Category: 2020 Election

Trump Jr. And Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Paris Trip Cost Taxpayers At Least $64,000 For Security

The couple has recently complained about Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s “nepotism” and taxpayer-financed perks.

WASHINGTON ― Taxpayers shelled out at least $64,443 to safeguard the president’s eldest son and his girlfriend during a two-day visit to Paris in 2018 that included a stay at a $1,000-a-night hotel a few blocks from the Champs-Elysees, according to U.S. Secret Service records.

Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, a fundraiser for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, visited the Louvre and Eiffel Tower, posting photos on social media, a few months after they began a romantic relationship. According to those posts, the pair then went to Monaco for a friend’s birthday party.

Secret Service documents show that taxpayers spent $31,104 on air travel and $23,036 for hotel rooms on July 11-12, 2018, split between the Hotel de Sers and the Prince de Galles. An additional $10,303 was spent to rent three cars from an agency that offers armored vehicles. Continue reading.

Fact check: Night 3 of the Republican National Convention

The third night of the RNC featured Lara Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

Night 3 of the Republican National Convention featured a number of elected officials, second lady Karen Pence and others who made the case for President Donald Trump’s re-election during a program focused on “law and order” as protests grow over the police shooting of a Black man in Wisconsin.

Vice President Mike Pence also accepted his renomination with a speech praising Trump for his leadership, but he frequently distorted the facts.

NBC News fact checked the speeches in real time. Continue reading.

Kellyanne Conway’s RNC Speech Praises Trump As Champion Of Women

Conway made a surprise announcement about stepping down from her top role in the misogynistic leader’s administration earlier in the week.

Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, used her time in the spotlight at the Republican National Convention to paint the president as a supposedly kindhearted champion of women.

“A woman in a leadership role still can seem novel,” Conway said. In 2016, she became the first woman to run a successful U.S. presidential campaign.

Later, she claimed to have “seen firsthand many times the president comforting and encouraging a child who has lost a parent, a parent who has lost a child, a worker who lost his job, an adolescent who has lost her way to drugs.” Continue reading.

Kellyanne Conway undermined the truth like no other Trump official. And journalists enabled her.

Washington Post logo

Among the many appalling scenes in the many tell-all books written from an inside-the-Trump-administration perspective, one in particular spoke volumes about how Kellyanne Conway operates:

Former White House aide Cliff Sims wrote in “Team of Vipers” that he once sat down in the West Wing at the personal laptop of President Trump’s senior adviser, at her direction, to compose a press statement. But because Conway’s text messages were tied to both her phone and her personal computer, Sims kept getting distracted by “a nonstop stream of iMessages popping up on the screen,” he recalled.

“Over the course of 20 minutes or so, she was having simultaneous conversations with no fewer than a half-dozen reporters, most of them from outlets the White House frequently trashed for publishing ‘fake news’ . . . As I sat there trying to type, she bashed Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer,” and talked about Trump “like a child she had to set straight.” Continue reading.

The Kenosha Shooting Suspect Was In The Front Row Of A Trump Rally In January

Kyle Rittenhouse’s social media is filled with references to “Blue Lives Matter.” A Trump campaign spokesperson said, “This individual had nothing to do with our campaign.”

The law enforcement–obsessed 17-year-old who was charged with shooting and killing two people and injuring another in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during protests for Jacob Blake appeared in the front row at a Donald Trump rally in January.

Kyle Howard Rittenhouse’s social media presence is filled with him posing with weapons, posting “Blue Lives Matter,” and supporting Trump for president. Footage from the Des Moines, Iowa, rally on Jan. 30 shows Rittenhouse feet away from the president, in the front row, to the left of the podium. He posted a TikTok video from the event.

Seven months later, Rittenhouse went with his rifle to the third night of Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha after police shot Blake, a Black man who is now paralyzed as a result, according to his family. Rittenhouse attended as an armed vigilante, supposedly assisting police and protecting property in an unofficial capacity. Instead, he allegedly prowled the protest with a gun. Videos captured him fraternizing with law enforcement and attempting to get their attention. Continue reading.

Trump, GOP walk tightrope in wooing minority voters

The Hill logo

There have been two sides to the Republican National Convention so far this week. 

One side has featured what was expected: a grandiose, virtual happy hour to President Trump‘s conservative base.

The other side has been an open letter to minority voters — a bloc that the president struggles mightily with.

On the convention’s first two nights, a number of Black voices have been heard touting Trump, from the former NFL player Herschel Walker and Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones (D) to future and present GOP stars such as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Kentucky Attorney General David Cameron. Continue reading.

Trump’s campaign paid $2.3 million in donor funds to his private businesses: FEC filings

AlterNet logo

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to “drain the swamp” and declare war on crony capitalism — and he insisted that if he was elected, there would be a strict separation between his presidency and his business interests. But Dan Alexander, in Forbes, reports that according to Federal Election Commission filings, Trump’s campaign has so far paid $2.3 million in campaign funds to his private businesses.

“The most recent expenses look familiar,” Alexander notes. “The president accepted $38,000 in rent last month through Trump Tower Commercial LLC, the entity that owns his Fifth Avenue skyscraper.”

In July, according to the FEC filings, Trump’s campaign paid $8000 to the Trump Corporation for “legal and IT consulting.” And Trump’s campaign also coordinated with the Republican National Committee to pay Trump Tower Commercial LLC $225,000.

In July, the FEC filings show, Trump Hotel Collection received $1000 from his campaign. And some of the $2.3 million went to Trump Restaurants LLC. Continue reading.

RNC Video Showing Rioters In “Biden’s America” Is Actually Spain

The video is part of a pattern of Trump and his supporters portraying BLM protests as violent.

On the first night of the Republican National Convention, the party aired a segment featuring Catalina and Madeline Lauf warning of dire consequences if Democratic candidate Joe Biden is elected president.

“This is a taste of Biden’s America,” one sister says in a voiceover as images of protests play onscreen. “The rioting, the crime. Freedom is at stake now and this is going to be the most important election of our lifetime.”

The problem is that one of the images in the segment doesn’t show the US at all — it shows Spain. Continue reading.

The lie at the heart of Trump’s vision of America

AlterNet logo

In a new book published this month, New York Times reporter Jim Tankersley set out to get to the bottom of the problems in the American economy. “The Riches of This Land: The Untold, True Story of America’s Middle Class” traces the changes that have shaped Americans’ jobs and lives in the second half of the 20th century and recent decades, diagnosing what has gone wrong and how politicians have failed to offer solutions.

A primary target of the book is President Donald Trump’s vision of American society, in which immigrants supposedly compete for scarce jobs and white working-class men are tossed aside in favor of other groups. This perspective, Tankersley makes clear, does not match reality —even if the media erroneously lent it credibility. Workers are not actually pitted against each other in the American economy, and racial minorities and women have often suffered along with if not worse than white workers encountering hard times. Fixing what ails working Americans involves getting everyone to see that their interests are aligned, not in tension.

Tankersley also dismantles Trump’s frequent claims that he kept his 2016 campaign promises and built an economy that works for everyone prior the coronavirus, a central theme of the Republican National Convention. This just isn’t true, and the pandemic and economic crisis have revealed that devastating fissures in society remain pernicious sources of unjust inequality and disadvantage. Even before the crisis hit, Tankersley argues, we weren’t on a sustainable path to creating a secure and prosperous economy for everyone. Continue reading.

Democrats say Pompeo’s speech to RNC is unethical, hypocritical, and possibly illegal

The secretary of State last month admonished his staff not to improperly participate in politics or campaigns in this election year

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to address the Republican National Convention on Tuesday elicited outrage from Democrats and former U.S. diplomats, who said the potential 2024 Republican contender was being a hypocrite and causing serious harm to longstanding State Department norms around apolitical service.

Pompeo recorded his address to the RNC on Monday in Jerusalem from the rooftop of the famous King David Hotel, where he was traveling on official business. A State Department spokesperson said the actual recording of the remarks did not involve taxpayer resources.

He will be the first modern sitting secretary of State to address a national political convention, breaking with decades of bipartisan norms that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Continue reading.