Another interesting weekend in American politics, especially if one is following the 2024 presidential campaign. One side was definitely on offense, and the other one was on defense. 

Donald Trump announced he was going to do a rally in the South Bronx this Thursday. It'll be the first campaign stop for the former President in the Empire State since he held a rally in Buffalo in 2016. President Trump also stumped in the Twin Cities at an event held by Tom Emmer, Minnesota Congressman and chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee. Now I'm not an optimist on either one of these states for the Republicans, but Minnesota might be a smidgeon more doable than New York. But what Trump is showing is that he definitely sees polling and excitement on the ground that shows he can expand his 2024 map of pick=up states, while Joe Biden is signaling something entirely different. 

The current President is hemorrhaging votes with a lot of components that make up the Democratic Party mosaic, but especially with Blacks. The Washington Post headline two weeks ago said it all about the problem Joe Biden faces: Fewer Black Americans Plan To Vote In 2024, Post-Ipsos Poll Finds. So naturally, the President, being on defense, chose to give a commencement speech Sunday to graduates of Morehouse College, and all-male Black college, and followed it up by a Sunday night affair in Detroit for the NAACP. As bad as you might imagine the day going for Biden, you're not being imaginative enough.

Morehouse's commencement was the most feared event on the President's schedule, so much so that the White House sent Steve Benjamin, senior advisor to the president on public engagement, to preemptively negotiate with faculty and students so that there wouldn't be protests, walkouts, heckling, or violence during Biden's speech. The optics had to be managed in order to show how loved Joe Biden is with the next generation of Black graduates. Here's how that went. 





It's probably the best the White House could have expected, considering they had to send an advance team to concrete over protesters. As for the speech itself, it was pretty standard fare for Joe Biden - an utter disaster. He didn't give any aspirational or inspirational thoughts. It was a stump speech. It was a presidential candidate scaremongering for his political life. It was not full of uplift. It was full of upchuck.



All y'all? I understand that's the official plural tense of y'all in the South, but do you think Joe Biden talks that way normally? Is that the Southern Delaware dialect he's deploying? It's a fake accent. It's fake rhetoric, and it flies about as well as it did when Hillary Clinton uncorked the infamous "I ain't in no ways tired," nonsense. It also didn't work when Vice President Kamala Harris, during her very short, failed presidential run in 2020, tried a Southern accent to warm up to South Carolinians. 



Yes, nothing says look towards the future to Morehouse grads like a President of the United States boasting about how he's violating the 9-0 decision against him by the United States Supreme Court by illegally transferring the debt of college students to the entire country as a whole who didn't agree to the debt in the first place. 



Typically, your average commencement speaker talks about how together, with what you've learned, you can conquer the world. Joe Biden instead accuses the Republican Party of being racists for trying to remove sexually-explicit books from the hands and eyes of elementary school kids in public school libraries. Biden, and the Democratic Party, apparently, would rather sexualize Morehouse kids sooner rather than later. 



Naked pandering. George Floyd did not deserve the fate he got at the hands of the police, to be certain. Joe Biden treated the incident as nothing other than political opportunism. Again, he's only bringing up this issue because he's at a largely Black university with Black male graduates. He's not talking about the economy, jobs, or how bright their future looks. To Biden, everyone in the audience is a potential George Floyd. 



Okay, I've got nothing. Not even God knows what he was trying to say. 



This is not only a debunked myth, everyone in White House coms knows it's a debunked myth, which makes what he said a lie. It is not illegal for voters in line to have food and water. The Georgia law provides for water stations to be present so that voters in line can go hydrate and rejoin their place in line. They can bring food and water with them. What is in the law is that political groups cannot bring food and water to voters within 150 of the polling station and use that as an opportunity to persuade them at the last second. That is a perfectly Constitutional law that is in place in virtually the rest of the country. It's fearmongering and race-baiting of the President to pull that crap at a commencement address to a Black audience. 



The only solution, Joe? Don't you mean the Final Solution? Again, what does this have to do with a commencement address for Morehouse graduates in Georgia?



Okay, now we get to the whopper. The White House is crawling with Morehouse grads. Here are the facts. In Joe Biden's administration, the President graduated from the University of Delaware. His vice president, Kamala Harris, graduated from Brown, and got her law degree from the University of California. Biden's chief of staff, Jeff Zeints, graduated from Duke. Kamala Harris' chief of staff is Tina Flournoy, who graduated from Georgetown.

Maybe Joe Biden might have been referring to his foreign policy team when pointing out the overwhelming numbers of Morehouse grads populating his White House staff. The National Security Council is run by the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, who is a Yalie. The regular members of the NSC include the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, a Harvard grad, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, with degrees from Yale and Brown, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a West Point grad, Attorney General Merrick Garland of Harvard, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm of Berkeley and Harvard, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of Berkeley and Loyola, Chief of Staff Zeints, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines of Johns Hopkins, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown, Jr. of Texas Tech and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, CIA Director William Burns of Oxford, Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall of Harvard and Oxford, and United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield of Louisiana State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Not a Morehouse grad anywhere in sight. 

Perhaps Biden was talking about his Council of Economic Advisers. They would include Jared Bernstein of the Manhattan School of Music, Kirabo Jackon of Yale and Harvard, and Ernie Tedeschi of Stanford and Berkeley. 

Maybe the President was referring to the Secret Service. Its current director is Kimberly Cheatle of Eastern University. The deputy director is Ronald L. Lowe, Jr. of the University of Maryland. The chief operating officer is Cynthia Sjoberg Radway of Johns Hopkins. 

The White House Chef is Andre Rush of Trident University International and Central Texas College. 

I could run through all the White House Department Directors. There are eleven of them, eight of whom are female, which wouldn't have graduated at all-male Morehouse. The three males running departments at the White House are Vinay Reddy of the Speechwriting shop from Miami University and The Ohio State University, White House Military Officer Garret Hoffman of the National War College, and the aforementioned office of public engagement director, Steve Benjamin. 

Add it all up, and what do you get? Zero. Nada. Bupkis. There are dozens of people that do work in the White House - secretaries, personal assistants, maintenance workers, plumbers, electricians, housekeeping. I'm sure if one were to look at the college experience of every one of the roughly 90 employees of the building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, you might run across someone who went to Morehouse, but they're certainly not in a position to exert influence in the domestic or international policies of the country. If they're just making up the ranks of the support staff, that's not exactly a bragging point for the President, is it? 

Now to be fair, there actually was a Morehouse grad that was in Biden's inner circle - former Office of Public Engagement Director Cedric Richmond, who is a Morehouse undergrad and also has advanced degrees from Tulane Law and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He left the White House to co-chair the Biden-Harris '24 campaign. That's it. He's the only Morehouse grad I could find in the Biden White House that has or had any part of the President's ear. And he's no longer there. So when the President tells the Morehouse graduates, and to some of them, telling their backs, that he's got more Morehouse grads running around than he knows what to do with, he means one, and that was too much. So he sent him away. 

Now maybe you might be embracing Christian charity and give Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt, that he was distracted by the dissent in the audience, and that threw him off his game. Surely, he must have done a better job later in the evening in Detroit at the NAACP dinner, right? 



Erectionists? Was Biden watching Stormy Daniels' testimony? 



That's the first time he's made that claim, and it's backed up by zero evidence - It's not in his memoir, Promises To Keep, and it's not in his official bio. 

Biden attended St. Paul’s Elementary School in Scranton. In 1955, when he was 13 years old, the family moved to Mayfield, Delaware, a rapidly growing middle-class community sustained primarily by the nearby DuPont chemical company. 

As a child, Biden struggled with a stutter, and kids called him “Dash” and “Joe Impedimenta” to mock him. He eventually overcame his speech impediment by memorizing long passages of poetry and reciting them out loud in front of the mirror.

Biden attended the St. Helena School until he gained acceptance into the prestigious Archmere Academy. Although he had to work by washing the school windows and weeding the gardens to help his family afford tuition, Biden had long dreamed of attending the school, which he called “the object of my deepest desire, my Oz.” At Archmere, Biden was a solid student and, despite his small size, a standout receiver on the football team. “He was a skinny kid,” his coach remembered, “but he was one of the best pass receivers I had in 16 years as a coach.” Biden graduated from Archmere in 1961.