On the four-year anniversary of Trump’s bizarre rhetoric, President Joe Biden was only too pleased to draw attention to the incident, and a day later, the incumbent Democrat reemphasized the story anew. The New York Times reported:

On Air Force One, on social media and from the presidential lectern, President Biden has homed in on the infamous moment — one that crystallized the chaos of the Trump presidency — as he trolls his political opponent. “Remember when he was trying to deal with Covid, he said just inject a little bleach in your veins?” Mr. Biden said on Wednesday after picking up the endorsement of North America’s Building Trades Unions. “He missed it. It all went to his hair.”

A video of the comments suggested that Biden enjoyed both making the joke and the enthusiastic response from his audience.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1783177933022175573
.....But just below the surface, there’s probably a larger strategy unfolding.

For his part, the presumptive GOP nominee has largely avoided talking about Covid lately, especially as Biden has started talking about it more. Consider the president’s rhetoric during an event in Scranton, Pennsylvania, last week:

“[W]hen the pandemic hit, Trump failed the most basic duty any president owes the American people: a duty to care and a duty to respond. Remember when he told us, ‘Don’t worry; this will all be over by Easter’? Remember when he told us, literally, inject bleach? ... Think about it. Because he failed to care, not only did people die, but millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their livelihoods.”

By some measures, at the heart of the 2024 presidential race is a memory test for the American electorate: Will voters remember Trump’s many failures? Will they recall the many reasons they voted him out of office in the first place?

Biden’s job isn’t just to celebrate his accomplishments and denounce Trump’s regressive and radical plans. It’s also to combat amnesia and refresh memories.

The disinfectant joke, in other words, checks more than one box

Last fall, Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic state attorney general, told CNN that her office was overseeing a “robust” investigation related to alleged criminal misconduct in the scheme. Evidently, she wasn’t kidding: NBC News reported on her office filing a series of new criminal charges in this case, including conspiracy, fraud and forgery.

A state grand jury in Arizona on Wednesday indicted Trump aides including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Boris Epshteyn, as well as so-called “fake electors” who backed then-President Donald Trump in 2020, after a sprawling investigation into the alleged efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election in the state.

The former president is described as “Unindicted Coconspirator 1” in the indictment.

As NBC News’ report added, the indictment also described a variety of prominent Republican figures who’ve been charged in the case but have not yet been served and whose names are redacted, including Meadows, Giuliani, Epshteyn, former Trump campaign and White House official Mike Roman, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, former Trump attorney Christina Bobb, and John Eastman.....

For those keeping score, let’s count up the number of indictments currently pending in the scandal across multiple jurisdictions:

Arizona: 18 people have been indicted, including 11 fake electors and seven Trump aides.

Georgia: 19 people were initially indicted, including Trump, though some have since reached plea agreements with prosecutors.

Michigan: 16 people have been indicted, though there are several other prominent unindicted alleged co-conspirators.

Nevada: Six people have been indicted, each of whom served as fake electors.

A Washington Post report noted overnight that an investigation launched by Wisconsin’s attorney general is still ongoing — suggesting the total number of indictments might yet grow — though the scandal appears unlikely to lead to charges in New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

To be sure, some of President Joe Biden’s recent accomplishments have been dramatic in their own right. After all, the Democrat recently helped prevent a war between Israel and Iran, while carefully navigating the congressional process on a critically important security aid package.

But that’s not all the incumbent president and his administration have been up to. The New York Times reported this morning:

The Biden administration on Thursday placed the final cornerstone of its plan to tackle climate change: a regulation that would force the nation’s coal-fired power plants to virtually eliminate the planet-warming pollution that they release into the air or shut down. The regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency requires coal plants in the United States to reduce 90 percent of their greenhouse pollution by 2039, one year earlier than the agency had initially proposed.

This comes the day after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made a big announcement of his own. NBC News reported:

A federal rule announced Wednesday will require airlines to quickly give cash refunds — without lengthy arguments — to passengers whose flights have been canceled or seriously delayed, the Biden administration said. ... The rule from the Transportation Department says passengers who decline other reimbursement like travel credits are to get cash refunds.

This week, the Biden administration has also:

announced a major breakthrough on non-compete clauses;
made millions of American workers eligible for overtime pay;
unveiled a new rule cracking down on the kind of investment advice that advisors, brokers, and insurance agents can give to retirement savers;
made it easier for military spouses to work remotely;
announced $7 billion in federal grants for residential solar projects in low- and middle-income communities.

Remember, not only are these worthwhile steps, they’re also a sampling of the kind of governing we’re seeing from the Biden administration over the last few days.

Donald Trump frequently complains that his New York hush money trial is keeping him off the campaign trail, but he used this week's day off to hit the links instead of meet voters.

Justice Juan Merchan ordered the former president to attend each day of his trial, but the judge does not hold court on Wednesdays. Trump spent the day golfing at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club instead of visiting battleground states or making his case for the 2024 election, sources told CNN.

Trump has complained repeatedly, including as recently as Monday, that his criminal trial for allegedly falsifying financial records was keeping him from campaigning or attending his son's high school graduation....

https://twitter.com/KristenhCNN/status/1783510509934780566

Take a look at this NBC News summary, and pay particular attention to the penultimate name toward the end of the paragraph:

The [indictment] describes people who have been charged in the case but have not yet been served and whose names are redacted: [Mark] Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff; [Rudy] Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump attorney; [Boris] Epshteyn, a Trump campaign official and attorney; former Trump campaign and White House official Mike Roman; former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis; former Trump attorney Christina Bobb; and John Eastman, another attorney and Trump legal adviser in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Each of these GOP figures is notable for a variety of reasons, but it’s Bobb’s name that stood out.

The Republican lawyer’s name might not be immediately familiar to national audiences, but Bobb made headlines last month after Trump took over the Republican National Committee and hired Bobb to serve as senior counsel for election integrity.

In other words, a grand jury in Arizona has indicted the RNC’s election integrity chief on election-related crimes. Specifically, the indictment includes charges of conspiracy, fraud and forgery.

Whether anyone at the Republican National Committee will actually mind remains to be seen. A Washington Post analysis from last month made clear that Bobb’s not just another Republican lawyer.

She has a robust pedigree, at least as far as Trump is concerned. Soon after the 2020 election, she began working with Giuliani and others to elevate baseless or later-debunked claims about the results in various states having been tainted by fraud. She was involved in the “audit” of votes in Arizona, working with Trump campaign official (and Georgia co-defendant) Mike Roman. She wrote a book, published in January 2023, cataloguing familiar (and baseless or debunked) criticisms of the results. It’s all there, from Antrim County to State Farm Arena to True the Vote. (The book’s forward was written by Stephen K. Bannon; Jim Hoft of the conspiracy-promoting site Gateway Pundit wrote a blurb.)

And that was just a sampling. Bobb talked in 2022 about a plot to overturn the 2020 election results and possibly reinstate Trump to the White House. A year later, the lawyer raised the possibility of someone “intentionally” having released Covid as part of a scheme to interfere with Trump’s re-election effort......

In other words, the lawyer who will help oversee the Republican National Committee’s “election integrity” efforts is a “Big Lie” proponent, an election conspiracy theorist who played a prominent role in a scandal that led to one of Donald Trump’s many felony indictments, and a suspected criminal in Arizona, where she’s been charged with election-related crimes.

The seemingly minor incident over sourcing might not have escalated or triggered such emotional responses on both sides if not for tensions between the White House and the Times that had been bubbling beneath the surface for at least the last five years. Biden’s closest aides had come to see the Times as arrogant, intent on setting its own rules and unwilling to give Biden his due. Inside the paper’s D.C. bureau, the punitive response seemed to typify a press operation that was overly sensitive and determined to control coverage of the president.

According to interviews with two dozen people on both sides who were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject, the relationship between the Democratic president and the country’s newspaper of record — for years the epitome of a liberal press in the eyes of conservatives — remains remarkably tense, beset by misunderstandings, grudges and a general lack of trust. Complaints that were long kept private are even spilling into public view, with campaign aides in Wilmington going further than their colleagues in the White House and routinely blasting the paper’s coverage in emails, posts on social media and memos.

Although the president’s communications teams bristle at coverage from dozens of outlets, the frustration, and obsession, with the Times is unique, reflecting the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organization catering to an elite audience — and a deep desire for its affirmation of their work. On the other side, the newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that Publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright.

The president’s press flacks might bemoan what they see as the entitlement of Times staffers, but they themselves put the newspaper on the highest of pedestals given its history, stature and unparalleled reach. And yet, they see the Times falling short in a make-or-break moment for American democracy, stubbornly refusing to adjust its coverage as it strives for the appearance of impartial neutrality, often blurring the asymmetries between former President Donald Trump and Biden when it comes to their perceived flaws and vastly different commitments to democratic principles.....

Although the newspaper, like most mainstream outlets with a heavy White House presence, devoted pages of coverage to the president’s early legislative successes, its unrelenting focus on Biden’s advanced age and his low numbers in the NYT’s approval poll have frustrated the president and top aides to no end. Beyond that, they bemoan the newspaper’s penchant for sweepy comparisons, analytical reporter memos — referred to in the Biden press shop as “opinion pieces” or “diary entries” — and story frames that seem consistently skeptical.......

The Times’ desire for a sit-down interview with Biden by the newspaper’s White House team is no secret around the West Wing or within the D.C. bureau. Getting the president on the record with the paper of record is a top priority for publisher A.G. Sulzberger. So much so that last May, when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters for an off-the-record meeting with around 40 Times journalists, Sulzberger devoted several minutes to asking her why Biden was still refusing to grant the paper — or any major newspaper — an interview. Harris, according to three people in the room that day, suggested that he contact the White House press office and later grumbled to aides about the back-and-forth being a waste of the allotted time......

When describing their grievances with the Times, almost every Biden administration and campaign official used the word “entitled” to characterize the institution writ large and several of the individuals within the newsroom, where “Timesian” is an adjective routinely deployed without irony. Those officials described reporters who refused to correct minor errors or mischaracterizations in stories or those who haven’t been willing to engage with anyone besides the most senior administration officials. That said, many White House officials maintain productive working relationships with most of the Times reporters who cover the beat.

An Arizona grand jury has indicted 18 allies of Donald Trump for their efforts to subvert the 2020 election — including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorney Rudy Giuliani and former Trump campaign operative Mike Roman.

The indictment, which includes felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery, also describes Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator.

“Defendants and unindicted coconspirators schemed to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters,” the 58-page indictment reads.

The names of seven of the defendants, including Meadows, Giuliani and Roman, are redacted, but the document makes clear who they are by describing their roles. Ken Chesebro, an attorney who helped devise Trump’s post-election strategy, is described as “unindicted coconspirator 4.”

The only defendants whose names are visible in the version of the indictment released by the Arizona attorney general’s office Wednesday evening are the 11 Republicans who falsely posed as the state’s presidential electors despite Joe Biden’s narrow victory there. Among them: former Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward, state senators Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, and Arizona’s RNC committeeman Tyler Bowyer.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, has been helming the aggressive investigation. Though she initially appeared to be focused primarily on the false electors, in recent months she issued a wave of subpoenas to figures in Trump’s national orbit.