M.L. Nestel joined Raw Story in 2023. An award-winning writer and editor, his work has been published in New York Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and The Guardian, among other titles. He also produces and writes for true-crime genre TV shows. Prior to that, he served on the Newsweek masthead as a senior writer, wrote as a correspondent at ABC News and held the titles of West Coast bureau chief and senior writer at The Daily Beast. Priors also include working as senior national correspondent at The Daily Mail and investigative reporter at all three NYC tabloids: The New York Post,The New York Daily News and Newsday. He traveled around the country as a national correspondent at The Daily. M.L. published hundreds of stories about underground music and cinema — most notably as a critic for Box Office Magazine and the New York editor at Soma Magazine. He also headed development at Fountainhead Films. M.L. splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.
CNN's chief national correspondent John King weighed in on what he's been hearing to be an abysmal performance on the galactic stage of the presidential debate where President Joe Biden faced off against former President Donald Trump in a rematch on who will be occupying the White House in 2025.
"Anderson this was a game changing debate in the sense that right now as we speak, there is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic party," he said.
And it started hemorrhaging in the first few moments.
"It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now," he said. "It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers —and they're having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket and they're having conversations about what they should do about it."
He continued: "Some of those conversations include 'Should we go to the White House and ask the president step aside?' The conversations are about 'Should prominent Democrats go public with that call because they feel this debate was so terrible?'"
The 81-year-old incumbent Biden had spoken in a raspy almost drifting way when he tried to strike points against a much more crisp and cogent Republican counterpart, 78-year-old Donald Trump
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Van Jones, another Democratic strategist, on CNN concurred: “He did not do well at all.”
The wobbly performance has Democrats panicking despite prepping for weeks at Camp David to ready himself.
King hit Trump for having "broke the fact check machine more than I can count tonight" but Biden's showing on this evening may be unfixable.
"I can tell you it started minutes in, it started with the first couple of answers and it has continued throughout the night for my 'Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!'"
"To 'What do we do about this?' and it involves very senior people in the Democratic party, including elected officials saying we have a problem.
CNN's Abby Phillip also was confounded by the hysteria on behalf of the left.
"I mean, the panic that I am hearing from Democrats is not like anything that I have heard in this campaign so far," she said.
