Principals

1. The debate Democrats feared
2. Media vs. Biden
3. Trump VP tryouts
4. SCOTUS rulings
5. Biden’s Black support

PDB: Oklahoma to require teaching of the Bible and Ten Commandments

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris rally in North Carolina today … CNN flash poll: 67% say Donald Trump won debate ... Russia is taking brutal casualties in Ukraine — NYT

— edited by Benjy Sarlin, Jordan Weissmann and Morgan Chalfant

Debate pushes Biden viability questions into the open

ATLANTA, GA — President Biden walked into his debate against Donald Trump with a low bar to clear and left it with some Democrats publicly asking whether he should drop out. Semafor’s David Weigel and Shelby Talcott tracked the panic from his party, which began minutes into the debate as a hoarse and reportedly sick Biden stumbled through the early questions. “It’s awful,” one veteran of two major Democratic campaigns said. “My non-political friends who just began tracking the election are concerned about Biden after watching this,” one senior Democratic aide said. “If it gets Biden not to run, then it was very good,” one former Obama campaign aide darkly texted. “Otherwise it’s bad.”

Biden stopped by a Waffle House after the debate and told reporters “I think we did well” and that he had a sore throat. Vice President Kamala Harris conceded on CNN that Biden “started slow” but said he “finished strong” and that the substance of the debate — including discussions of Trump’s role in Jan. 6 and his repeated refusal to agree to accept the results of the election — favored Democrats. But if the president wants to continue, he’s going to need to stabilize his standing with his own party first before anything else. And while he’s likely the only one who can decide if he stays on the ticket, his left-leaning skeptics are going to be a whole lot less deferential this time while he responds to their argument.

Liberal commentators turn on Biden

Prominent liberal media voices turned hard on Joe Biden as he stumbled through Thursday’s debate, Max Tani reports. New York Times columnist Nick Kristof called on Democrats to “fix this,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid said panicked Democrats are circulating rules for replacing the nominee at the convention, and The New Republic went with “Ditch Biden” as their lead story. Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker, meanwhile, took a victory lap for a controversial story on Biden’s mental acuity, saying her team “took a lot of grief for covering a story that needed to be covered and that no other mainstream publishers were willing to touch.” CNN’s Mark Thompson told Max that the debate was a success, and dodged a question on whether the hosts should have fact-checked the candidates. A nation turns its lonely eyes to Joe Scarborough.

The Vice Presidential tryouts, debate edition

Republican vice-presidential hopefuls flocked to Atlanta on Thursday, as Trump’s team continued to tease his pick. The veepstakes appear to have narrowed to three: Sens. J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, as well as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, were the key contenders who showed up to support the former president, jumping into the post-debate media circus to hype his performance and take shots at Biden. But who Trump will select for the coveted position is no more clear this morning than it was yesterday: Vance told NBC News after the debate that Trump has not asked him, while Burgum dodged the question. Rubio similarly ducked and weaved on CNN post-debate. Trump had said he would unveil his running mate around the Republican convention, which takes place July 15-18. On Tuesday, he said: “We’ll make a decision fairly soon and I think people will be very happy with this decision.” Stay tuned.

Hot off the debate stage, and into the podcast studio, Ben, Nayeema, and Max dig into who gets to decide who “won” the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Joining them, statistician Nate Silver, founder and former editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, discusses election predictions and why people are so skeptical of polls these days. On Wednesday, Silver released his Silver Bulletin Election Model showing Trump with a 66% chance of heading back to the White House. Plus, Nayeema calls out Americans’ blindspots by taking us on a quick tour of elections around the world.

Catch up with the latest episode of Mixed Signals.

Supreme Court allows emergency abortions, extends term

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing emergency abortions in Idaho without deciding on key issues in the case, a day after the opinion was prematurely posted on the court’s website. The justices also limited the ability of regulators to impose monetary penalties through in-house tribunals, and they threw out a controversial settlement with Purdue Pharma that would have prevented further lawsuits against the family that controls the OxyContin maker. The court said its term may extend beyond Monday, with decisions remaining on Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, the validity of charges against Jan. 6 suspects, whether people can be barred from sleeping in public spaces when shelter space is sparse, and one that may overturn a 40-year decision used to uphold multiple government regulations.

Raphael Warnock says Trump’s bet on Black voters is a bust

If there’s an earthquake happening with Black voters, Raphael Warnock isn’t seeing it. “This idea that throngs of Black folks are going to vote for Donald Trump, it’s just not true,” the Georgia senator and top Biden surrogate told Semafor’s Kadia Goba before the debate. “It’s not going to happen.” A new wave of lousy pre-debate polls for Biden included a New York Times/Siena poll found Trump hitting 30% among registered Black voters, an outlier perhaps, but one of a number of surveys suggesting danger. Warnock insisted that Democrats’ real concern was turnout. “What we’ve got to do is help people see between now and November that this is going to be a close election, and if we don’t turn out, we could see this man, this dangerous man, back in the White House,” he said.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: Democratic candidates in high-tax states are increasingly talking up the 2017 SALT tax cap on the campaign trail.

Playbook: The drop-Biden campaign will only gain traction if prominent Democratic officials express their concerns in public and press the president in private.

WaPo: Some Democratic aides are downplaying concerns about Joe Biden’s performance, comparing it to Barack Obama’s first debate against Mitt Romney in 2012, where Obama appeared unprepared and unrehearsed.

Axios: The Biden campaign’s strategic misstep was focusing on details instead of presentation. The president was “relying on minutiae when all that mattered was vigor and energy,” Axios quotes a person close to the campaign saying. “He was over-prepared when what he needed was rest.”

White House

The Biden administration plans to protect around 300,000 Haitians who arrived after November 2022 from deportation and allow them to work in the US. — NYT

Congress

• The House on Thursday rejected amendments offered to an appropriations bill by Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to cut off aid for Ukraine.
• Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL., underwent successful hip replacement surgery Thursday.

Outside the Beltway

• Oklahoma state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters ordered public schools to incorporate the Bible and Ten Commandments into their curriculum in grades 5 through 12, calling the Bible “one of the most historically significant books and a cornerstone of Western civilization, along with the Ten Commandments,” and that “immediate and strict compliance is expected.”
• The former Uvalde school district police chief was indicted over his role during the police response to the 2022 school shooting.

Courts

• Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the Trump classified documents case, wants to look again at whether prosecutors can use information from one of Donald Trump’s lawyers — a matter that had already ruled on by another judge.
• A federal jury ordered the NFL to pay $4.7 billion to customers of its “Sunday Ticket” telecast package, ruling that the league violated antitrust laws with its out-of-market telecasts. That amount could be tripled under antitrust law if the judgment is upheld. The league said it plans to appeal.

On the Trail

• Trump donors paid $25,000 to pose a question to North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum in a fundraiser on Zoom on Tuesday. Other attendees were able to listen for $10,000. — Bloomberg
• The Biden campaign says it had the best grassroots fundraising hour and day since launch yesterday.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. staged his own one-person debate after being left out of the official CNN one.

National Security

• Pentagon and USAID inspectors general began coordinated reviews of the US humanitarian mission to Gaza where the temporary pier constructed by the military has faced repeated challenges, including breaking apart. Meanwhile, a US military commander met Wednesday night with senior UN and Israeli officials to discuss restarting aid distribution, which has been suspended since June 9.
• The Pentagon is moving military assets closer to Israel and Lebanon to be ready to evacuate Americans as fighting between Israel and Hezbollah intensifies. — NBC
• US Air Force veteran Paul J. Freeman was arrested and charged for allegedly disclosing classified information related to US military aircraft and weapons to unauthorized individuals.
• A US soldier was charged with sexually assaulting a Japanese teenager in Okinawa. A top Japanese government spokesperson said it has called for stronger oversight of the behavior of US military personnel.

Foreign Policy

• Iranian voters go to the polls today to pick a successor to President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash last month.
• European Union leaders endorsed Ursula von der Leyen for another term as European Commission president.

Media

News nonprofit Center for Investigative Journalism, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal, sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in a new fight over the unauthorized use of news content in building AI.

Technology

Tesla says CEO Elon Musk has won the legal fight over his $56 billion pay package because shareholders two weeks ago approved the compensation, despite a judge rescinding it early this year, the EV maker said in a court filing released Thursday.

Blindspot

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, according to data from our partners at Ground News.

What the Left isn’t reading: A federal bankruptcy judge has stopped an effort by the parents of a boy killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to start collecting on the $50 million they won in a lawsuit against Alex Jones over his false claims the 2012 massacre wasn’t real.

What the Right isn’t reading: The White House Correspondents Association criticized CNN for not allowing the White House travel pool in the studio during Thursday’s presidential debate in Atlanta.

Principals Team

Editors: Benjy Sarlin, Jordan Weissmann, Morgan Chalfant

Editor-at-Large: Steve Clemons

Reporters: Kadia Goba, Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Shelby Talcott, David Weigel

Matt Rosendale is a Republican representative from Montana. Posters criticizing the practice of IVF were seen hanging outside his office.