In the past week, Donald Trump has:
Category: 2020 Election
Scoop: Trump regrets Kushner advice
President Trump has told people in recent days that he regrets following some of son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner’s political advice — including supporting criminal justice reform — and will stick closer to his own instincts, three people with direct knowledge of the president’s thinking tell Axios.
Behind the scenes: One person who spoke with the president interpreted his thinking this way: “No more of Jared’s woke s***.” Another said Trump has indicated that following Kushner’s advice has harmed him politically.
Why it matters: This could be the final straw for federal police reform legislation this year, and it could usher in even more incendiary campaign tactics between now and November. Continue reading.
Senate Republicans defend Trump’s response on Russian bounties
Senate Republicans are defending President Trump’s handling of intelligence claiming that Russia’s military intelligence units offered bounties to Taliban militants to kill U.S. troops, arguing the evidence of bounties has not received sufficient verification.
Trump has come under sharp criticism since Saturday for not issuing a forceful response to the allegations or vowing to get to the bottom of the claims. Instead, the president has waved off media reports as “fake news” and suggested the story is meant to make Republicans “look bad.”
Trump claimed in a tweet Sunday night, “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP. Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks.” Continue reading.
Robert Reich: Trump’s 2020 Election Strategy in 25 Steps
President Trump is ‘near-sadistic’ in phone calls with women leaders: report
President Donald Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders sounded like his combative, meandering coronavirus press briefings — free of facts but packed with conspiracy theories, fantasies and gut hunches derived from social media rumors and the perspectives of Fox News personalities, according to a new report from CNN’s Carl Bernstein.
In tones reminiscent of his contentious coronavirus conference calls with U.S. governors, Trump regularly boasted vaingloriously and flattered strongman adversaries while at the same time bullying top allies, most specifically women whom Trump often insulted directly in calls that officials described as “near-sadistic,” Bernstein reported.
Bernstein, who drew from four continuous months of interviews with a number of former top White House and intelligence officials, reported that top Cabinet advisers thought Trump’s calls were “delusional” and posed a threat to national security. Continue reading.
Trump’s Twitter feed reads like a local crime blotter as he stokes a culture war
President Trump returned from his Virginia golf course Saturday afternoon and turned his Twitter feed into a crime blotter.
In less than five minutes, the president posted 15 fliers from the United States Park Police to his 82.6 million followers, complete with grainy photos of Americans suspected of vandalism at Lafayette Square. The images hearkened to the kinds of posters one would see on the wall of a local post office.
The president’s messages about protesters and vandals have continued apace, often in the early hours of the morning or the late hours of the evening when he is not surrounded by aides, but sometimes in interviews and executive orders. Continue reading.
The Flag-Hugger-In-Chief Flies A Nonstandard, Cheaper One At Mar-a-Lago
Under President Eisenhower’s executive order, government offices must fly the standard U.S. ensign. Trump doesn’t at his “Southern White House.”
PALM BEACH, FLORIDA – The president who literally hugs and kisses the U.S. flag to show his patriotism appears to fly a nonstandard version, particularly on windy days, at his Florida resort, perhaps to save money.
Donald Trump calls Mar-a-Lago the “Southern White House” and has hosted foreign leaders there, complete with military honors, suggesting it is an official residence. Despite this, the property fails to fly the standard U.S. ensign, which under a decades-old executive order, all official buildings are required to use.
Under that directive, signed by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959, who before winning the White House commanded the Allied forces in Europe that defeated Nazi Germany, executive branch offices are to use the official flag that is precisely 1.9 times as long as it is tall, with the blue “union” in the corner stretching 40% across the length. Continue reading.
Scoop: Kushner changes top Trump campaign staff
Michael Glassner, the man who organizes President Trump’s rallies, has been “reassigned,” and Trump’s 2016 Arizona chair Jeff DeWit will join the campaign as chief operating officer to oversee the final stretch to election day, three sources familiar with the situation tell Axios.
Driving the news: Jared Kushner engineered these moves. Glassner, a Trump campaign original dating back to 2015, has been told he will now be handling the campaign’s various lawsuits, sources say.
- DeWit, a Kushner ally, is a businessman and former Arizona state treasurer who served as chief financial officer of NASA under Trump from 2018 until earlier this year. Continue reading.
‘Straight up fascism’: Trump’s disturbing propaganda meme draws sharp blowback‘Straight up fascism’: Trump’s disturbing propaganda meme draws sharp blowback
President Donald Trump once again is under fire, this time after posting an old, dark meme that’s appeared on literally hundreds of web pages on social media sites like Twitter and Reddit.
Oddly, it’s not the first time Trump has posted this meme. He did so the day the House impeached him.
The text reads: “In reality they’re not after me they’re after you. I’m just in the way.” Continue reading.
The GOP traded its principles for conservative judges. It was a bad deal.
If Republicans lose the White House in 2020, they’ll have to ask whether they paid too high a price
President Trump has retained support from many Republicans and conservatives thanks to a Faustian bargain: So long as Trump stacks the judiciary with friendly judges, they’ve been willing to look the other way when Trump pushes trade protectionism, ditches entitlement reform, or woos Russia’s President Vladimir Putin — positions out of step with recent conservative orthodoxy. As David Harsanyi argued for the Federalist, “The question was,” for conservatives, “ ‘What’s scarier, a Trump presidency or a progressive Supreme Court?’ ”
Former George W. Bush administration attorney John Yoo said that he had deeply conservative friends “who would normally be utterly turned off by a guy like Trump,” yet supported him “only because of [the] appointment to Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s vacancy” on the Supreme Court. Conservative fixation with judges doesn’t only include the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well. Noting that the Supreme Court hears a tiny fraction of the cases decided by appellate judges, Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt challengedTrump’s conservative critics to “reconcile their vehement opposition to him with their love of the Constitution. The latter is most definitely benefiting from the president’s massive impact on the federal bench, one that extends far beyond Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.
Conservatives may have felt the bargain paid off last week, when Trump clinched his 200th judicial confirmation faster than any president since Jimmy Carter. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) tried to spike the ball when he said the milestone marked “a sea change, a generational change on the federal bench,” and that “Republicans are stemming this liberal judicial tide that we’ve lived with in the past.” Continue reading.