Just on the level of basic competence, we haven't seen any evidence at any point that there's anyone in Trump's White House who has the ability to write the speech he just gave.
My gut tells me that the speech was handed to him from outside the WH pretty much as we saw it, and he was given an ultimatum: read it or else.
Folks are asking who I think wrote it and what the "or else" was. The obvious answers are "McConnell's writing staff" and "he gets barred from running in 2024," but I have no specific insight.
It definitely has the feel of a speech written by a competent professional speechwriter, and—at least on a first listen—I didn't hear any patches that would suggest his own people reworked specific sections. It felt (with maybe one exception at the end) like a coherent whole.
And as for whether it was written by lawyers, the obvious rejoinder to that is that Trump's lawyers all suck and are bad at their jobs. None of them wrote that.

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More from @studentactivism

15 Jan
Hot take: The $2000/$1400 stimulus check issue isn't going to make a difference in the 2022 or 2024 elections.
The feeling in the Biden camp is presumably that they were saying $2000 before the $600 passed, so topping up the $600 with another $1400 is following through on their original plan. I think that's bad messaging, but reasonable on substance.
I'd like further left policy than I'm likely to get from Biden, on this and a thousand other issues. But if Trump had vetoed the $600 two weeks ago, it seems obvious that Biden would be proposing $2000 now, and that they see this as the same as that.
Read 4 tweets
13 Jan
We're at nine Republican yes votes, zero Dem no votes, on impeachment. Forty-seven votes outstanding.
With 19 votes left to be cast, we've now got a solid majority of the House voting yes on impeachment. Donald Trump is the first American president to be impeached twice.
And the tenth Republican yes vote just came in, with eight Republicans outstanding.
Read 5 tweets
5 Jan
Love this thread, and this table. Quick story...
When I was in my early twenties, I had a temp office job for a publishing company that had just moved into new offices in lower Manhattan.
Right before they'd moved in, a basement storage room my division was using had flooded, and my boss decided a good way to guard against the recurrence by having a huge shed built. In the basement. Of the office building. In lower Manhattan.
Read 7 tweets
19 Dec 20
Watching 10 Things I Hate About You with the kids. Again. Yay!
Larry Motherfucking Miller.
So apparently Budweiser paid for product placement? In a high school party scene? In a teen movie?
Read 4 tweets
17 Dec 20
Here's a thing I just looked up: As a percentage of the total, the Libertarian Party vote dropped by 64% from 2016 to 2020, the Green vote dropped by 76%, and all other third-party votes combined dropped by 71%.
One really big takeaway: Reluctant Trump voters and reluctant Biden voters both mostly held their noses and voted for their guy this time.
(Particularly reluctant Biden voters, BTW. The Green Party vote was just 0.26% of the total, the smallest left third-party haul since 1992.)
Read 4 tweets
15 Dec 20
All this AND an attempt by Jonathan Alter to defend Toobin by comparing him to . . . Al Franken.
In a situation in which nobody is talking about Al Franken OR Harvey Weinstein, to pipe up to say "I have trouble with the conflation of offenses. I don’t put Al Franken in the same category as Harvey Weinstein" is a hell of a thing.
(Also, analogizing Toobin to Franken isn't a rhetorical move that does either of them any favors.)
Read 4 tweets

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