Category: 2020 Election

‘He Is and Always Will Be a Terrified Little Boy’

Mary Trump has not indicted her uncle. She has indicted the whole family. And that could give it a “seismic imprint.”

Donald Trump is the damaged product of an absent mother and a sociopathic father.

That’s in essence Mary Trump’s assessment in her ultra-anticipated instant bestseller that’s due out Tuesday—Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

For anybody who’s done the reading these last five years—from Wayne Barrett’s biography that was published in 1992 to Gwenda Blair’s multigenerational study from 2000 to psychology experts’ more recent efforts to explain this president—it’s a takeaway that’s not altogether unfamiliar. And the glut of books about Trump and his aberrant administration has contributed almost inevitably to a tendency to treat even the most hyped fresh releases as cash-grab ephemera to speed-read for damning tidbits and just as quickly forget amid the ruthless whirl of crises. Continue reading.

‘Adapt immediately or find a new job’: Senate GOP confronts fundraising emergency

Democrats’ online fundraising has again caught fire, giving them a boost in November’s fight for the Senate majority.

Last month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee prepared a slideshow for Senate chiefs of staff full of bleak numbers about the party’s failure to compete with Democrats on digital fundraising. For anyone not getting the message, the final slide hammered home the possible end result: a freight train bearing down on a man standing on the tracks.

The slideshow, obtained by POLITICO, painted a grim picture of the GOP’s long-running problem. Republican senators and challengers lagged behind Democrats by a collective $30 million in the first quarter of 2020, a deficit stemming from Democrats’ superior online fundraising machine. Since then, Democrats’ fundraising pace accelerated further, with the party’s challengers announcing huge second-quarter hauls last week, largely driven by online donors giving through ActBlue, the party’s preferred fundraising platform.

The money guarantees Democrats nothing heading into November 2020. But with President Donald Trump’s poll numbers sagging and more GOP-held Senate races looking competitive, the intensity of Democrats’ online fundraising is close to erasing the financial advantage incumbent senators usually enjoy. That’s making it harder to bend their campaigns away from the national trend lines — and helping Democrats’ odds of flipping the Senate. Continue reading.

U.S. budget deficit shattered one-month record in June as spending outpaced revenue by $864 billion

Washington Post logoA huge spending increase and sharp falloff in revenue led to the large gap. The deficit in the past nine months has breached $2.7 trillion.

The U.S. budget deficit widened to a record-high $864 billion last month because of the federal government’s extraordinary response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Treasury Department said on Monday.

In June 2019, the budget deficit was just $8 billion.

Federal spending rose to more than $1.1 trillion in June, more than twice what the U.S. government spends in a typical month. The amount of tax revenue collected by the federal government remained largely flat, at about $240 billion, in part because the Treasury Department delayed the tax filing deadline until July. Continue reading.

ICYMI – MinnPost: “Jason Lewis Laughs” About Previous Comments on Trayon Martin

In Case You Missed It:

MinnPost: D.C. Memo: Focus on the Fifth District

By Gabe Schneider. 7/10/20

I reported last week that Jason Lewis, the endorsed Republican for Senate in MN, previously said Trayvon Martin was “a thug,” “a kid in trouble,” “not a saint,” “not a role model,” and “guilty.”
On Monday, Lewis was asked by a radio host what he thought about the discrepancy between his words about George Floyd, whose death he called tragic, and his words about Trayon Martin. He laughed.

Host: “You called the death of George Floyd tragic, because it was, but you said different things after another person died a long time ago, so how do you rectify that, Jason?”

Jason Lewis: “I don’t know, it’s kind of amazing.”

You can listen to the clip here at about the 42 minute mark.

Trump says he disagreed with privately funded border wall. The builder got $1.7 billion in wall contracts from his administration.

President Donald Trump now claims this privately funded border wall in the Rio Grande Valley — touted as the “Lamborghini” of fences — was built to “make me look bad,” even though the project’s builder and funders are all Trump supporters.

President Donald Trump complained via Twitter on Sunday that a privately constructed border wall in Texas was a bad idea and poorly done — not mentioning that his administration has awarded the builder a $1.7 billion contract to build more walls.

With the backing of Trump supporters, Tommy Fisher built a 3-mile border fence along the Rio Grande, calling it the “Lamborghini” of fences. But just months after completion of his showcase piece directly on the banks of the river, there are signs of erosion along and under the fence that threatens its stability and could cause it to topple into the river if not fixed, experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

“I disagreed with doing this very small (tiny) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads. It was only done to make me look bad, and perhsps it now doesn’t even work. Should have been built like rest of Wall, 500 plus miles,” Trump tweeted with a typo in reaction to the news organizations’ report about the wall. Continue reading.

The stock market and economy have parted ways. It’s a FOMO market now.

Washington Post logoJust last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — a group of 36 countries — issued its forecast for the United States through 2021. It is unlikely to inspire much cheering. Acknowledging that much depends on the severity of the coronavirus, the OECD report constructs two scenarios: one that might be termed “pessimistic” and a second that is “more pessimistic.”

Under the “pessimistic” assumptions, the unemployment rate is projected at 11.3 percent at the end of 2020 and the economy (gross domestic product) falls 7.3 percent for the year. Both the unemployment rate and the GDP decline are larger than in any previous post-World War II recession. By way of comparison, the peak monthly jobless rate in the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was 10 percent. Continue reading.

By Praising Trump, Goya President Angers His Core Latino Market

New York Times logoRobert Unanue said the country was “blessed” to have the president’s leadership. Now, amid calls for a boycott, the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the U.S. is facing dismay from chefs and home cooks.

When Lina Baez-Rosario moved to the United States as a young girl, she missed her home in the Dominican Republic. Her parents made sure to cook with familiar flavors, to keep memories alive.

As an adult, the 42-year-old special education kindergarten teacher, who lives in the Inwood area of Manhattan, found those same tastes through the same Goya Foods products.

“Goya is the one product that I know that my family used, that my mom still uses,” Ms. Baez-Rosario said, “because it’s the one that resembles home to them.” Continue reading.

What Donald Trump’s ‘Access Hollywood’ Weekend Says About 2020

New York Times logoOn a Friday, the world heard vulgar audio of Mr. Trump boasting about forcing himself on women. By Sunday night, the episode that was supposed to doom him had begun to recede.

Donald J. Trump, down and unwilling to get out, saw only one way back up: Go lower.

Two days had passed since the signal humiliation of his political life — the publication of audio in which Mr. Trump boasted about forcing himself on women — and the candidate was desperate to redirect the conversation. The result, less than two hours before an October 2016 debate against Hillary Clinton in St. Louis, was a gambit so secretive that several concerned parties were left in the dark.

Campaign advisers told Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman who was helping with debate preparations inside the team’s hotel suite, that Mr. Trump had to leave for a perfunctory “meet and greet.” They feared that Mr. Priebus would object if he knew the truth: Mr. Trump would be appearing on camera with women who had for years accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct — a brazen attempt to turn the issue of mistreating women back against the Clinton family. Continue reading.

Trump’s attacks on Michigan’s female Democratic leaders have blown up in his face: report

AlterNet logoAccording to a report from New York Times, Donald Trump’s obsessive attacks on the Democratic female leadership of Michigan have become a motivating factor for women in the rust-belt state to turn on the president and will likely hand the state to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in November.

Noting that the president won Michigan in 2016 by a slim 10,704 votes — his smallest margin of victory in the country — the Times explains that the president’s attacks on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, has resonated with voters in the state — and not in a good way.

According to the Times, the president is currently trailing in Michigan polls to Biden, and Democrats in the state believe the president’s attacks on the three women — who have strongly pushed back against the president’s sniping — is hurting his chances of getting back in the game in the state. Continue reading.