Category: 2020 Election

As President Trump Rails Against Mail-In Voting, Many of His Senior Advisors Have Repeatedly Used It

WASHINGTON — A half-dozen senior advisers to President Donald Trump have repeatedly voted by mail, according to election records obtained by The Associated Press, undercutting the president’s argument that the practice will lead to widespread fraud this November.

The aides include Betsy DeVos, the education secretary who has permanent absentee voting status in her home state of Michigan. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, voted absentee in Texas in 2018 and didn’t vote in the general election two years earlier when Trump’s name was on the ballot.

Two other senior Trump campaign officials — chief operating officer Michael Glassner and deputy campaign manager Bill Stepien — have repeatedly voted by mail in New Jersey. And Nick Ayers, a senior campaign adviser who was previously chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, has voted by mail in Georgia since 2014. Continue reading.

What’s Facebook’s Deal With Donald Trump?

New York Times logoMark Zuckerberg has forged an uneasy alliance with the Trump administration. He may have gotten too close.

Last Nov. 20, NBC News broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump and a Facebook board member, Peter Thiel, had dined together at the White House the previous month. “It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and Thiel discussed,” the report said.

That was it. Nothing else has emerged since. Not the date, not who arranged the menu, the venue, the seating, not the full guest list. And not whether some kind of deal got done between two of the most powerful men in the world. The news cycle moved on, and the dinner became one of the unsolved mysteries of American power.

But I was able to pry some of those details loose last week from White House officials along with current and former senior Facebook employees and people they speak to. Most said they would only talk on the condition their names not be used, since the company is not eager to call attention to Mr. Zuckerberg’s relationship with the president. Continue reading.

The White House is trying to clean up Trump’s horrifying admission about testing — but Mike Pence confirmed the worst: report

AlterNet logoDuring his speech at a campaign rally in Tulsa on Saturday, President Donald Trump told the crowd that he had ordered his staff to slow down the amount of coronavirus testing — sparking a fierce backlash from those who have long criticized his handling of the pandemic as inept, if not outright corrupt. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the comment during a press briefing on Monday, saying that Trump was speaking “in jest.” But Trump’s critics have their doubts, fearing that the president really does want to cut back on testing for COVID-19.

McEnany told reporters that Trump was “not joking about coronavirus” but rather, was poking fun at the press while speaking “in jest.”

However, CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe reported on Twitter that when Vice President Mike Pence was speaking to governors during a conference call on Monday, he told them that Trump’s “comments at an Oklahoma campaign rally about slowing down testing for #Coronavirus were just ‘a passing observation’ and not meant in jest.” Continue reading.

As Trump slumps, his campaign fixes on a target: Women

Washington Post logoBefore the coronavirus pandemic shut down Tampa’s hotels and put her out of work, Audrey Scaglione said she expected to vote for Donald Trump a second time. Now the contract food service worker finds herself struggling to decide.

“I’m just really unsure right now,” said Scaglione, who says she leans Republican but also previously voted for Barack Obama. “It is so hard to tell. I don’t think I can.”

She has not heard much from former vice president Joe Biden, the Democratic choice for president, and has few kind words for Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a close Trump ally, who has done little to improve a byzantine unemployment benefit system she spent months navigating. Continue reading.

Two Trump campaign staffers who attended rally test positive for coronavirus

Axios logoTwo members of the Trump campaign staff who attended the president’s rally in Tulsa on Saturday have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the campaign’s communications director Tim Murtaugh.

The big picture: The campaign says the two staffers wore face masks during the entire event, which drew thousands of supporters. Health officials, including several in Tulsa, had urged the campaign to delay the rally, warning of the risk of spreading the virus. Six campaign staffers for the president were quarantined after testing positive before the rally last week,.

What they’re saying:

“After another round of testing for campaign staff in Tulsa, two additional members of the advance team tested positive for the coronavirus. These staff members attended the rally but were wearing masks during the entire event. Upon the positive tests, the campaign immediately activated established quarantine and contact tracing protocols.”

— Communications director Tim Murtaugh

Continue reading.

Trump signs executive order suspending certain work visas through 2020

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Monday signed an executive order to suspend the issuance of certain temporary worker visas through the end of 2020, cracking down further on immigration after signing a more narrow measure in April.

The order applies to H-1B visas, H-2B visas, H-4 visas, L-1 visas and certain J-1 visas. It is the latest effort by the Trump administration to satisfy immigration hawks and groups that argue American workers should be prioritized, especially amid the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

H-1B visas are used for skilled workers and are common in the tech industry and is the largest visa program of those included in Monday’s order as its recipients can stay for multiple years. Continue reading.

With ‘kung flu,’ ‘thugs,’ and ‘our heritage,’ Trump leans on racial grievance as he reaches for a campaign reset

Washington Post logoHe referred to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus as the “kung flu.” He called racial justice demonstrators “thugs.” He attacked efforts to take down Confederate statues as an assault on “our heritage.” And in an ominous hypothetical, he described a “very tough hombre” breaking into a young woman’s home while her husband is away.

President Trump has long used his raucous rallies to road test potential campaign themes and attack lines. And while much attention on his Saturday night appearance in Tulsa focused on the sparse turnout for his first rally since the pandemic ended mass gatherings, Trump’s litany of racially offensive stereotypes sent a clear signal about how he plans to try to revive his flagging reelection effort.

Even at a moment of national reckoning over race and racism, Trump demonstrated the extent to which the final four months of the 2020 election will build on the darker themes of a previous campaign notable for its attacks on Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. Continue reading.

Bolton says he hopes Trump is 1-term president, warns country imperiled by his reelectionBolton says he hopes Trump is 1-term president, warns country imperiled by his reelection

Here are the many headlines from ABC’s interview with Trump’s former top aide.

President Donald Trump‘s longest-serving national security adviser John Bolton condemned his presidency as dangerously damaging to the United States and argued the 2020 election is the last “guardrail” to protect the country from him.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Bolton offered a brutal indictment of his former boss, saying, “I hope (history) will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can’t recall from. We can get over one term — I have absolute confidence, even if it’s not the miracle of a conservative Republican being elected in November. Two terms, I’m more troubled about.”

In the interview with ABC News Chief Global Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz and in his new book, “The Room Where It Happened,” Bolton paints Trump as “stunningly uninformed,” making “erratic” and “irrational” decisions, unable to separate his personal and political interests from the country’s, and marked and manipulated by foreign adversaries. Continue reading.

New DNC ‘Descent’ ad encapsulates all the ways Trump has ‘brought America down with him’

AlterNet logoSay this for the impeached popular-vote losing, white supremacist, wanna-be dictator, grifting demagogue squatting in the Oval Office—he makes for good opposition ad fodder. Like this one done by the DNC for Joe Biden called “Descent.”

“Five years ago Donald Trump descended to the basement of Trump Tower,” the narrator says over video of that gross golden escalator ride he took to announce his candidacy. “For the last five years,” it continues, “he’s brought America down with him.” Then the ad launches into a litany of what Trump has managed to destroy in just three-and-a-half years: “attacking health care for people with preexisting conditions; giving massive tax cuts to billionaires, not working families; praising white supremacists, stoking racial division; losing 300,000 jobs in a failed trade war with China; locking children in cages.”

“He ignored science on coronavirus and misled the American people,” the ad continues, then shows a snippet of Trump saying it would “miraculously go away,” but “It didn’t. Now, over 100,000 dead Americans, 20 million jobs destroyed. Recession.” And then again a video snippet of Trump saying “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.” Then it hits national security and how he “shredded our alliances and turned our military on American citizens,” showing video of the attack on protesters in Lafayette Square and Trump’s Bible photo op. “You have the power to end the descent of our nation, to choose justice, unity, leadership,” the ad concludes. “Because we can’t afford four more years of Trump.” Continue reading.