Trump Allies Beg Him Not to Be “Raging Asshole” at Biden Debate

Trump’s debate preppers are begging him to not be a “raging asshole,” according to sources who shared their sigh-inducing strategies with Rolling Stone ahead of Thursday’s presidential debate against Biden.

A Republican who recently provided debate prep to Trump paraphrased their advice to Rolling Stone as, “Don’t be a raging asshole while you’re on stage with Biden.” The unnamed Republican also discouraged Trump from taking the bait from Biden to devolve into the aforementioned “raging asshole” like he did in 2020. During those debates, Trump opened by derailing what NPR at the time described as “maybe the worst presidential debate in American history,” then took a restrained approach for the second, which led to him face planting.*

Trump appears to be taking the advice seriously. According to Rolling Stone, Trump has privately acknowledged that Biden would try to make him act “crazy” during the debate, which for Trump is just something he typically does all on his own. Rolling Stone also notes the topic has come up at rallies. At a rally in Atlanta, Trump reportedly told the crowd that multiple advisers had told him he “should be nicer.” At another rally in Pennsylvania, Trump asked attendees how he should act during the debate. According to Rolling Stone, he asked the crowd, “Should I be tough and nasty, and just say, ‘You’re the worst president in history’? Or should I be nice, and calm, and let him speak?” The crowd overwhelmingly cheered for him to be the “raging asshole” his debate preppers have urged him against.

Allies and advisers around Trump are concerned he’ll let Biden get to him, with pressure points aplenty amid a historic felony conviction, allies getting creamed in state courts across the country for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his election-denialist base getting carted off to federal prison for participating in the January 6 insurrection, and Trump-endorsed candidates losing their primaries. They’re also concerned Trump will be a “raging asshole” about Biden’s age.

“You can be strong and fight, but most people won’t like to see you beating up too hard on grandpa,” one source told Rolling Stone, referring to attacks on Biden’s age. Dan Eberhart, a longtime GOP donor who claims to have spent a lot of time around Trump recently, also urged caution, telling Rolling Stone, “He needs to be careful to be assertive but not aggressive with Biden. If he’s too aggressive, it’ll turn off female voters.”

Trump and his followers are already convinced he’ll lose the upcoming debate, naturally claiming it is rigged: Both Trump and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump have pushed a doping conspiracy that claims if Biden is anything other than altogether boring during the debate, it’ll be due to drugs. Other allies like Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both everlasting sources of nonsensical conspiracy theories, have preemptively decided Trump will lose the debate because the moderators are biased against him.

Meanwhile, Trump claims the entirety of his debate prep is just … being interviewed by conservative outlets. Ahead of his rally in Philadelphia last Saturday, Trump told conservative radio talk show host Chris Stigall, “People say, ‘How are you preparing?’ I’m preparing by taking questions from you and others, if you think about it.”

If Trump shows restraint in Thursday’s debate, it won’t be because he’s magically developed a mature and level-headed “presidential tone”—but because he listened to his advisers begging him not to be a “raging asshole” for once.

* This article originally misstated the number of Trump-Biden debates in 2020.

Good news for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party: The swing-state voters most likely to decide the election believe that democracy is on the ballot in November. The problem: They trust Donald Trump to protect it more than Biden.

A new poll from The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government shows that the Biden campaign’s effort to frame the 2024 election as a battle between democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism—the “most important election of our lifetime”—has been successful; 61 percent of surveyed swing-state voters described “threats to democracy” as “extremely important” to them.

But the campaign’s messaging does not seem to have translated to support for Biden. Remarkably, 44 percent of swing-state voters trust Trump to best handle those threats over Biden’s 33 percent. Among undecided voters, the numbers are just as bleak: 38 percent trust Trump and 29 percent trust Biden.

The troubling numbers come as Trump faces an election interference trial in Georgia and an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith over his involvement in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Amid his legal woes, the former president has continued to peddle lies about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Biden’s messaging problem is surprising. Voters appear to agree that democracy is in danger, a central theme of Biden’s stump-speech pitches and campaign ads, many of which contain footage of the mob outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They just don’t trust that he’s best suited to guard it. Claims made by Trump of the threat to democracy in the wake of his felony conviction in his hush-money trial may partially explain the poll’s results, as may frustration with Biden’s insistence on continuing to fund Israel’s unpopular assault on Gaza, even as he violates international and domestic weapons transfer laws to do so.

But whatever voters think threats to democracy entail—like a president sowing doubt in elections and refusing to submit to the peaceful transfer of power—Biden, who has prioritized comparatively abstract messaging on democracy at times during his reelection campaign, will need to figure out how to fully get through to voters on the issue, or change course soon.

Representative Lauren Boebert celebrated winning her new Colorado district’s Republican primary wearing a MAGA hat and an admittedly counterfeit pair of Donald Trump’s golden sneakers.

The tacky, reflective gold “Never Surrender” high-tops were first launched in February as a moneymaking scheme for the embattled former president, who’s been hit with mounting legal fines in addition to his costly campaign. It appears that Boebert, who claims to be one of Trump’s favorites, couldn’t secure an actual pair of the sneakers, so she had to go with knock-offs, according to Westword.

“These are very China, but I’m OK with that,” Boebert said at Tuesday night’s victory party, laughing. “If I could’ve bought the OGs, I would have.”

Trump has begun promising the limited-edition sneakers as a gift to donors who gave in excess of $2.5 million, but originally they sold for $399, a steep sum for a pair of plastic kicks. If Boebert had shelled out, the money would’ve gone to Trump’s Save America PAC, which will pay the bills across his many legal battles.

During her victory party, Boebert took a phone call, which she told Westword was from Trump himself. “I said a lot of great things,” she said. “I told him I’m looking forward to helping him in this fight, and that I’m going to be there, and I told him he needs to win his third election.”

Maybe next time she gets Trump on the phone, she should ask him for merch. The sneakers are sold out online, but Trump clearly has some extras knocking around.

“He congratulated me, he loves me and thanks me for a good win,” she said.

In December, Boebert announced that she would be switching districts, to run in a Republican stronghold after only narrowly securing her seat in 2022 from a Democratic challenger. With Tuesday’s win, the far-right Christian nationalist showed she will have far better luck staying in Congress in November.

Fox News and Jesse Watters are pushing a bizarre conspiracy theory ahead of Thursday’s presidential debate: that Joe Biden is part of a plot to install Kamala Harris in a “DEI presidency.”

On The Five Tuesday evening, Watters claimed that the debate was part of progressives’ plan to “drag [Biden] across the finish line and install” the vice president to the top job.

“There is a lot at stake, plus the progressive movement—they are this close to locking this thing in,” Watters lamented. “They have opened the borders. They have changed the entire culture of this country. If you look at the cities, it’s almost over.”

“If they can drag him across the finish line and install Kamala, we have a DEI presidency that they can celebrate for the rest of the administration,” he added. “That’s all they need to get to. It’s just 90 minutes. That’s all it takes.”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion principles have been a buzzword on the right in recent years, often standing in for racism and bigotry. Two weeks ago, Republicans in Congress introduced a bill to ban DEI from all government offices and contracting, and DEI was among the slurs used to allege another conspiracy involving the Baltimore bridge collapse in March. Conservatives have blamed DEI for the Hawaii wildfires last year and the rise in train derailments. And of course, there’s also Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s statewide crusade against DEI.

Alas, it’s no surprise that DEI would join right-wing media’s conspiracy mongering regarding the upcoming debate. So far, conservative pundits and politicians, including Trump himself, have been pushing the idea that Biden will need to be drugged up to speak coherently during the debate, despite Trump’s own cognitive issues. Right-wingers have also alleged that CNN is rigging the debate against Trump, crying about a “hostile environment.”

All of these excuses add up to some kind of justification for Trump in the event that Biden outperforms him in the debate, which anyone who saw Biden out-debate the convicted felon in 2020 can understand.

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to temporarily protect the right to abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho, according to an opinion that was briefly posted to the court’s website Wednesday morning, before promptly being taken down, according to Bloomberg.

The opinion indicated that the majority ruled 6-3 to dismiss the case as “improvidently granted,” which will send it back to a lower court to be retried. The lower court had previously reinstated emergency abortions for the health of patients, after Idaho enacted a near-total abortion ban following the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

The decision “will prevent Idaho from enforcing its abortion ban when the termination of a pregnancy is needed to prevent serious harms to a woman’s health,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in a concurring opinion.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

The court was asked to decide whether Idaho’s uber-restrictive ban violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires hospitals receiving funds from Medicare to provide stabilizing treatment to any patient experiencing a medical emergency. In some cases, that could mean the patient requires an emergency abortion.

After President Joe Biden issued a memorandum explicitly stating that EMTALA preempted Idaho’s abortion ban, a lower court halted the law from going into effect. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group behind challenges regarding Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the abortion pill mifepristone, filed for emergency relief with the Supreme Court—which the court granted, allowing the Idaho law to go into effect, while agreeing to hear the case in Idaho v. United States.

While this is not necessarily the final copy of the opinion, if the court does follow through with its ruling, emergency abortions may continue in Idaho while the issue is duked out in a lower court.

Patricia McCabe, the court’s public information officer, addressed the accidental posting, and said that the court has yet to release its final ruling. “The Court’s Publications Unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the Court’s website,” she said. “The Court’s opinion in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States will be issued in due course.”

If final, the decision will provide essential relief for pregnant people who may seek emergency care in Idaho— but it will also let the court get away with putting off making actual decisions to protect abortion access, similar to its decision on mifepristone.

In her opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that doing away with the case “is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho.”

“While this court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires,” she wrote.

This story has been updated.