the cattle calls have begun, and the first debate round is looming on the horizon. In other words, the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contest has moved into a new phase. If the polls can be believed, the people of Iowa are once again taking their "first in the nation" status seriously, and have begun examining the candidates much more closely than voters in other states. That should come as no surprise, since almost all the candidates are now investing heavily in doing well out in corn country. At least, the ones who have raised enough money to invest heavily in any state, that is.

Campaign News

The big news over the weekend was a new Des Moines Register poll, which showed only seven of the 24 candidates getting any sort of traction at all with Democratic voters. Joe Biden led the field with 24 percent, while three others were neck-and-neck in the battle for second place: Bernie Sanders (16 percent), Elizabeth Warren (15), and Pete Buttigieg (14). The other three who moved the needle at all were: Kamala Harris (7), Beto O'Rourke (2), and Amy Klobuchar (2). The other 17 candidates all registered at a single percentage point or worse.

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