Category: 2020 Election

Virus outbreak reshapes presidential race in Sun Belt — CBS News Battleground Tracker poll

The coronavirus outbreak is reshaping the presidential race in three key Sun Belt states. Joe Biden is now leading President Trump by six points in Florida, and the two are tied in Arizona and competitive in Texas, where Biden is down by just a point to Mr. Trump. Biden has made gains in part because most say their state’s efforts to contain the virus are going badly — and the more concerned voters are about risks from the outbreak, the more likely they are to support Biden.

In all three states, most voters say their state reopened too soon, and those who say this feel their state went too fast under pressure from the Trump administration. Most also say the president is doing a bad job handling the outbreak. He may be paying a price for that, at least in the short term.

This is helping Biden not only to post bigger gains with groups that already trend Democratic — like women and younger voters — but also to cut into Mr. Trump’s margins with seniors. Seniors who are very concerned about coronavirus back Biden in large numbers.

Why The Lincoln Project Strikes Terror In Trump

Dear never-Trump Republicans: Would you adopt me? I’m a centrist with left-leaning tendencies. I get along with cats, dogs and most libertarians. But I’m best off in a political home without small children.

Most of all, I dearly want President Donald Trump gone. You — knowing how he got elected in the first place — are best equipped to defeat him. Democrats seem to have had the good sense to make Joe Biden their candidate. Now you have to get him elected.

One of Trump’s bigger nightmares is the growing pack of organized anti-Trump Republican groups. The Lincoln Project is the alpha dog. Its operatives are former Republican strategists who perfected the cultural weaponry deployed against liberals for decades. Continue reading.

The once-mocked ‘Never Trump’ movement becomes a sudden campaign force

Washington Post logoThe grainy first-person testimonial arrived at 2 a.m. in late June. A 40-year-old man with a thick Southern accent — shirtless, the red ember of his cigarette glowing in the green twilight between drags — looked into his smartphone and began talking.

“Hi, my name is Josh and I live in North Carolina and I voted for Donald Trump — my bad, fam,” he begins, before explaining that this November will mark the first time “ever, ever” that he will vote for a Democrat. “If Joe Biden drops out and the DNC runs a tomato can, I will vote for the tomato can, because I believe the tomato can will do less harm than our current president.”

The unsolicited video submission to a group called Republican Voters Against Trump is just one small part of a broader “Never Trump” rebellion that began four years ago as a largely ineffective cadre of appalled Republicans, but which has transformed in recent weeks into a potentially disruptive force in this year’s presidential race. Continue reading.

In Commuting Stone’s Sentence, Trump Goes Where Nixon Would Not

New York Times logoSenator Mitt Romney called the commutation an act of “unprecedented, historic corruption.” Attorney General William P. Barr privately argued against clemency for the president’s friend.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has said he learned lessons from President Richard M. Nixon’s fall from grace, but in using the power of his office to keep his friend and adviser Roger J. Stone Jr.out of prison he has now crossed a line that even Mr. Nixon in the depths of Watergate dared not cross.

For months, senior advisers warned Mr. Trump that it would be politically self-destructive if not ethically inappropriate to grant clemency to Mr. Stone, who was convicted of lying to protect the president. Even Attorney General William P. Barr, who had already overruled career prosecutors to reduce Mr. Stone’s sentence, argued against commutation in recent weeks, officials said.

But in casting aside their counsel on Friday, Mr. Trump indulged his own sense of grievance over precedent to reward an ally who kept silent. Once again, he challenged convention by intervening in the justice system undermining investigators looking into him and his associates, just days after the Supreme Court ruled that he went too far in claiming “absolute immunity” in two other inquiries. Continue reading.

Robert Mueller: Roger Stone remains a convicted felon, and rightly so

Washington Post logoRobert S. Mueller III served as special counsel for the Justice Department from 2017 to 2019.

The work of the special counsel’s office — its report, indictments, guilty pleas and convictions — should speak for itself. But I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office. The Russia investigation was of paramount importance. Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.

Russia’s actions were a threat to America’s democracy. It was critical that they be investigated and understood. By late 2016, the FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled to a Trump campaign adviser that they could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to the Democratic candidate. And the FBI knew that the Russians had done just that: Beginning in July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails stolen by Russian military intelligence officers from the Clinton campaign. Other online personas using false names — fronts for Russian military intelligence — also released Clinton campaign emails.

Following FBI Director James B. Comey’s termination in May 2017, the acting attorney general named me as special counsel and directed the special counsel’s office to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The order specified lines of investigation for us to pursue, including any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign. One of our cases involved Stone, an official on the campaign until mid-2015 and a supporter of the campaign throughout 2016. Stone became a central figure in our investigation for two key reasons: He communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers. Continue reading.

The Roger Stone Case Shows Why Trump Is Worse Than Nixon

On March 21, 1973, President Richard Nixon and John Dean, the White House counsel, conferred in the Oval Office about ways to keep the Watergate scandal from consuming the Administration. The two men weighed the possibility of a pardon or commutation for E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars. “Hunt’s now demanding clemency or he’s going to blow,” Dean said. “And, politically, it’d be impossible for, you know, you to do it.” Nixon agreed: “That’s right.” Dean continued, “I’m not sure that you’ll ever be able to deliver on clemency. It may be just too hot.” Neither Nixon nor Dean had especially refined senses of morality or legal ethics, but even they seemed to understand that a President could not use his pardon power to erase charges against someone who might offer testimony implicating Nixon himself in a crime. To do so, they recognized, would be too unseemly, too transparent, too egregiously corrupt. And, in fact, Nixon never gave a pardon, or commuted a sentence, of anyone implicated in the Watergate scandal.

But, on Friday night, Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of Roger Stone, his associate and political mentor of more than three decades. Last year, Stone was convicted of obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, and witness tampering in a case brought by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. William Barr, the Attorney General, had already overridden the sentencing recommendation of the prosecutors who tried the case—a nearly unprecedented act—and Stone was ultimately sentenced to forty months in prison. But Barr’s unseemly interference in the case was somehow not enough for the President, so Trump made sure that Stone would serve no time at all. The only trace of shame in Trump’s announcement was that he delivered it on a Friday night—supposedly when the public is least attentive. Continue reading “The Roger Stone Case Shows Why Trump Is Worse Than Nixon”

Better Government Starts with Us

None of us expected our days to look like this.

As the spouse of a nurse practitioner at Hennepin Healthcare, I didn’t expect to feel like I was sending my wife into a war zone every morning as a frontline health worker in a pandemic.

As a school board member, I didn’t expect my role to shift from public education governance to crisis management, figuring out how to remotely educate and feed 6,000 students.  Continue reading.

Solving the Puzzle Pieces

Since FDR, we Democrats have always stood for workers’ rights, civil rights, farmers’ rights, voting rights, women’s rights and gay rights.  Today, we continue those causes along with educational opportunity, affordable health care and safer communities for all.

I believe that the purpose of life is to solve as much of the puzzle as possible before we pass.

Democrats we all share the same goal:  To leave this world a better place than when we came upon it. Continue reading.

 

Internal Polls Show Trump Jeopardizing Safe GOP House Seats

Republicans entered the 2020 cycle as longshots to win control of the House back after the party was unceremoniously swept out of power in the midterm elections.

But the GOP hoped to at least chip away at the Democrats’ majority in November, when Democrats will be defending 31 seats Donald Trump carried in 2016.

Yet a trio of recent House polls shows Trump’s unpopularity is hampering that effort, dragging down Republicans in districts they’ve held for years — and raising the possibility that the party will slip further into the minority once the election is through. Continue reading.

‘House of absolute horrors’: Mary Trump’s book reveals how Trump family gave rise to a ‘sociopath’

AlterNet logoIn a new book, Mary Trump — the president’s niece — describes Donald Trump as a “sociopath” who grew up in a dysfunctional family that fostered his greed and cruelty. Donald Trump’s younger brother, Robert, is seeking to block the sale of the book on the grounds that it violates a confidentiality agreement, but publisher Simon & Schuster says 600,000 copies of the book have already been distributed ahead of its July 14 publishing date. Investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, who has reported on Trump for three decades, says the book is “very, very important” and helps to answer how Trump got to the White House.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, and her new book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Mary Trump’s father was Fred Trump Jr. He was Donald Trump’s older brother. Fred Jr. died of a heart attack in 1981 after a struggle with alcohol and addiction.

Mary Trump wrote that after Donald Trump’s inauguration, quote, “the smallest thing — seeing Donald’s face or hearing my own name, both of which happened dozens of times a day — took me back to the time when my father had withered and died beneath the cruelty and contempt of my grandfather. I had lost him when he was only 42 and I was 16. The horror of Donald’s cruelty was being magnified by the fact that his acts were now official U.S. policy, affecting millions of people,” she wrote. Continue reading.