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Opinion: Is this going to be the most performative presidential debate ever?

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Opinion: Is this going to be the most performative presidential debate ever?

The first debate between President Biden and former President Trump on Thursday night will be a real test of Americans’ sense of civic duty. I essentially get paid to watch; political journalism is my job. But given the sort of cringey schoolyard ruckus that Trump provoked between the two men in their initial encounter four years ago, it’s a fair question why anyone else would tune in.

Except out of dedication to good citizenship.

Opinion Columnist

Jackie Calmes

Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.

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So here we go again, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s memorable riposte to then-President Jimmy Carter in their 1980 debate. Don’t expect edification, not when Trump is involved, but hope for some anyway.

About 73 million viewers tuned in for the Biden-Trump melee in September 2020 — not for the entire 90 minutes, I’m confident — and additional viewers livestreamed the spectacle. For perspective, that compares to about 160 million registered voters. The audience was smaller than anticipated, down from the record-high 84 million who watched Trump’s first face-off with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and down as well from the number who viewed the Carter-Reagan debate 40 years earlier.

Nonetheless, as my colleague Stephen Battaglio recently wrote, presidential debates are “one of the last mass audience experiences left in a highly fragmented TV landscape.” Six of 10 U.S. adults said they would watch all or most of Thursday’s showdown, and nearly a quarter said they would closely follow the news coverage about it, according to a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll this month. Good for them. In our polarized nation, a presidential debate is a rare communal experience, if far less enjoyable than a Super Bowl.

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Just as with the NFL championship, most viewers will head into the presidential debate cheering for one contender or the other, and nothing about the show in Atlanta — no lie or imbecility from Trump, no gaffe or stumble from Biden — will dissuade them from their man’s team. That makes the candidates’ target audience the few persuadable voters. The ones who actually will go to the trouble of watching the virtually unwatchable in the hope that it will help them make up their minds.

Just about everyone, however, will be united in their focus: How do both men look, sound and perform? Biden and Trump are the oldest people ever to serve as president, and each has been credibly criticized as too old to do it again.

As Republican pollster Whit Ayres put it to PBS News, “Can Joe Biden not look like a senile old man? Can Donald Trump not be an obnoxious jerk?”

The answer to the first question is yes, Biden can, as evidenced by his impressive performance recently at Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-day, and months earlier in his feisty State of the Union address. He desperately needs to look and sound presidential again, for a much larger audience of voters who are, by definition, politically engaged. But he also needs that feistiness — not to give as good as he gets from Trump (who would want that?), but to sparingly and strategically counterpunch in ways that underscore Trump’s inanity. For example, Biden’s zinger in 2020: “Will you shut up, man?” He spoke for so many millions of us that night.

The answer to the second question is no, Trump can’t be anything but obnoxious. For his own electoral sake, however, he really must try. CNN’s debate rules lend him a hand: Given Trump’s penchant for the kind of nonstop interruptions and insults that all but wrecked the 2020 debate, CNN will cut off both candidates’ mics when it’s not their time to speak. And there will be no studio audience for the performative Trump to play to.

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Perhaps that’s why he’s started calling it a “Fake Debate.” The rest of us can hope it’s more like the real thing, with fewer theatrics, lies and butting-in — a matchup that a high school debate coach might recognize.

Except for this: The extent to which viewers’ emphasis will be on the two candidates’ style over substance will be all but unprecedented in the history of presidential debates — especially the 64 years that they’ve been televised. (Would-be spoiler Robert F. Kennedy Jr., fortunately, failed to make the cut for the CNN-sponsored debate; the conspiracist hasn’t yet qualified for enough states’ ballots.)

Emphasizing style over substance is perhaps inevitable, and even important, when such old men are seeking reelection as leaders of the free world. But it’s not a good thing at a time when so many issues troubling the nation demand substantive policy responses.

Take the existential threat of climate change. As Biden and Trump prep for debate, much of the nation is enduring deadly record-high heat, along with the wildfires and intense storms that have become commonplace on our warming globe. Biden is implementing the most ambitious clean-energy agenda ever, and Trump has sworn he’ll repeal it. That dichotomy deserves probing questions from the CNN moderators, and our attention to the answers.

And what about the continued threats to reproductive rights in the wake of the Dobbs decision that Trump’s justices on the Supreme Court made possible? The debate will come three days after that ruling’s second anniversary. Or the unsustainable growth of the national debt, to which both Biden and Trump contributed? Or the ongoing chaos in the nation’s immigration system, which was a big problem on Trump’s watch, too, despite his false revisionism about how well-controlled the southern border was then.

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The candidates are likely to respond with more heat than light, especially the policy-phobic Trump. Yet his advisors’ Project 2025 plan is chock full of radical, detailed policies for gutting the civil service, repealing environmental laws, enforcing mass deportations that would rock the economy and defunding or closing whole government departments, should he regain the office. Trump must be forced to answer for those dangerous ideas — by the moderators, Biden or both.

If everyone who says they’ll pay attention does so, Americans will have passed the civic duty test. We can hope the candidates will pass theirs, delivering more than gaffes and groans. Alas, there’s nothing in Trump’s sorry rhetorical record to suggest he will rise to the occasion. Yet that, too, would be informative. Stay tuned.

@jackiekcalmes

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Omar’s disclosures erased millions, leaving her with potential negative net worth. She won’t explain why.

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Omar’s disclosures erased millions, leaving her with potential negative net worth. She won’t explain why.

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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., refused to address her revised financial disclosures that could imply she has a negative net worth after the progressive lawmaker dramatically reducing the reported value of assets tied to her husband’s business ventures.

“Can you tell us if your husband still has the consulting business and the wine business?” Fox News Digital asked Omar.

The congresswoman stayed silent as she was repeatedly questioned, after previously telling Fox News Digital that the original filing — showing Omar’s reported assets reducing by as much as $29.9 million — was inaccurate and “incomplete” information.

ILHAN OMAR’S OFFICE SAYS SHE’S ‘NOT A MILLIONAIRE’ AFTER $30M FILING REVISED DOWN TO UNDER $100K: REPORT

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US Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, speaks during a press conference with family members of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as members of Congress call for US investigations into Israel’s actions and reintroduce the Justice for Shireen Act, outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, May 18, 2023. The Al Jazeera journalist, who was a dual US citizen, was killed on May 11, 2022. The Israeli army later admitted one of its soldiers likely shot the reporter. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

The controversy surrounding Omar’s finances began when a 2024 financial report estimated that Omar and her husband possessed between $6 million and $30 million in assets, all while the Minnesota fraud scandal within the Somali community was beginning to come to fruition.

A more recent 2025 financial disclosure report shows Omar’s revised value of shared assets between her and husband to sit at a maximum of $125,000 — a multi-million-dollar drop from the year prior. The lower estimate of their assets, $20,000, compared to the low and high debt estimates, $30,000 and $100,000, would imply the Minnesota Democrat could have a negative net worth.

Both her and her husband have separate debts, each ranging somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000 — from her own student loans and her husband’s credit card debt, according to the disclosures.

WATCH: OMAR SILENT WHEN CONFRONTED ON ALLEGED TIES TO MASSIVE MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL

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RICHFIELD, MN – AUGUST 08: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (C) campaigns with her husband Tim Mynett (R) at the Richfield Farmers Market on August 8, 2020 in Richfield, Minnesota. Omar is hoping to retain her seat as the representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District in next week’s primary election. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

The biggest change in the documents involved Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett. His reported ownership interests in both his winery and venture capital advisory firm, which were previously valued in the millions of dollars, are listed with no value now.

In Omar’s 2024 financial disclosure records, Mynett’s share in his winery was valued between $1 million and $5 million, and his share at the venture capital advisory firm was valued between $5 million and $25 million. Now, his equity interests are both listed at $0.

Omar’s office previously told Fox News Digital that Mynett has partners in both businesses and said the earlier disclosure mistakenly reflected the businesses’ total equity rather than his ownership interest. The office also said the original filing listed assets without accounting for liabilities.

VANCE REFERS TIM WALZ, MINNESOTA ATTORNEY GENERAL TO DOJ FOR CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OVER STATE’S ALLEGED FRAUD

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House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has publicly voiced his interest in the Ethics Committee opening an investigation into Omar’s personal finances after the 2025 financial reports came out showing the possibility of a $29 million drop in her net worth.

Vice President JD Vance also has previously said the U.S. Department of Justice will be opening a probe into her alleged fraud as part of the administration’s anti-fraud taskforce that he spearheads, though no formal investigations have been shared with the public at this time.

Omar has been reluctant to answer Fox News Digital’s questions about her financial fallout and potential probes to be opened against her.

The Minnesota lawmaker similarly dodged answering any of Fox News Digital’s questions just last month about the revised disclosures.

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“There’s also the possibility that it might rain on this sunny day,” Omar replied without responding directly to the content of the question.

Fox News Digital’s Robert Schmad contributed to this report.

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Column: Trump decries ‘communism’ while his government takes ownership of companies

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Column: Trump decries ‘communism’ while his government takes ownership of companies

As a student years ago, I dove deep into the history of the Red-hunting McCarthy era and became familiar with the actor who emerged second only to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy as the villain of that insidious time: his shameless, conniving young lawyer, Roy Cohn. Never would I have imagined that a future president would count Cohn as a mentor and role model.

Then came Donald Trump.

Now, in Cohn-inflected McCarthyesque style, President Trump is channeling his tutor yet again, baselessly labeling his political enemies — all Democrats — as communists as he looks ahead to the fall’s midterm elections. Once more Trump shows that his catchphrase “Make America great again” means regressing, this time to Trump’s formative 1950s and the McCarthy era that sadly helped define it.

In recent speeches, including on the Fourth of July, Trump’s utterances of “communist” or “communism” reached double digits each time. (As that implies, the president didn’t set aside his divisive rhetoric even for the nation’s 250th birthday.)

“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said late on the Fourth on the National Mall.

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Trump couples his commie-baiting with a dash of his trademark xenophobia. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including by newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said at Mount Rushmore a day earlier. (He’s got it backward, of course: Immigrants come here for the American way of life and promise of success.)

Here’s the irony: Trump’s actions in his second term make him look more like the commie. He’s projecting again.

Now that Trump is exploiting a few victories lately by left-wing democratic socialists in Democratic primaries to paint the entire party as communists, it’s time to review the record — his record.

A hallmark of communism is government ownership of companies and control of the economy, at the expense of private property and free markets. In just over a year, Trump has used billions of taxpayers’ dollars to buy shares for the government in a growing list of private companies — U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse and more — citing national security. The companies don’t always welcome their new stakeholder; at a minimum, they rightly fear it for the demands the government could make about prices and production.

“It’s what Putin did,” the estranged Republicans at the Lincoln Project posted online Monday. “Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism.”

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“What began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control,” free-market economist Veronique de Rugy wrote in The Times last October of Trump’s actions. “The power to ‘partner’ with business is the power to control it.”

Comrade Trump’s first big government grab, and a model for those to come, was in June last year, when he wrested a permanent “golden share” in U.S. Steel in return for approving its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel. The company’s charter was revised to give the U.S. president extraordinary veto power over nearly a dozen corporate activities, including closing or relocating plants, supply-chain decisions, even pricing.

“We have a golden share, which I control,” Trump told reporters at the time, in words I never thought I’d hear from a president of the party once associated with free markets.

Just last week, Trump boasted to CNBC how he’d extracted a 10% stake in beleaguered chip giant Intel last August, after first demanding that its chief executive resign. “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company.’ … Somebody said that’s not very American. I said, ‘No, I think it is very American, actually.’ And I’ve done that with other deals.”

And so he has.

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The Pentagon is now the largest stockholder in struggling MP Materials, a large rare-earth mine in California, and guarantees a 10-year price floor for its output that stunned competitors. The administration has since taken shares in other rare-earth companies. The Commerce Department took an option for an 8% stake in Westinghouse, to spur construction of nuclear reactors, and has the right to 20% if the government decides the company should go public. The government takes a 15% cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ AI chip sales to China.

As much as anything he does, Trump’s direct intervention in private enterprise invites the question “What if Biden/Harris/Obama did that?” The answer, of course: Trump and Republicans would cry “Communist!”

Trump’s actions are the sort Americans generally have only seen during economic emergencies or major wars, and then rarely. I covered the frenzied and ultimately successful response to the near-collapse of the global financial system and the U.S. auto, insurance and housing industries. Behind the scenes in the Obama White House (and George W. Bush’s at the outset) was constant, angst-filled debate about any actions smacking of government takeovers and a determination that interventions be temporary, unlike Trump’s schemes. (For all the still-lingering unpopularity of the banking bailout, the Treasury — the taxpayers — got all the money back and then some, and exited the business.)

Trump’s economic big-footing isn’t the only way in which he resembles the commies Americans know best, and whom he so admires: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un. There are also the images of himself everywhere, monuments planned, drearily long and self-adulating speeches and interference in the nation’s cultural, educational and legal spheres and — worst of all — in elections.

At Rushmore, Trump closed with a demand that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act to restrict voting. “We do that and we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years,” he said, speaking of course about Republicans.

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One-party rule through central government election finagling? Now that’s a communist.

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Who is Valli Geiger? Meet the Maine Dem that Platner urged to run for Senate

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Who is Valli Geiger? Meet the Maine Dem that Platner urged to run for Senate

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Maine state Rep. Valli Geiger, a Rockland Democrat, former nurse and former mayor, is drawing sudden national attention after saying now-former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner encouraged her to consider taking his place on the ballot in the Maine Senate race.

While Geiger has not been named the replacement nominee, her name entered the Maine Senate scramble after she told local outlet WMTW that Platner called her Monday night, praised her as a “fighter” and asked whether he could put her name forward. Platner’s campaign told the outlet he had not made an endorsement decision but confirmed he encouraged Geiger to consider running if he stepped aside.

After Geiger said Platner called her about potentially putting her name forward, Geiger posted Tuesday she would not “throw Graham under the bus,” while also saying she would not “slander or accuse” Jenny Racicot, the woman who accused Platner of rape, “of anything more than telling the truth as she experienced it.” 

By Wednesday, local outlets were reporting that Geiger said Platner had encouraged her to consider running if he withdrew. Platner, who suspended his campaign Wednesday night, has denied the claim.

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WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IF PLATNER DROPS OUT? HERE’S WHO COULD REPLACE HIM ON THE BALLOT AND HOW IT COULD WORK

Graham Platner Maine State Rep. Valli Geiger  (Maine State Legislature/Getty Images)

“For the movement to continue, it can’t be me. For that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said in a video posted to social media.

Geiger is a third-term Democratic state representative from Rockland, according to her legislative biography, representing a coastal House district in Maine that includes Rockland, Criehaven Township, Matinicus Isle Plantation, the Muscle Ridge Islands, North Haven and part of Owls Head. Her biography says she serves on the Labor Committee and the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee.

Before entering the state legislature, Geiger served six years on the Rockland City Council, including one year as mayor and four years on the Rockland Comprehensive Planning Commission, three of them as chair. 

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Her biography says she holds a master’s degree in sustainable design and built her own passive-solar, net-zero-energy house. It also describes her as a former nurse at Pen Bay Medical Center who later worked as a health policy analyst and health administrator, including as director of the Healthreach Hospice program and clinical director for Federally Qualified Health Centers around Maine.

The Maine State Capitol May 18, 2026, in Augusta, Maine. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

PLATNER CAMPAIGN PUTTING ‘THUMB ON SCALE’ TO INFLUENCE POSSIBLE REPLACEMENT, MAINE DEM ALLEGES

Geiger’s connection to Platner predates the latest replacement speculation. Local reporting has described her as a close Platner supporter, and WMTW reported she previously stood with him and credited him with helping secure funding for rape kit tracking in Maine.

In her Facebook post responding to Racicot’s allegation, Geiger wrote that Racicot’s story “seems credible” but added that “none of us knows the truth nor will we ever.” She also described Platner as “a man becoming a better man” and said she had hoped he would lead the political movement his campaign had built and will not “throw Graham under the bus.”

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In the post, Geiger also praised Platner’s “passion for economic populism” and said she had granted him “an enormous amount of grace” for his behavior during what she described as his “dark years” after multiple deployments.

Dr. Nirav D. Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during a news conference about COVID-19 at Maine Emergency Management Agency in Augusta. (Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

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The Maine state representative is not the only Democrat whose name has surfaced as Maine Democrats prepare for the possibility that Platner exits the race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins. 

Several Democrats have expressed interest or are considering bids, including former gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah.

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Under Maine law, the Maine Democratic Party can replace him on the general election ballot by selecting a new nominee through its party process, with the replacement required to be chosen by July 27.

Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.

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