Category: 2020 Election

New York Times shreds Trump campaign lawsuit over Russia op-ed

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s hypocrisy accompanies him everywhere, from the Oval Office to his residences to his Twitter account and, notably, to the courthouse. Over the years, Trump has relied on the protections of the First Amendment while routinely smearing political opponents and critics in the media. Recently, his presidential campaign filed a volley of defamation actions complaining about his treatment by news organizations. Targets include The Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN.

One of those outlets just needled Trump over his legal opportunism.

The Times filed a motion Thursday to dismiss a complaint the Trump campaign filed in February over an opinion piece the newspaper published in 2019 by former executive editor Max Frankel. Coming just after Attorney General William P. Barr’s faulty summary of the Mueller report, Frankel argued that while there may not have been criminal cooperation/collusion/conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians, there was a more ambient “overarching deal.” Continue reading.

Understanding the mysterious group of Never Trumpers

Washington Post logoPundits and operatives studying Never Trumpers tend to treat them like an offshoot of the humanoid family (Homo integrity) or a new civilization in the deep political jungle. The political anthropologists often wind up confused or exasperated. The conversation goes something like this:

But what do you guys want? We want President Trump gone and Trumpism thoroughly discredited.

Then what? We’ll figure it out later.

You’ll never work in Republican circles! You’re assuming there will be a Republican Party. But if you are right, I have no interest in them anyway. Continue reading.

How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic

The secretive titan behind one of America’s largest poultry companies, who is also one of the President’s top donors, is ruthlessly leveraging the coronavirus crisis—and his vast fortune—to strip workers of protections.

On June 22nd, in the baking heat of a parking lot a few miles inland from Delaware’s beaches, several dozen poultry workers, many of them Black or Latino, gathered to decry the conditions at a local poultry plant owned by one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign contributors. “We’re here for a reason that is atrocious,” Nelson Hill, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, told the small but boisterous crowd, which included top Democratic officials from the state, among them Senator Chris Coons. The union, part of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., represents some 1.3 million laborers in poultry-processing and meatpacking plants, as well as workers in grocery stores and retail establishments. Its members, many defined as “essential” workers—without the option of staying home—have been hit extraordinarily hard by the coronavirus. The union estimates that nearly thirty thousand of its workers in the food and health-care sectors have contracted covid-19, and that two hundred and thirty-eight of those have died.

For the previous forty-two years, a thousand or so laborers at the local processing plant, in Selbyville, had been represented by Local 27. Just two years earlier, the workers there had ratified a new five-year contract. But, Hill told the crowd, in the middle of the pandemic, as the number of infected workers soared, the plant’s owner, Mountaire Corporation—one of the country’s largest purveyors of chicken—conspired, along with Donald Trump, to “kick us out.”

Hill, who is Black and from a working-class family on the Delmarva Peninsula—a scrubby stretch of farmland that includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—was used to the area’s heat and humidity. But, as he spoke to the crowd, behind dark glasses, his face glistened with anger. “It’s greed, that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s a damn shame.” Continue reading.

White House goes public with attacks on Fauci

The Hill logoTensions between the White House and Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious diseases expert, are spilling into the open as officials openly attack the doctor for his public health advice during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Fauci’s advice has often run contrary to President Trump’s views, and the attacks on Fauci have begun to look like a traditional negative political campaign against an opponent. Yet this time, the opponent is a public health expert and career civil servant working within the administration. 

Dan Scavino, deputy chief of staff for communications, shared a cartoon on his Facebook page late Sunday that depicted Fauci as a faucet flushing the U.S. economy down the drain with overzealous health guidance to slow the spread of the pandemic. Continue reading.

Trump financial regulator quietly shelved discrimination probes into Bank of America and other lenders

AlterNet logoIn the spring of 2018, bank regulators trained to spot discriminatory lending detected something alarming at Bank of America.

The bank was offering fewer loans to minority homebuyers in Philadelphia than to white people in a way that troubled examiners from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to two people directly involved in the probe and internal documents reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The officials suspected the second-largest bank in the United States was “redlining,” or deliberately turning its back on minority homebuyers, the people said. Continue reading.

This damning supercut shows how Trump has been ‘wrong about every aspect of the pandemic’

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump’s allies have been circulating an opposition research file on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for getting some things wrong in the past when talking about the novel coronavirus.

However, the president has gotten vastly more wrong about the pandemic — and CNN on Monday showed the receipts.

CNN’s Alisyn Camerota showed viewers a supercut video of Trump’s statements about the disease that she said show he’s been “wrong about every aspect of the pandemic.” Continue reading.

Veterans rip Trump as a ‘traitor’ for his mask photo-op at Walter Reed Hospital

AlterNet logoThe veteran advocacy organization Vote Vets on Sunday blasted President Donald Trump for holding a photo-op at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

After a round of golf on Saturday, Trump traveled to the hospital to be photographed by the press pool wearing a mask, which was a first since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vote Vets, which says it has raised over $120 million since being founded in 2006 and made over 50 million voter contacts, released a new video on Trump’s visit. Continue reading.

Yale Economists: Defeating Virus Is The Only Way To Restore Prosperity

Many far-right allies of President Donald Trump, from Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana to Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to radio host Glenn Beck, have railed against Democratic stay-at-home orders and argued that too much social distancing is strangling the U.S. economy. But economists Steven Berry and Zack Cooper, in a Politico op-ed, argue that the only way to “restore” the U.S. economy is to seriously slow down the spread of coronavirus — and doing so is going to require aggressively funding anti-coronavirus measures.

“Unfortunately, Congress and the (Trump) Administration seem poised to return to a tired playbook which isn’t working: ramping up government spending as if we are stuck in a pure financial crisis,” explain Berry and Cooper, both of whom teach economics at Yale University. “Financial aid, while vitally important for reducing the economic pain caused by COVID-19, will not hasten the end of the pandemic.”

Congress, according to Berry and Cooper, needs to fund “solutions that would shorten or mitigate the virus itself” — for example, “measures like increasing the supply of PPE, expanding testing, developing treatments, standing up contact tracing, or developing a vaccine.” Continue reading.

Roger Stone, and Trump’s extraordinary record on clemency

Washington Post logoPresident Trump has attempted to make law and order his calling card in the 2020 election. In fact, he’s tweeted or retweeted the words “LAW & ORDER” — in ALL CAPS — more than two dozen times since May 31.

The same president just commuted the sentence of a political ally, Roger Stone, who was recently convicted of seven crimes, including ones aimed at shielding the president himself.

The first thing that jumps out at you about Trump’s pardons and commutations is the inordinate number of them which have gone to people with either personal or political ties to Trump (or both): Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D’Souza, Conrad Black, Bernard Kerik, Rod Blagojevich, Michael Milken, Paul Pogue, David Safavian, Eddie DeBartolo Jr. and now Stone. It’s hardly unheard-of for a president to pardon allies — see Marc Rich et al. — but Trump has taken it to another level. Continue reading.

Texas GOP Sues Houston To Hold Convention In Virus Hotspot

The Texas Republican Party was all set to hold a 6,000-person convention in Houston this next week even though the city is located in Harris County, the Texas county with the highest overall number of coronavirus cases. But because the county has averaged around 950 new COVID-19 cases each day over the last week, Houston’s Democratic Mayor Sylvester Turner effectively canceled the event on July 8.

But now the Texas GOP is suing for the right to hold the event anyway as the convention’s preliminary meetings were set to start next Monday. This last Thursday, a district court judge rejected the state GOP’s request, so now the state GOP has appealed to the Texas State Supreme Court which will hear arguments on Saturday.

The state GOP’s argument is essentially that Turner allowed thousands of racial justice protesters to congregate in the city over the last month, so why not a bunch of Republicans? Continue reading.