Category: 2020 Election

Trump renomination vote to be held in private, with no media present

Axios logoThe vote on renominating President Trump will be held in private this month with no media present because of coronavirus “restrictions and limitations” in place in North Carolina, a Republican National Convention spokesperson told AP Saturday.

The big picture: The vote is due to take place at the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 24. When Trump announced on July 23 that he canceled plans to hold the convention in Jacksonville, Florida, over COVID-19 concerns, he said he’d give an acceptance speech “in a different form.” Continue reading.

Trump Urges Voters To Use Absentee Ballots, Which Are, Uh, Mailed In

“It’s actually a great thing, absentee ballots. I’m going to be voting absentee,” the president said a day after attacking the integrity of mail-in voting.

After railing about “fraudulent” mail-in ballots without any basis in fact, President Donald Trump bizarrely urged Americans on Friday to use absentee ballots — which are mailed in.

“People should go and they should vote — or do it absentee ballot,” he told reporters Friday, a day after he floated delaying the election.

Absentee ballots “are great because absentee ballots you have to go through a process to get ’em,” Trump explained. “It’s actually a great thing, absentee ballots. I’m going to be voting absentee,” Trump told reporters. Continue reading.

Trump struggles to stay on script, frustrating GOP again

The Hill logoPresident Trump is struggling to stick to a consistent message that resonates with voters, vacillating almost daily between scripted events and remarks and incendiary commentary that risks alienating key voting blocs in an election year.

The whiplash was on full display this week, as Trump made a series of trips to underscore his administration’s focus on the coronavirus pandemic and economy.

Trump traveled to North Carolina on Monday for an extremely brief, targeted event to tout progress on a COVID-19 vaccine. On Wednesday, he was in Texas to sign permits boosting oil exports, and on Thursday he stopped by the Red Cross to urge Americans who recovered from the coronavirus to donate convalescent plasma. Continue reading.

The Lincoln Project’s plan for preserving the union: Drive Trump out of office by driving him nuts

Washington Post logoYour house is on fire. Do you care who the firemen are?

That is a central question of the 2020 election. Donald Trump has managed to do one thing no other president has done: Bring Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, boomers and millennials together in unprecedented numbers to try to defeat him in November. For Americans who believe the president is a raging threat to democracy, purity tests are out. Results are in.

Which explains the spectacular rise of the Lincoln Project, a group of Republican Never Trumpers who have moved rent free into the president’s head. Their viral videos and tweets mocking his leadership, his intelligence and his patriotism — aimed both at Republican voters who are wavering and Trump himself — have attracted millions of dollars, via donors from both parties. More than 10,000 people showed up for a virtual town hall last month. Lifelong Democrats are organizing fundraisers for the project. Continue reading.

To Reboot Failed Messaging, Trump Campaign Suspends Advertising

In yet another sign Donald Trump’s internal polls aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, the Trump campaign has halted ad spending over the next few days due to their “messaging strategy,” because that’s clearly the problem.

Following the campaign shakeup in mid-July, a senior campaign official sought to frame the cessation as completely par for the course. “There’s understandably a review and fine-tuning of the campaign’s strategy,” the official told CNN, adding that they would be back on the air “shortly.”

While the initial advertising focused on featuring Trump’s accomplishments, the latest ads have taken a darker turn as Trump’s reelection chances dim and the candidate descends into a sea of self-pity and petty grievances. Continue reading.

More Than Just a Tweet: Trump’s Campaign to Undercut Democracy

New York Times logoFloating the idea of delaying the election was the latest step in the president’s running effort to discredit the election, risking long-term damage to public trust in the system.

Nothing in the Constitution gives President Trump the power to delay the November election, and even fellow Republicans dismissed it out of hand when he broached it on Thursday. But that was not the point. With a possible defeat looming, the point was to tell Americans that they should not trust their own democracy.

The idea of putting off the vote was the culmination of months of discrediting an election that polls suggest Mr. Trump is currently losing by a wide margin. He has repeatedly predicted “RIGGED ELECTIONS” and a “substantially fraudulent” vote and “the most corrupt election in the history of our country,” all based on false, unfounded or exaggerated claims.

It is the kind of language resonant of conspiracy theorists, cranks and defeated candidates, not an incumbent living in the White House. Never before has a sitting president of the United States sought to undermine public faith in the election system the way Mr. Trump has. He has refused to commit to respecting the results and, even after his election-delay trial balloon was panned by Republican allies, he raised the specter on Thursday evening of months of lawsuits challenging the outcome. Continue reading.

A year of dark magical thinking: Trump’s petty revenge fantasies have killed thousands

AlterNet logoThere have been a lot of changes in Donald Trump’s campaign in the last couple of weeks, but they haven’t been able to change the candidate. He’s more Trumpy than ever.

When the last round of terrible polls were released, showing Trump badly trailing Joe Biden both nationwide and in the key battleground states, Kellyanne Conway and others inexplicably suggested that the president should reignite the dumpster fire formerly known as the coronavirus briefings. That’s not going well. Have they been as bad as the White House coronavirus rallies in the spring, where Trump spent what seemed like hours every day insulting the press corps and generally making a fool of himself? Not yet. But that’s only because he has managed to stick to answering a few questions after droning on for 20 minutes as if he were reading someone else’s book report.

The substance of that book report is the same old happy talk and cheerleading, virtually always based on half-truths and outright lies. And the Q&A period is predictably a disaster. One day he wished his old friend Ghislaine Maxwell, the accused sex trafficker, well, spurring speculation that he was sending her the kind of signal he had earlier sent to his pal Roger Stone, whose sentence he commuted after Stone made clear he hadn’t ratted him out. (Perhaps that’s unfair, but since Trump commonly says things that sound like a slightly less erudite Tony Soprano, it’s only natural to wonder.) Continue reading.

Could Obama’s call to end Senate filibuster shift the tide?

One previous skeptic, Sen. Bernie Sanders, now on board

Former President Barack Obama’s endorsement Thursday of ending the legislative filibuster energized progressive senators and groups who’ve championed the issue and converted one previous skeptic, Sen. Bernie Sanders. But will it provide enough momentum to topple a longtime Senate rule that many view as a pivotal check against partisan politics?

The answer to that question wasn’t immediately clear in the hours after Obama’s remarks at Rep. John Lewis’s funeral in Atlanta, where he said doing away with the 60-vote threshold for legislation may be necessary if Congress is ever going to finish Lewis’s work on voting rights. With the notable exception of Sanders, most of those who celebrated Obama’s comments had already called for such a rule change.

And the true impact of Obama’s surprise endorsement may not become clear until after the November election. Discussion of further erasing the 60-vote filibuster for legislation, which both Democratic and Republican Senate majorities have eliminated for executive and judicial nominations, will be a moot point if Democrats don’t regain control of the Senate. Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made clear there are no circumstances under which he’d entertain a move to end the legislative filibuster. Continue reading.

Federalist Society Co-Founder Calls For Trump’s Impeachment For Proposing To Postpone Election

Steven Calabresi is not among the usual slate of conservative critics of the president. He doesn’t appear on MSNBC to lambast the Republican Party or write denunciations of the White House for The Bulwark. But in a new piece for the New York Times published Thursday, he offered a blistering rebuke to President Donald Trump’s suggestion on Twitter that he may seek to delay the November election.

Calabresi started with his Trumpist bona fides, confirming that he’s not inclined to criticize the president:

I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment.

Then he continued, cutting to the heart of the matter:

But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.

Continue reading.

Worst Quarterly Downturn Since ’29 Crash Fails To Spur GOP Economic Action

Donald Trump oversaw the worst economic quarter in recorded U.S. history, with the economy shrinking by 33 percent from April through June.

This marks the second quarter in a row Trump has presided over a steep quarterly drop in the nation’s gross domestic product, the Associated Press reported on Thursday, following a five percent drop from January through March.

Since the federal government began recording quarterly GDP in 1947, the previous worst quarter was a ten percent contraction in 1958.

In 2016, Trump campaigned on growing the economy by up to six percent per year, but has repeatedly failed to fulfill that promise. The most the economy has grown was 3.2 percent in 2018 and GDP growth fell below 2.5 percent in both 2017 and 2019. Continue reading.