Trump Reveals His Idiotic Debate Talking Points for Some Reason

Only hours before the first debate in the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump posted some of his talking points on social media. Why he did that is as yet unclear.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump tweeted a screenshot of a document containing bullet points on climate and energy policy that appear to have been written for the presumptive Republican nominee by his former Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler.

“Mr. President, I am sure that a climate question will come up during your debate this week and I suggest the following talking points,” the document reads, signed by Wheeler.

Wheeler then listed multiple bullet points: “Under my Administration CO2 emissions went down, and at the same time we became more American energy dominate which helps Americans at the gas pump and with their electricity bills,” he wrote. “We can do both. Biden just increased the energy costs for everyone.”

While carbon emissions did drop under Trump’s administration, pollution levels decreased at a slower rate than they did under Barack Obama. Trump’s low carbon levels were likely helped by lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic that brought travel and industry to a screeching halt.

Wheeler wrote a point attacking President Joe Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris climate accord, which Trump had exited during his term, claiming the move sent money overseas to “benefit other countries like China.” Wheeler also suggested criticizing Biden’s climate and tariff policies, claiming that they are causing people to buy “Chinese solar panels instead of American energy.”

“Under my Administration we will continue to reduce CO2 and focus on American made energy,” Wheeler wrote.

The notes from Wheeler also advise the former president to bring up Biden “canceling pipelines,” in the case that “you get push back during rebuttal and you need another point.”

Note that Trump’s comments on the environment don’t make a single reference to climate change, as during his presidency he marked himself as one of the many Republicans who is staunchly in denial about the existential threat of global warming.

Biden’s campaign hit back, noting that Wheeler is a former coal lobbyist.

Wheeler took over the EPA from Scott Pruitt in 2019 and immediately set about deregulating the agency, repealing Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and removing restrictions on U.S. fossil fuel power plants put in place to lower their carbon dioxide emissions. In general, Trump’s approach to climate legislation seemed to be to just undo everything from the previous administration—and that appears to be his plan again if he’s elected in November.

Trump won’t be able to actually use any pre-written talking points during the 90-minute debate. Each candidate will only be given a bottle of water, a blank pad of paper, and a pen while onstage. According to CNN’s terms, their campaign staff will be unable to communicate with them during the breaks.

It’s really not clear why Trump would bother to share his talking points. Maybe he doesn’t think he’ll get the chance to say them; maybe he doesn’t think he can actually remember them.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer may have attacked President Joe Biden for utilizing email aliases, but he’s no stranger to the practice himself.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Comer had used two pseudonymous email addresses instead of his government one while serving as Kentucky agriculture commissioner, both of which were uncovered during a records request into Comer’s 2014 marijuana mishap. But a new FOIL request filed by The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger has uncovered an eyebrow-raising trove of other aliases used by the Kentucky representative—approximately 1,600 to 2,700 more.

“In a previous communication, you were advised that more than 1591 parent emails containing 199 attachments had been identified as possibly related to your request,” the FOI officer email to Sollenberger read in part. “During a subsequent search, we found an additional 2,716 emails and attachments possibly related to your request.”

One finding in the document load suggested that Comer had used one such alias to handle classified information.

Some parts of the request were denied, including one exemption that was particularly notable.

“One email from a loan officer to former Commissioner Comer discussing a personal financial matter that was unrelated to government business was redacted,” the letter read.

Judge Aileen Cannon denied a motion by Donald Trump’s legal team on Thursday, but she isn’t ready to stop what legal experts have decried as inessential hearings intended to indefinitely delay the actual trial.

The denied motion pertained to Trump’s effort to suppress 32 classified documents seized by the FBI during its raid on Mar-a-Lago. But in the same order, she granted Trump’s team an evidentiary hearing that could suppress key obstruction evidence, including former Trump attorney Evan Corcoran’s notes that describe a client who not only knew he had committed a crime but was also knowingly attempting to obstruct the federal effort to retrieve the documents.

The decision to hold what special counsel Jack Smith’s office has described as a “mini-trial” over the notes would effectively overrule a D.C. District Court’s decision that ruled that Corcoran’s notes fell under a crime fraud exception of attorney-client privilege. It would also further postpone the classified documents trial, likely until after the November election, after which Trump could theoretically pardon himself from the federal charges.

In a written order clearly conscientious of the time-wasting criticisms being levied against her, Cannon claimed that there “is a difference between a resource-wasting and delay-producing ‘mini-trial,’ on the one hand, and an evidentiary hearing geared to adjudicating the contested factual and legal issues on a given pre-trial motion to suppress, on the other.”

Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to willful retention of national security information, corruptly concealing documents, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Meanwhile, the Trump-appointed judge overseeing the case has slow-walked the trial so aggressively that she has been accused by legal experts of attempting to postpone it indefinitely. Last week, Cannon began hearing arguments not related to Trump’s actions—but instead on whether Smith’s appointment to the case, and its subsequent prosecution, was constitutional.

It’s exceptionally cool and normal that the network hosting the Biden-Trump debate has been forced to roll out stopgaps to prevent a descent into chaos. CNN on Wednesday explained in child’s terms how they’ll be muting mics at Thursday night’s presidential debate to avoid interruptions, sending MAGA viewers into a frenzy.

CNN’s Victor Blackwell and Phil Mattingly demonstrated how it will sound when a candidate attempts to interrupt the other, showing a green light appearing on their podium when their mic is on and—get this—turning off when their mic is off. According to Mattingly, the same explainer was provided to both the Trump and Biden campaigns and by appearing at the debate, both are agreeing to abide by the muted mic rules. Notably, the muting appears intended to protect against cross talk, a disruption where no one can make head or tail of what anyone is saying—not to preemptively silence the content of a candidate’s response.

The very simple rule was enough to set off Trump’s base.

While MAGAs fume, many view CNN’s decision to mute mics as a grim indictment on the state of debate that requires technological intervention to ensure the basic rules are followed—and the unwillingness to let the debate get derailed by a certain Republican presidential candidate prone to ranting incoherently.

Senator Tim Scott made a wild comment suggesting that his being in contention for Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick demonstrates that we’re living in a post-racism utopia.

During an interview with Ainsley Earhardt on Fox & Friends that aired Thursday, the South Carolina Republican was asked how being on the short list for Trump’s running mate made him feel.

“I think it’s exciting, no matter the outcome,” Scott gushed. “It’s the evolution of the Southern heart that we see on display, and we Southerners get so little credit for the progress we’ve made.

“The whole notion of judging a person on the content of their character, not the color of their skin has happened,” Scott continued. “It’s not going to happen. It’s not around the corner. It’s in the rearview mirror. We are living Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.”

Since dropping out of the race, Scott has been desperately shilling to join Trump’s ticket as his vice president, and he has repeatedly contradicted his own policy positions so he can breathlessly repeat the former president’s campaign talking points. 

Unfortunately for Scott, Trump is exactly the kind of racist he imagines American society has moved past. 

Trump uses his Black friends to claim he isn’t racist, and while his campaign bragged about receiving endorsements from dozens in a group called Black Americans for Trump, the team  failed to mention that a few of them were on the Trump family’s payroll. Recently, Trump has railed against so-called “anti-white racism” and claimed that Black voters will like him more because of his indictments and his mug shot, comparing his legal battles to the systemic discrimination experienced by Black people in the U.S. As recently as Wednesday, Trump literally phoned it in on a roundtable event with Black business leaders in Atlanta. 

Meanwhile, recent polling found that Black voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania feel Trump should receive jail time at his sentencing in July. A study conducted in April by the Pew Research Center found that a vast majority of Black voters still identify as or lean Democratic, and 77 percent said they’d back President Joe Biden, despite Trump’s claims that Black voters are abandoning the incumbent. 

During the interview, Scott also revealed that the former president had come to him in 2017 after his infamous remark on the deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump angered many by claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides,” despite the fact that one side was entirely neo-Nazis, including one man who drove a car into a crowd.

At the time, Scott had criticized Trump, saying his moral authority had been “compromised.”

“He wanted me to share with him my perspective,” Scott told Earhardt. “He listened, and after we finished talking, he said, ‘Help me help those I have offended.’”

Looks like that’s going really well.