In court and on campus.
We lead this week with the latest polls. According to the Real Clear Politics averages, former president Donald Trump leads President Biden by greater than the margin of error in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Nevada. Biden has a half point edge over Trump in Pennsylvania, Trump has a one-point edge over Biden in Wisconsin – both of which are within the margin of error making them a statistical tie.
That’s about all the actual 2024 campaign news we have this week. The rest of the story is taking place on college campuses and in a New York City courtroom.
The trial began this week in the falsified documents case brought against former president Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. FOX News Radio’s Nate Foy filed this report yesterday.
The state’s first witness, former American Media CEO and president David Pecker, testified about his efforts, along with former President Trump’s old lawyer, Michael Cohen, to suppress damaging stories about Trump leading up to the 2016 presidential election and publishing negative stories about Trump’s opponents. Pecker testified that he made a secret agreement in 2015 to alert Trump’s former lawyer, Cohen, of negative stories about Trump, while Cohen would then work to kill those stories. Pecker answered questions about suppressed stories from former Playboy model Karen McDougal and a false story from a Trump Tower doorman. While leaving court, Trump criticized the court’s gag order, which the DA’s office claims he’s violated at least ten times.”
For his part, the former president is expressing his opinion of the trial quite forcefully.
This is done as election interference. Everybody knows it. I’m here instead of being able to be in Pennsylvania and Georgia and lots of other places campaigning.”
Meanwhile, way uptown in Manhattan from where Donald Trump’s trial is taking place, a scene reminiscent of the 1968 presidential campaign season is playing out. At New York’s Columbia University – as well as on other university campuses across the country – students are staging loud and disruptive protests over U.S. policy as it pertains to Israel’s war against Hamas. President Biden has so far been rather quiet regarding the protests as FOX News Radio’s Jacqui Heinrich reports.
He has tweeted 25 times since Saturday, including nine times about climate. He made no mention of this in his remarks yesterday, and although there was a strong White House statement over the weekend, it was written by the deputy press secretary, Andrew Bates. This afternoon the education secretary, Miguel Cardona, did put out a statement. He posted in part, ‘…anti-Semitic hate on college campuses is unacceptable. I’m deeply concerned by what is happening at Columbia University.’ He went on to say that ‘…hate has no place in our schools. All education leaders must stand definitively against hate, anti-Semitism, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment.’”
Surely sometime soon a more normal presidential campaign will begin. But for now, it’s college protests and courtroom drama that are dominating Decision 2024.
