The video also captured the mother's screams for her baby

This damage threw the engine out of balance

'By enacting these measures, we continue to uphold the principles of safety, fairness, and common sense for all our citizens'

Donald Trump has a lot of things to celebrate this week, but a foregone conclusion in November isn’t one of them. Joe Biden is down in the polls and losing the unwinnable war against time’s toll. But Biden is nothing if not tenacious, and the president has a trick ready to turn Trump’s latest triumph— over an assassin’s bullet—into a political defeat. In his Oval Office remarks last Sunday, Biden tied the attempt on Trump’s life the day before to a litany of other acts of political violence, including the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Biden was returning to a winning theme from 2020, when the summer of rage following the death of George Floyd gave Democrats an opening to identify Trump with chaos. The Biden campaign’s next move is obvious enough—blame Trump and the GOP themselves for the assassination attempt by linking it to their position on guns. Just why 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to murder Trump isn’t clear. But how he tried to do it is significant enough for Biden’s purposes: Crooks used a rifle, and whatever his ideological interests may have been, he’s confirmed to have been a firearms enthusiast. He tried out for his high school’s shooting team, belonged to a gun club, and died wearing the T-shirt of a pro-gun YouTube channel called Demolition Ranch. A vote for Trump, Democrats will say, is a vote for political instability and putting deadly weapons in the hands of unstable individuals like the Trump shooter. Republicans, meanwhile, have already sprung a trap on themselves. To score cheap political points, or because they’re simply victims of their own groupthink, Trump supporters have started echoing a theme of Democrats. They think they’re turning the tables on progressives by holding them accountable for creating a climate of violence with their extreme anti-Trump rhetoric. Trump even appears as Adolf Hitler on a recent New Republic cover. Isn’t that an incitement to murder the man? When Biden himself talks about putting Trump in a bull’s-eye, isn’t that language likely to lead to someone actually putting him in the crosshairs? Republicans never thought so before, whenever they used such “targeting” metaphors and progressives were the ones accusing them of inspiring violence. It shouldn’t take an exceptional degree of self-awareness for supporters of Donald Trump to recognize how hyping the dangers of intemperate language might backfire. Any comparison of Trump to Hitler is moronic, but it’s not an instigation. And if rude rhetoric were the deciding issue of the campaign, voters would be quick to send Trump into retirement—not only for the things he says but for the deranged utterances he elicits from his enemies’ mouths. Democrats are only too happy to wage a campaign on these terms. Their strategy calls for getting voters to see Biden, once again, as a force for calm and unity and Trump as a source of endless controversy, anger, and upheaval. Trump, on the other hand, has to court moderates without repudiating the right if he wants to match or surpass his 2016 victory. He needs the Republican base, including gun owners and pro-lifers, to turn out in full strength—but the no-compromise policies conservatives hope for are what many swing voters fear most. Trump was the president who built the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade. But he’s seen how referendums on abortion have turned out since then, and he’s determined not to let his campaign become one. Democrats are doing their utmost to turn it into just that. Biden is no moderate when it comes to guns or abortion, or almost anything else, but moderation is a message he’ll exploit to the fullest. He wants to be the no-drama candidate—a steady, mature hand at the wheel, even if one that’s a bit too mature. Trump at his best is an inimitable mixture of humor, optimism, urgency, and outrage. He takes the stage to opera, disco, and the Rolling Stones—drama is his element. Trump must, however, be seen to master the whirlwind, as he did when he rose to his feet and raised his fist defiantly after the assassin missed his shot. Biden seeks to turn his own mediocrity into a strength. It worked last time. Republicans shouldn’t help him do it—either by becoming complacent about their chances Nov. 5 or by adopting the Democrats’ framework on rhetoric and violence. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Are Republicans Ready for Biden’s Counterattack? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

I think it was 2019 when I first interacted with Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio. I had just finished my judicial clerkship and begun my career in media. JD, just a few years older than me, was already a bestselling author and a tech venture capitalist. We were both interested in some of the energetic and ascendant elements of the Trump-era Right, and had followed each other on social media accordingly. We messaged about meeting up on the sidelines of the first-ever National Conservatism Conference (“NatCon 1”), held in Washington, D.C., in July 2019. I don’t think we actually met up amid the fracas, but JD gave a memorable speech. We’ve remained in touch ever since. Vance published two op-eds at Newsweek during my tenure as opinion editor. We have remained active with national conservatism and both spoke at the recent NatCon conference (“NatCon 4”). We are two of the founding advisory board members for American Moment, which seeks to “identify, educate, and credential” young leaders of the New Right. We have both been active with American Compass, a think tank that aims to reorient conservative economics away from doctrinaire libertarianism. We both spoke at the Restoring a Nation Conference in Steubenville, Ohio, in October 2022; we got dinner before his keynote speech, nerding out on public policy. Like a true American, JD downed two Miller Lites. We have also taken a similar path when it comes to former President Donald Trump. JD and I were both critical of Trump during the 2016 election but quickly came around as we saw the great achievements he secured in short order as president. We became vocal proponents of a more pragmatic, nimble, and dynamic Right—a Right, that is, which rejects the dog-eared playbook of yesteryear and prefers prudent statecraft to blindly following abstract dogma. We have been influenced by many of the same people and count some of the same people as friends. It is somewhat surreal to watch a friend be coronated as a major party’s vice presidential nominee. But JD Vance is not merely a spokesman for our particular corner of the American Right. Rather, he is an authentic voice for all those tens of millions of forgotten Americans who have been sold out by globalism and left in a cloud of dust by neoliberalism’s “free movement” of goods, labor, and capital. (Anyone who thinks neoliberalism has been “free” ought to walk around a town like Steubenville.) And JD is the best possible voice for frustrated millennials and Gen Zers who have inherited a country, following decades of boomer malpractice, where the social fabric is tattered and the American dream of upward economic mobility is all but dead. Our current predicament may seem dire, but JD was made for this moment. Out of the new American Right’s motley band of brothers, vice presidential nominee JD Vance has emerged as the chosen one— the one uniquely capable of giving voice to an entire disaffected generation or two and permanently transforming America’s cultural and political landscape. Trump would be wise to give JD an outsize role on the campaign trail and an even more outsize role in the presidential administration that is to come. In JD he will find someone who is not merely a talented communicator with an inspiring personal biography. Trump will also find someone who is highly thoughtful and has his finger squarely on the pulse of America’s economic and cultural ailments—and, perhaps most importantly, a keen sense of what public policy can actually do to tangibly improve Americans’ everyday lives. Vice President JD Vance will help advance a trade agenda and economic statecraft that meaningfully prioritizes the interests of places like Steubenville—not Wall Street. He will pursue policies that enable others to rise up through the economic ranks and live their own American dreams—just as he did. He will advance a realistic foreign policy that views every geopolitical issue and every global hotspot through the prism of the American national interest and the American way of life. Ultimately, as the now clear heir to the throne in a post-Trump Republican Party, JD Vance will have a unique opportunity to effectuate transformative change in American political life by scrambling arbitrary old political lines and building a durable, generational coalition of the broader center. Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the post-Berlin Wall neoliberal “Washington consensus” helped define the parameters of “consensus” American political life in their own times, so too can JD Vance’s Republican Party—and the broader movement he will soon lead—usher in a new American epoch of cultural restoration, civilizational sanity, and material prosperity. JD Vance is only 39 years old; he turns 40 on Aug. 2 He has been Trump’s vice presidential nominee for less than a week. But to set the bar any lower would be a disservice to his prodigious talent. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Chosen One appeared first on The Daily Signal.

'WHO?' POTATUS a Couple Hostages Short of a Full Retort

As much as the Biden campaign team may try to ignore it, the polls aren’t looking good and even the liberal media know it. This was illustrated on Friday’s CBS mornings as Principal Deputy Campaign Manager, Quentin Fulks didn’t budge as co-host Tony Dokoupil brutally but calmly dished out the numbers. After months of disregarding and blatantly ignoring both the physical and mental strength of the President, the media has finally acknowledged it. There has been a major shift, across the board, in the party’s support of Biden. Dokoupil highlights this as he questioned Fulks (click expand): Inside the Democratic party there are calls growing louder for President Biden to rethink, even reconsider his re-election campaign. The President left the campaign trail this week after testing positive for Covid. And he's under pressure from Democratic lawmakers, from supporters, and from donors to drop out of the 2024 race entirely. A CBS news poll released yesterday shows that the President is trailing former President Donald Trump by 5 points nationally. The largest Trump lead of the campaign so far. He's also lose being in battleground states. The Biden/Harris campaign's Principal Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Fulks is with us now to talk about all of this, Quentin, thank you very much for being here. You don't have an easy job this morning, right. Because, the reporting is that your candidate, Joe Biden, has grown more receptive, over the last few days, hearing this negative information and maybe dropping out and that we could actually see him withdraw. This is CBS reporting and others as early as this weekend. Where is the truth in that?     However instead of responding, by acknowledging the legitimacy in such claims, Fulks disregarded the question, making false accusations surrounding Trump’s RNC speech: It's not true at all. Joe Biden has been very clear, he is running for President of the United States and our campaign is continuing to implement a strategy to win with him at the top of the ticket. And I think all the calls for the anxiety is coming from a place of wanting to defeat Donald Trump. We saw what he did last night. He got on stage here and unfortunately he learned nothing from his first term. He doubled down on an extreme agenda, talking about ripping away women's reproductive freedoms, talking about gutting things like social security and medicare, and bringing in a new plan like Project 2025. Dokoupil retorted with critiques of the campaign pointing out that, “you can't have a policy or character debate about Donald Trump until they're done having this conversation about Joe Biden.” Reminding Fulks of the mounting pressures from all sides of the Democratic Party again Dokoupil questioned him: DOKOUPIL: Well Quentin, Quentin, can you show me where most Democrats want him to stay in the race? Cause I haven't seen one. FULKS: Look, the poll that I look at is how voters are going to decide between Joe Biden and Donald Trump at the top of the ticket. Voters at home are not sitting around thinking about hypothetical match-ups, they're thinking about child care, health care, mortgage and rent affordability. And when it comes down to it, if they are going to vote for Joe Biden and Donal Trump. This is a margin of error race in all of the states. And so that is our focus. Dokoupil, focusing in on his hard hitting questions, continued, “How do you change the narrative when voters out there are reacting with what they see with their own eyes?; What's so bad about Kamala Harris, you're not considering it at all?; It's not going to be Harris/Whitmer?”  Though Dokoupil questioned many times where Fulks’s evidence was based his answers were less than direct. (click expand): Look, we think that because when we're out talking to voters, when we are out campaigning, we went through a Democratic primary process where Joe Biden won 14 million votes. When he goes out into the states, that is not what the crowds are saying they're chanting four more years. They are chanting, “Go! Joe, go!” (...) There's nothing bad about Kamala Harris. And I think that people are trying to make this something that it is not. She is on the ticket. The name of our ticket is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And so if people turn out because they love the Vice President or if people turn out because they love President Joe Biden, it makes no difference to us. But Joe Biden is the democratic nominee. Throughout the interview, Fulks slipped up, stating Trump had “doubled down on an extreme agenda, talking about ripping away women's reproductive freedoms, talking about gutting things like social security and medicare, and bringing in a new plan like Project 2025.” In reality, Trump did the opposite. He never once mentioned anything regarding reproductive health, or Project 2025, a point which was brought up by networks following the speech. On Social Security and Medicare, the former president stated he will protect both. Unfortunately, Fulks was not fact checked, but instead spread misinformed confidence in a campaign now treading water.   The transcript is below, click “expand” to read: CBS Mornings 07/19/2024 08:10:06 AM EST   TONY DOKOUPIL: Inside the Democratic Party, there are calls growing louder for President Biden to rethink, even reconsider his re-election campaign. The President left the campaign trail this week after testing positive for Covid and he’s under pressure from Democratic lawmakers, from supporters, and from donors to drop out of the 2024 race entirely. A CBS News poll released yesterday shows that the President is trailing former President Donald Trump by 5 points nationally. The largest Trump lead of the campaign so far. He’s also lose being in battleground states. The Biden/Harris campaign’s Principal Deputy Campaign Manager Quentin Foltz is with us now to talk about all of this. Quentin, thank you very much for being here. You don’t have an easy job this morning — right — because, the reporting is that your candidate, Joe Biden, has grown more receptive, over the last few days, hearing this negative information and maybe dropping out and that we could actually see him withdraw — this is CBS reporting and others — as early as this weekend. Where is the truth in that? QUENTIN FULKS: It’s not true at all. Joe Biden has been very clear, he is running for President of the United States and our campaign is continuing to implement a strategy to win with him at the top of the ticket. And I think all the calls for the anxiety is coming from a place of wanting to defeat Donald Trump. We saw what he did last night. He got on stage here and, unfortunately, he learned nothing from his first term. He doubled down on an extreme agenda, talking about ripping away women’s reproductive freedoms, talking about gutting things like Social Security and Medicare, and bringing in a new plan like Project 2025. DOKOUPIL: Look Quentin, can’t have a policy or character debate about Donald Trump until they’re done having this conversation about Joe Biden. And there’s some difficult information for the President. You’ve got two out of three Democrats — his own voters — saying he should step aside. You’ve got major donors saying he should step aside. You’ve got big time party leaders saying he should step aside. Is this information reaching the President? FULKS:  Look, the President has spoken to a number of elected officials and he’s heard the concerns from across the Democratic Party. But what the President has also heard is directly from voters. He has hit every single battleground state over the last several weeks and that is not what the voters are saying. That’s not what the 14 million voters are saying who voted for him in the Democratic primary. DOKOUPIL: Well Quentin, Quentin, can you show me where most Democrats want him to stay in the race? Cause I haven’t seen one. FULKS: Look, the poll that I look at is that — how voters are going to decide between Joe Biden and Donald Trump at the top of the ticket. Voters at home are not sitting around thinking about hypothetical match-ups. They’re thinking about child care, health care, mortgage, and rent affordability. And when it comes down to it, if they are going to vote for Joe Biden and Donald Trump, this is a margin of error race in all of the states. And so that is our focus. DOKOUPIL: Voters are thinking, particularly Democratic voters are thinking they don’t want Donald Trump back in the office and then they see Joe Biden out there campaigning, they have concerns about his age and ability to continue in this job. Then he gives a speech at the NAACP, he has to pause three times in two minutes, seems to lose his place. He needs help getting into a vehicle. He has some difficulty, it would appear, on the stairs. And this is on top of years of videos, that I know you guys — you’ve tried to discount, how do you change the narrative when voters out there are reacting with what they see with their own eyes? FULKS:  Look, we’re not trying to discount anything. President Biden is 81 years old. Donald Trump is only a couple of years older than him. But, again, I do not think that is where many American voters are putting their faith in how they are deciding to vote. DOKOUPIL: Why do you think that? Because, we don’t have any polling to suggest otherwise? And I — I’ve talked to Democrats in numerous states over the past few weeks. They think what Joe Biden is doing is — is borderline selfish and they’re angry about it. FULKS:  Look, we think that because when we’re out talking to voters, when we are out campaigning, we went through a Democratic primary process where Joe Biden won 14 million votes. When he goes out into these states, that is not what the crowds are saying. They’re chanting, four more years. They are chanting, go, Joe, go. The President is deeply in touch with the American people and what is going on the ground. And when it comes to the issues, we know we are running on a deeply popular agenda. I do not think that voters at home want a nationwide abortion ban and that is what Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans will do. DOKOUPIL: What’s so bad about Kamala Harris, you’re not considering it at all? FULKS: There’s nothing bad about Kamala Harris and I think that people are trying to make this something that it is not. She is on the ticket. The name of our ticket is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And so, if people turn out because they love the Vice President or if people turn out because they love President Joe Biden, it makes no difference to us. But Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee. DOKOUPIL: Alright, it’s not going to be Harris/Whitmer? Or Harris — FULKS: It is going to be Joe Biden/Kamala Harris. DOKOUPIL: — Quentin Fulks, you have a difficult job. You did it well. Thank you very much, appreciate it. FULKS: Thank you. DOKOUPIL: Send it back to you guys in New York. GAYLE KING: Quentin’s like — NATE BURLESON: Alright, Tony. Well eon. Difficult questions. Well done on that. We’ll check back in with you a little bit later. Good job by Tony there. KING: I’ll say. I think Quentin Fulks is going, why am I standing here now? But Tony just asked the questions that a lot of people are thinking and that we’re all hearing too. BURLESON: Asking — KING: But Quentin also responded, saying we’re hearing something different. So, we shall see. BURLESON: — right now it’s Biden/Harris. KING: We shall see. BURLESON: And that’s how they’re moving forward.  

A teenager was able to fight off an armed man who was trying to kidnap her near an elementary school in Los Angeles, according to police. The harrowing incident unfolded near the Figueroa Street elementary school on Tuesday at about 3:30 p.m. 'I hope the police start to pay more attention to the community.'The 15-year-old girl spoke to KABC-TV about the horrible ordeal that was also captured on surveillance video from Roxi's Store. The video shows a driver allegedly stalking the girl from a white or silver SUV. The man jumps out of the car and grabs her, trying to drag the girl into the car. Police said he was armed at the time. The girl said that she struck the man with her phone and was able to break his grip so that she could run away. Another video showed her emotionally distraught at a nearby store. The victim's mother told KABC that her daughter was treated for an injury caused by the man allegedly grabbing her neck. She said the girl was also emotionally traumatized by the incident. Neither the mother nor the victim wanted to be publicly identified. Residents from the neighborhood said that they were on edge after hearing the news. "I hope the police start to pay more attention to the community," said a shop owner. KABC published videos from both surveillance cameras on its YouTube account here. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Secretary of State Antony Blinken Says Iran Is '1-to-2' Weeks From Starting to Build a Nuke

Pornography was the last search Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, made on his smartphone before he tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump last weekend, according to the FBI.