Category: 2020 Election

Trump’s biggest roadblock to reelection is COVID-19

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President Trump’s biggest obstacle to winning a second term in office is the coronavirus pandemic, which has dramatically altered the course of the presidential race and raised serious questions about his leadership.

Trump and his campaign have sought to contend with criticism by arguing that China is to blame for the global spread of the virus and that the U.S. government has done everything in its power to steer resources to states.

The president has repeatedly highlighted his decision to cut off travel from China and Europe, noting it was criticized at the time but was then followed by other countries. Continue reading.

‘He’s going to be unleashed’: Republican DOJ appointees urge against Trump second term

The officials said they’re backing Joe Biden in the hope of restoring “basic honesty and integrity.”

A group of onetime Republican presidential appointees who served as senior ethics or Justice Department aides are endorsing Joe Biden for president, warning that Donald Trump has “weaponized” the executive branch and is putting in peril the legitimacy of the Justice Department.

“I think a lot of us are extremely alarmed, frankly, at the threat of autocracy,” Donald B. Ayer, former deputy attorney general during the George H.W. Bush administration, said in an interview with POLITICO. “He’s going to be unleashed if he gets a second term. I don’t know what’s going to stop him.”

The former officials endorsing Tuesday served under the Reagan, H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. Continue reading.

Two dozen former Republican lawmakers come out against Trump on first day of GOP convention

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Two dozen former Republican lawmakers on Monday came out to endorse Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on the first day of the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Fox News reports that the list of former GOP lawmakers is headlined by Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator who frequently clashed with the president before retiring in 2018.

The other Republicans endorsing Biden are former Sens. John Warner of Virginia, Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, and former Reps. Steve Bartlett of Texas, Bill Clinger of Pennsylvania, Tom Coleman of Missouri, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Charles Djou of Hawaii, Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland, Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania, Bob Inglis of South Carolina, Jim Kolbe of Arizona, Steve Kuykendall of California, Ray LaHood of Illinois, Jim Leach of Iowa, Connie Morella of Maryland, Mike Parker of Mississippi, Jack Quinn of New York, Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island, Chris Shays of Connecticut, Peter Smith of Vermont, Alan Steelman of Texas, Bill Whitehurst of Virginia, Dick Zimmer of New Jersey, and Jim Walsh of New York. View the post here.

The absurd claim that Trump is the ‘most pro-gay president in American history’

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“President Trump is the most pro-gay president in American history. I can prove it.”

— Richard Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence, in a video released by the Log Cabin Republicans, Aug. 19, 2020

Grenell is a longtime spinmeister who under President Trump became a controversial ambassador to Germany. (The influential Der Spiegel magazine described him as “politically isolated” after he was accused of interfering in domestic politics.) He was briefly the acting director of national intelligence and now advises the Republican National Committee.

He makes the provocative claim that Trump — whose administration is often criticized by gay rights advocates as anti-gay — is actually the most pro-gay president in U.S. history. But the core of the video is actually a lengthy attack on Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, as anti-gay.

The video is a stew of misleading timelines, out-of-context quotes and claims easily debunked. Let’s take a tour through it. Continue reading.

Twitter Flags Trump Tweet Smearing Election Drop Boxes With Fraud And Virus

On Sunday morning, Donald Trump unleashed yet another unfounded claim about voting. This time, he suggested without evidence, that “Mail Drop Boxes” actually “make it possible for a person to vote multiple times.” His tweet also says mail drop boxes are not “Covid sanitized.” As with his usual refrain on voting, he rounded out the tweet with: “A big fraud!”

Twitter has labeled the tweet but is letting it stay visible. The label reads: “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about civic and election integrity. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.” A Twitter spokesperson told The Verge that people will be able to Retweet with Comment, but not like, Reply, or Retweet it, which is the norm for tweets that receive this label.

This is Trump’s tweet.

This is the tweet from Twitter support. Axios reports that the tweet stayed up for more than five hours before Twitter added the disclaimer label. Continue reading.

F.D.A. ‘Grossly Misrepresented’ Blood Plasma Data, Scientists Say

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Many experts — including a scientist who worked on the Mayo Clinic study — were bewildered about where a key statistic came from.

At a news conference on Sunday announcing the emergency approval of blood plasma for hospitalized Covid-19 patients, President Trump and two of his top health officials cited the same statistic: that the treatment had reduced deaths by 35 percent.

Mr. Trump called it a “tremendous” number. His health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, a former pharmaceutical executive, said, “I don’t want you to gloss over this number.” And Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said 35 out of 100 Covid-19 patients “would have been saved because of the administration of plasma.”

But scientists were taken aback by the way the administration framed this data, which appeared to have been calculated based on a small subgroup of hospitalized Covid-19 patients in a Mayo Clinic study: those who were under 80 years old, not on ventilators and received plasma known to contain high levels of virus-fighting antibodies within three days of diagnosis. Continue reading.

Biden and Harris push back on GOP attacks in their first joint TV interview

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Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris on Sunday night pushed back on accusations that they would defund police departments and increase taxes on the middle class or that the presidential nominee is facing mental decline, three narratives that Republicans have promoted and are expected to focus on as their convention begins Monday.

In the Democratic duo’s first joint television interview, aired Sunday night on ABC, Biden reiterated his support for increasing funding to police departments — and noted that President Trump’s budget would cut grants to local law enforcement.

“I don’t want to defund police departments. I think they need more help, they need more assistance,” Biden said. His policing plan, which has been criticized by more liberal elements of his party, would give $300 million more to departments for community policing efforts. Continue reading.

The enduring Trump mystery: What would Trump do in a second term?

Top aides spent the past several weeks reviewing proposals attempting to answer that very question — and Trump will talk about them this week.

As a reality TV star, Donald Trump seized the White House with an unusual slate of Republican pledges: take on China, tear up trade deals, restrict immigration. But as president, Trump has faced warnings from a long line of GOP stalwarts that he can’t win in 2020 by offering more of the same.

So, as the Republican National Convention looms, Trump and his team have scrambled to find new twists on old favorites to quell concerns about the question that has bedeviled him for months: What would he do with four more years?

A working group of top aides spent the past several weeks reviewing proposals attempting to answer that very question. They’ve discussed ideas to lower capital gains and income taxes, adopt new immigration measures, strike new trade deals and ax additional regulations. And on Thursday, the president is likely to speak about these ideas and more during his convention speech as he tries to draw a sharp contrast with the agenda of former Vice President Joe Biden. On Sunday night, the campaign released the broad outlines of its second-term goals — eradicating Covid-19, creating jobs, ending America’s reliance on China, cutting drug prices, expanding school choice and defending the police — and promised to tease them out further over the next week. Continue reading.

More than 500,000 mail ballots were rejected in the primaries. That could make the difference in battleground states this fall.

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More than 534,000 mail ballots were rejected during primaries across 23 states this year — nearly a quarter in key battlegrounds for the fall — illustrating how missed delivery deadlines, inadvertent mistakes and uneven enforcement of the rules could disenfranchise voters and affect the outcome of the presidential election.

The rates of rejection, which in some states exceeded those of other recent elections, could make a difference in the fall if the White House contest is decided by a close margin, as it was in 2016, when Donald Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by roughly 80,000 votes.

This year, according to a tally by The Washington Post, election officials in those three states tossed out more than 60,480 ballots just during primaries, which saw significantly lower voter turnout than what is expected in the general election. The rejection figures include ballots that arrived too late to be counted or were invalidated for another reason, including voter error. Continue reading.

NOTE: If you’re interested in finding out of how to vote by mail absentee in Minnesota, visit the Minnesota of Secretary of State’s website for specifics.