Abortion & Covid - Trump's Two Achilles' Heel Issues

 "I surprised them." - Donald Trump speaking about the 2016 presidential election that Democrats thought they were going to win right up to Hillary Clinton's cancellation of the planned fireworks display over the Hudson River the night before the election.

Democrats vowed to never again be surprised by Trump & in the 2024 Trump-Biden rematch each party thought they had the one opponent they could beat.  Nikki Haley astutely pointed out that the first party to drop their aging candidate would win.

When the Democrats started getting cold feet about Biden's cognitive capacity & falling poll numbers they sucker punched Trump into agreeing to a June 27 debate - over three months earlier than the usual first debate.  Biden did so miserably in the debate that he dropped out of the presidential race but has been able to continue with what must be the less important job of actually being president.   Just imagine the state of the race if Trump had not agreed to that debate - it would still be the Trump-Biden rematch with Biden's incapacity suspected but not admitted.  But Harris has quickly regained Biden's lost polling ground & in many polls it is now Trump who trails & slides a little more each day.

Trump won the 2016 presidential race 304 to 227 electoral votes.  He received 46.5% of the popular vote.  Three states provided the margin of victory: Wisconsin - 10 electoral votes by a 22,748 vote margin out of 3 million votes cast; Michigan - 16 electoral votes by a 10,704 vote margin out of 4.8 million votes cast; & Pennsylvania - 20 electoral votes by a 44,292 vote margin out of 6.2 million votes cast.  If Hillary had overcome this cumulative 77,744 vote deficit she would have won the presidency 273 electoral votes to 258 - there were seven faithless electors.

In 2020 Biden won the presidency by an almost identical electoral college margin 306 to 232 with three states providing an even closer margin of victory: Wisconsin - 10 electoral votes by a 20,608 vote margin out of 3.3 million votes cast; Arizona - 11 electoral votes by a 10,457 vote margin out of 3.4 million votes cast; Georgia - 16 electoral votes by an 11,779 vote margin out of five million votes cast.  RTE posts since the 2020 election have shown how Trump suffered this 42,844 cumulative vote deficit - for example, Trump received less votes than winning congressmen down ballot in many cases with the difference totaling more votes than Trump lost the state by.  If Trump had overcome these three infinitesimal deficits in 2020 the race would have been tied 269 electoral votes each.  Students of the Constitution know what would have happened to Trump & Biden as well as Pence & Harris.

A good indicator I go by in analyzing a presidential election is to subtract the California & New York totals from the national popular vote.  In 2016 Trump won the popular vote of the total of the other 48 states by over three million votes while in 2020 Trump still won by this metric but by only 44,590 votes so there definitely was a stronger anti-Trump movement in 2020 in the other 48 states.

In addition to Nikki's remarks about each party changing out old candidates, after the June 27 debate Nikki also recommended that Republicans prepare for the Democrats replacing Biden with a "younger" & more "vibrant" candidate which of course is exactly what happened on July 21 - right on cue three days after the Republican National Convention concluded to minimize the news coverage positive bounce coming out of the convention.  Quite clever timing.

Neither Trump nor Vance has handled the switcheroo well from the inept Biden to a black woman whose strongest issue is abortion rights.

Abortion is the issue that gets credit for thwarting the 2022 Republican midterm red wave congressional victory.  The November 2022 midterm election was held less than five months after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had made abortion legal throughout the U.S.  Trump bragged about appointing three justices with known anti abortion views but now backs away from this fact.

Previous posts have pointed out how Trump stumbles regarding abortion.  Trump's June 27 debate statement that everyone wanted Roe v. Wade overturned with abortion policy returned to the states is delusional.  No one seeking an abortion wanted Roe overturned, meaning they would have to travel out of their home state to get an abortion let alone wanted its legality decided by 50 different state government officials.  Unbelievably Trump repeated this ridiculous claim virtually verbatim @ the September 10 debate with Harris.

The Florida citizen-led ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution by explicitly blocking the implementation of laws that "prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability" has found Trump more than once on every side of the ballot initiative.  Since he is a resident of Florida Trump is being pressured to say how he will vote on the measure that will undo the six week abortion ban signed into law on May 1.  Trump originally criticized that law as "a terrible mistake," a thinly veiled attack of Ron DeSantis, but now says he is voting in its favor.  In an ultimate irony, if the initiative passes, abortion in Florida, after the Roe overturn, will have gone from a 15 week ban to a six week ban to a 22 - 26 week ban meaning a longer period to get an abortion than even before the six week ban was signed into law.  The ballot initiative needs 60% of the vote to pass.

More trouble for Trump & down ballot races - there are nine other states (Arizona, Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, New York, & Maryland) that have abortion measures on the ballot in the 2024 election cycle.

But Trump's pandering position on in vitro fertilization (IVF) as told to Tulsi Gabbard in Wisconsin the last week of August is the most pathetic: "The government is going to pay for it or we're going to mandate your insurance company to pay for it."  Republicans campaigned for years to overturn ObamaCare because, among other things, it forced insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions.  Does this make Trump the ultimate RINO?  Also, does this seemingly desperate position take into account that the average IVF cycle in 2023 cost $12,400 - not counting medications & testing?  With fertility medications & genetic testing the cost could range between $15,000 to $30,000 per cycle.  Source GoodRx.

Based on the above, abortion has all the potential in the world to once again work against Trump & Republicans up & down the ballot.

The handling of Covid was an issue that hurt Republicans in 2020 so Harris has made it the basis of her answer regarding why the economy & inflation have been constant problems for people under Biden/Harris.  Harris claimed during their September 10 debate that Trump handed Biden/Harris such a bad economy - including "the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, the worst public health epidemic in a century, & the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War - that "what we (Biden/Harris) have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess" @ least implying that it has taken this long to do so.

The following graphic shows that 50% of voters in 2020 understandably rated health concerns (41% Covid & 9% healthcare) as the most important issue in the 2020 presidential election - & Trump was on the defensive for most of 2020 regarding one aspect of Covid or another as described below.

  Click on graphic to enlarge

Right out of the box, in March & April 2020 Trump regularly disrupted the daily Covid TV briefings-updates by getting into arguments with members of the press over minutia while vulnerable senior citizens, who were interested in the updates as a matter of life & death, only saw non-productive sparring matches day after day.  The Covid TV briefings were supposed to be handled by Pence, & Drs. Fauci & Birx.  Trump did himself no favors the way he appeared in these briefings.

Congress started throwing money @ developing a Covid vaccine in March 2020 & by May 2020 Trump ordered the drug companies to produce a Covid-19 vaccine in rapid fire order under Operation Warp Speed (OWS) - the goal was to deliver 300 million doses of a safe, effective, vaccine for Covid-19 by January, 2021.  A typical vaccine takes 5 to 10 years to develop.  The FDA approved the Covid-19 vaccines under emergency use authorization.  My doctor told me it was an experimental approval.  Nevertheless, many employers including the United States government mandated that employees get vaccinated thereby causing more division throughout the country. 

Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, provided the perfect example of what the administrative state produces to solve problems.  Fauci was wrong more than he was right with orders to wear masks & then not wear masks &/or to stand six feet apart before saying this is not important.  Fauci takes no responsibility for the shutdowns of either businesses &/or schools that occurred during Covid's worst time saying he did not have the authority to lock down anything - but while he was the top medical authority real GDP fell $2 trillion taking 15 months to recover (see graphic below) & PCE consumer spending declined $2.6 trillion taking eleven months to recover.  Seems Fauci forgot the federal government's leadership in "flattening the curve" to buy time so that healthcare facilities were not overwhelmed with patients.

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With all of his wrong information no one, starting with Trump, ever suggested Fauci step down or be fired.  On the contrary, @ his salary, well into his eighties, he was the highest paid federal government employee during Covid's worse times & like Joe & Jill Biden had to be dragged off the job.

And all the while Congress was passing & Trump was signing into law $3.6 trillion of Covid welfare stimulus money that is the root cause of our 40 year high inflation problem that included direct cash payments to households ($1,200 per adult plus $500 per qualifying child under 17), an additional $600 per week in unemployment compensation plus increases in food assistance, tax credits for employers who offered paid sick leave, bailouts & loans for airlines & other industries, & loans & grants for small businesses.  In addition to the Covid stimulus money Trump signed a $1.4 trillion omnibus bill to fund the government.  All in all Trump is the biggest one term deficit spender in the country's history.

But Covid is different from abortion because Covid has culpability for both Trump & Harris while the two candidates could not be more different regarding abortion - Harris is full throated for it & Trump doesn't know what to do with it.

Harris bases many parts of her campaign on the premise that Trump left Biden/Harris a mess while acknowledging that the Covid-19 pandemic caused by the Wuhan coronavirus was partially to blame.  She also thinks Trump handled Covid poorly.  The truth is that more people died per unit of time under Biden/Harris than under Trump. See graphic below & notice the steeper slope of the line under Biden/Harris from 400,000 deaths to the first million Covid-19 deaths in America than the slope of the line under Trump's term from March 1, 2020 to January 20, 2021.  And yet Harris got away with this distortion in the September 10 debate because Trump just can't focus on anything other than his blather.

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How much sharper would Trump have been in the September 10 debate if he had participated in the Republican primary debates with Pence, Haley, & Christy - three people who had worked for Trump & would have added great insight into the dialogue.  But Trump only wanted to debate the hapless Biden ("anywhere, any time, any place") & as of this moment wants no parts of a second debate with Harris who masterfully baited him time after time.

Harris was extremely well coached & prepared for the September 10 debate.  She responded to the questions each time exactly as she wanted to, telling just what she wanted, leaving out what she didn't want to bring up, but always ending her allotted time with a dig to stir Trump up like saying people leave Trump's rallies early out of boredom, the Wharton school scores Trump's economic plan poorly, or that Trump inherited millions of dollars to start his business.  In a failing junior high school type debate performance Trump was so distracted by Harris's maneuver that he never got around to pointing out the weakness of her response to the issue raised in the original question.  Trump could not resist talking about his crowd sizes or professors @ Wharton who he claimed think highly of his terrible tariff plans leaving Harris to smilingly go on to the next question only to repeat this mouse trap plan again & again.

Will any of this make a difference for the voters who are undecided?  Who knows what to think about an electorate who has given us this terrible choice for president?

The Border Czar Is No More Deserving Of The Presidency Than Trump Or Biden

If we're talking about Kamala Harris in this post's title, & we are, we know from her preferred gender pronouns that she would prefer czarina to czar.

Since the incessant overflow of migrants @ the southwest land border during the entire Biden/Harris term has finally moved border security near the top of concern for voters many Democrat pundits are saying that Biden never assigned Harris the role of Border Czar.

Checking the record we find that on March 24, 2021 Biden said "I've asked her, the VP, today - because she's the most qualified person to do it - to lead our efforts with Mexico & the Northern Triangle & the countries that help - are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border."  Click here to hear it in Biden's own words.

The definition of the noun czar is "a person appointed by the government to advise on & coordinate policy in a particular field" - sounds pretty close to what Biden asked Harris to do.  

NBC News reported that "the vice president is expected to focus on both curbing the current flow of migrants & coordinating with countries in the region to address the root causes (although Biden never used the words "root causes") of migration" - yet any activity by Harris over the last three & a half years regarding this assignment was confined to 1) a trip to Guatemala & Mexico on June 7, 2021: 2) a four hour trip to the El Paso Border Patrol station & the El Paso del Norte Port of Entry on June 25, 2021; 3) taking credit for a page & a half "Cover Message" to a National Security Council report entitled  "U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America" in July 2021; & 4) issuing a Fact Sheet: Update on the U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America on March 25, 2024 that says "the Administration is on track to meet its commitment in the 2021 Root Causes Strategy to provide $4 billion to the region over four years."

Notice that Harris has always ignored the part of her responsibility regarding "stemming the migration to our southern border" while morphing her assignment into identifying & spending money addressing the root causes of migration from Northern Triangle countries, which root causes we always knew were corruption, violence, trafficking, & poverty.  This was all known before Harris even began her feeble pretense of doing anything constructively in this regard or even showing interest in any part of the assignment except for not being tarred politically with the border overflow problem plaguing the nation.  Over eight million migrants illegally entered the country while Harris worked on root causes & Biden provided no supervision "because she's the most qualified person to do it." 

Most importantly, if there was an effort by Harris to stem the migration it was a complete failure unless the goal was to bring in future Democrat party voters.  Now that the damage is done & the election is getting closer the Harris effort has turned to one of professing border responsibility & she has statistics to prove it.  For instance the July encounters (Border Patrol & Office Of Field Operations) totaled 104,118 down from 301,981 last December.  The table below confirms that the trend of the number of encounters declined in 2024.  Click on table to enlarge.

And of course this reduction was brought about for political reasons benefitting Biden/Harris & AMLO (Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador) because 2024 is a presidential  election year in both the U.S. & Mexico.  In April AMLO asked Biden to hold off issuing his planned executive order that disqualifies migrants from winning asylum if they enter the U.S. illegally until after the June 2 Mexican presidential election that was won by AMLO's hand picked successor Claudia Sheinbaum.  Two days after the AMLO protege's victory, Biden issued the EO that requires migrants to be deported quickly which, with AMLO's help, in turn has discouraged thousands of migrants from heading north in the first place - thus the lower number of border encounters as recorded in the above table.

A responsible U.S. citizenry should withhold their vote until Biden/Harris explains why this extraordinary cooperation with Mexico did not happen three & a half years ago & why the EO was not issued then also.  Writing the EO in 2024 acknowledges that Biden had the authority to do so all along but in a dereliction of duty didn't.

Instead Harris is trying to turn the issue around saying she has been a responsible leader on border security all along & that the lower number of border encounters confirms that.  Harris blames Congress & Trump for not giving Biden/Harris the laws needed to properly enforce border security earlier.

This complaint is a reference to the Border Act of 2024 - S.4361 - negotiated with much fanfare by senators Lankford (R-OK), Sinema (I-AZ), & Murphy (D-CT).  This bill failed a floor cloture vote 43 to 50 (only Republican to support the bill was Murkowski - Alaska) on May 23.  Harris claims Republican congressmen capitulated to Trump's demands to not pass the bill because it would give Democrats an advantage over Trump by taking away his perceived best issue - border security.

A better reason to vote against the bill is found in Section 3.01 of the bill entitled Border Emergency Authority, paragraph (3) entitled Activations of Authority that is divided into two sections - discretionary activation & mandatory activation.  The new border emergency authority under the bill pertains to the Secretary of Homeland Security's authority & duty to summarily remove from & prohibit the entry into the U.S. of all aliens, except unaccompanied minors, between ports of entry in response to extraordinary migration circumstances (that we have had since Biden/Harris took office three & a half years ago).

The discretionary activation to prohibit further alien migration can occur if during a period of 7 consecutive calendar days there is an average of 4,000 to 5,000 aliens who are encountered each day.  The mandatory activation to prohibit further alien migration shall occur if during a period of 7 consecutive calendar days there is an average of 5,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day; or on any one calendar day a combined total of 8,500 aliens are encountered.

The outrageous part of hiding behind this bill having not been passed as the reason the border is out of control is that one or more of the above activation levels were hit every month that Biden/Harris has been in office except for February 2021 (their first full month in office when the caravans we're just gearing up) & July 2024 (for reasons detailed above).  See graphic below that shows the total number of encounters for each of the last twelve years & the average number of encounters per day for each of the years.  Click on graphic to enlarge.

How could Biden issue his Executive Order prohibiting entry two days after the Mexican election that placed even stricter limits (2,500 border encounters per day) on unauthorized crossings than the failed border bill described above if he had no authority to do so all along?  Answer - Biden always had the authority to control the border but chose not to.  The migration has only slowed as a result of enforcement of the EO so that Harris can use the lower number of crossings & encounters as a talking point to disguise her did-nothing record.

If we are all on the same team & Biden/Harris thought they didn't have the legal authority from Congress to enforce border security why didn't they meet with congressional leaders to explain the problem so that Congress could write a law they could enforce?

Harris has become so aggressive on border security she has even shamelessly shown a TV ad as part of her campaign highlighting the border she never visited with the voice-over saying how tough she is & that she will hire thousands of border patrol agents.

Now a vice president is subservient to their president & in order to make an informed vote a voter has to find out how much of the president's policy the vice president (Harris in this case) truly believed in.  For instance we know in 1996 that Jack Kemp temporarily put aside his supply side economic principles to support Bob Dole's economic plan for the country.  It was something Kemp had to do to be on the Dole ticket & I for one never felt Kemp had abandoned supply side economics.  After the campaign Kemp returned to champion supply side economics once again.

Based on Harris's improvement in the polls since becoming the presidential nominee it seems that voters are not holding her accountable for much of Biden's unpopular policies even though she made the tie breaking vote in the Senate on a record number 33 bills.  Source - Ballotpedia.

But Harris's record is all over the progressive lot from her days as California AG & senator.  Now she wants voters to believe she is for the strongest, most lethal military on earth, funding the police, respecting ICE, fracking, & supporting a bill that would resume building the wall that Trump never finished.  This from a self-proclaimed moderate candidate who was against all of these things just two months ago when she was more progressive supporting single payer Medicare for All while abolishing private healthcare insurance, outlawing gas stoves & gasoline-powered cars, supporting the disastrous Afghan withdrawal (after all she was the last person in the room with Biden on that decision), & wanting people who were never slave holders to pay reparations to people who were never slaves.  More recently Harris has been for national price controls @ least for groceries & the terrible ideas of no tax on tips, raising the top marginal tax rates on capital gains & wages, & taxing unrealized capital gains on the tippy top 0.01% of wealthiest households as if this would not trickle (flood) down to middle class households when she needed more revenue.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton says Harris must explain when & why she adopted her current policy views.

But Harris is quite content to keep a low profile & slide into the White House as a blank slate if she can get away with it.  The hostile anti-American media will not help in any substantial way so that leaves Trump having to drag her contradictory record out to the public in a way that makes sense because she has no intention of explaining any more of her record than she has to.

I don't think Trump can do it.

All in all, Harris is no more deserving of the presidency than Trump or Biden.

Fact Checking The Debate: Biden's Senility v. Trump's False Claims

Even the least discerning readers of this blog know that the theme of most posts over the last four years has been that neither Biden or Trump is fit to be president of the United States - some post titles were dead giveaways to this theme such as Neither Trump Nor Biden Deserves To Be President Again & Both Trump & Biden Have Disqualified Themselves From The Presidency.

Biden's performance in the June 27 presidential debate was so dismal that it not only caused him to drop out of the race but it made Trump's false claims during the debate that much harder to pick up except for professional fact checkers & readers of RTE.  

For instance, Trump absurdly stated, totally out of touch with political reality, that "everybody" wanted Roe v. Wade overturned with each state making their own abortion policy.  Trump said "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives.  Everybody wanted it back.  Religious leaders." & then added "Every legal scholar wanted it that way."  This falsehood was stunning to me.

Starting with conservative Kansas, less than two months after Roe was overturned, state after state (Kentucky, California, Vermont, Michigan, & Ohio) moved in the pro abortion direction with ballot initiatives.  Eleven other states (Florida, Arizona, Montana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, & Maryland) are planning to put abortion directly on the ballot in November to either directly reject further restrictions or fully enshrine abortion into their constitutions.  We know that Trump is aware that the 2022 midterm supposed "red wave" Republican victory never appeared because it was overwhelmed by the abortion issue - prompting Trump to say "You have to win elections" so say or do whatever you have to on abortion "to win elections."  And that is exactly what Trump did during the presidential debate.

But Biden was so inept during the debate that he could not even muster up a response to Trump's gross misstatement on abortion.

When Biden could try (instead of just standing there with his mouth open) to discuss an issue it too was terrible.  For instance, Biden's claim that "Truth is, I'm the only president this century that doesn't have any, this decade, that doesn't have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did," referring to Trump.

Of course this falsehood does not mention the thirteen U.S. service members (11 Marines, one Army special operations soldier, and one Navy corpsman) who were killed in the suicide bombing @ the airport in Kabul during the hideous Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021 following the Taliban re-taking of the country.  Biden also overlooks the three U.S. soldiers killed this year in Jordan by a drone attack instigated by Iran-backed militants.  Also two U.S. Navy Seals died in January in Somolian waters while attempting to seize lethal aid being transported from Iran to Yemen, & five U.S. soldiers died in a helicopter crash in the Mediterranean Sea in November 2023 during a routine refueling mission.  Lastly, eight U.S. airmen died in a CV-22 Osprey crash off the coast of Yakushima Island, Japan.

All told, according to the CNN fact checker Daniel Dale (whose work I relied on in this post based on my personal knowledge & previous RTE posts) Biden made @ least nine false or misleading statements during the debate - hard to believe he could muster up that many statements, false or otherwise.  Biden's misleading statements wandered through claims of Trump wanting to eliminate Social Security, saying unemployment was 15% when he took office, & incorrectly saying the Border Patrol union endorsed him before clarifying that he meant the border bill he had backed that was negotiated by Lankford (R-OK), Sinema (I-AZ), & Murphy (D-CT).

But the enormous unanswered question is why is Biden still president if he is so incapacitated that he could not perform better in a debate on his favored CNN.  If the debate proved anything it is that Biden should finally be given the cognitive test as a bare bones minimum to see if he can finish his term.  In the meantime, if this elderly man with a poor memory, who is @ least slightly senile, continues as president we are literally playing with a stick of dynamite that has a lit fuse.

Also, Kamala Harris immediately came on TV after the debate & continued the lie that Biden is as sharp as can be behind closed doors - this was before the knives came out to get rid of Biden's liability as a candidate for president.  But Harris certainly knew better - like all of us.  This is one of the questions she should answer along with 1) what is fracking, & 2) in your assignment from President Biden to lead our efforts with Mexico & the Northern Triangle countries to stem migration to our southern border did you ever issue a written report addressing both the root causes of & your recommendations for quieting the disorder @ the southwest land border that began right after the Biden-Harris administration took office.  Questions 1 & 2 were recommended by Steve Moore & Bill O'Reilly respectively.

Fact checker Dale logged in nine whoppers for Biden during the debate & "@ least thirty for Trump."

During the debate Trump said 1) that Democrats will kill babies in the "eighth month, the ninth month of pregnancy, or even after birth" (no state allows infanticide & 95.6% of abortions occur before 16 weeks of pregnancy & only 0.9% occurred @ 21 weeks or later in 2020); 2) that Biden will quadruple people's taxes (Biden's budget proposal for fiscal year 2024 calls for people making $60,000 per year to pay less tax than under current law while middle income households would pay about the same); 3) that Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the Capitol on January 6, 2021 (there is no record of Trump offering troops to Pelosi & even if he did Pelosi has no authority over the deployment of the District of Columbia National Guard, which is under the command of the president); 4) that Americans don't pay the cost of his tariffs on China & other countries (it is U.S. importers, not Chinese exporters, who make the actual tariff payments to the government meaning the American consumer ultimately foots the bill); 5) that the 2020 presidential election was marred by fraud (there has never been any evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state, but we do know that Rudy, Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, & Sydney Powell have experienced a world of hurt claiming otherwise & Fox paid almost $1 billion to Dominion for broadcasting such falsehoods); 6) that under Biden, "We have the largest (trade) deficit with China" (in 2023 the Biden trade deficit with China was the lowest since 2010 while under Trump in 2018 the trade deficit with China hit a new record high - see graphic below); & 7) that the U.S. currently has its biggest budget deficit (this claim from Trump who presided over the largest deficit spending in any four year period since the founding of the country - see graphic below.)

  Click on graphic to enlarge

Over the years I have written about the significance of the national debt many times in blog posts & over the past four years have received many comments from die hard Trump supporters who acknowledge that Trump is the biggest four year spender in the country's history but shrug it off by saying "In my opinion, voters don't care about ... the debt."

Now isn't it one thing to not care about the national debt & another thing to not care about being lied to about it?