Category: 2020 Election

Bolton rips Trump: ‘Getting reelected was the only thing that mattered’

The former national security adviser also argues in a new memoir that Trump took a series of actions that might warrant impeachment.

President Donald Trump repeatedly endangered national security — and committed a series of potentially impeachable offenses — to boost his reelection prospects, former national security adviser John Bolton argues in a forthcoming White House memoir.

Bolton writes that the House should have broadened its impeachment inquiry to other areas of his foreign policy, contending that he can document — and identify witnesses to — “Ukraine-like transgressions … across the full range of his foreign policy,” according to a description by Simon & Schuster released Friday.

Despite his swipe at the House, Bolton famously refused to cooperate with House investigators as they pursued allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his Democratic adversaries. Continue reading.

Jacksonville to host 2020 Republican National Convention

The most prominent parts of the Republican National Convention are coming to Jacksonville, including President Trump’s acceptance speech

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced Thursday night that Jacksonville, Florida has been selected as the host city to celebrate the renomination of President Donald J. Trump.

Jacksonville is going to be in the national spotlight in late August as the River City hosts major parts of the Republican National Convention for the first time. It’s also the first time in history that the convention will be split, as some of the business parts of the event will still be held in Charlotte, the original host city.

President Trump and the GOP pulled the convention from North Carolina because the Governor would not guarantee that a full crowd would be allowed inside the city’s 19,000-seat Spectrum Center for events due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including nomination acceptance speeches by President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. Instead those events, along with many of the publicly viewed parts of the convention, will be held in Jacksonville’s 15,000-seat Vystar Veterans Memorial Arena.

Jacksonville beat out other cities under consideration including Nashville, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Orlando.  Republican Mayor Lenny Curry lobbied publicly for the event to be held on the First Coast and Governor Ron Desantis said the state would welcome the event with open arms.

The Memo: Trump’s Tulsa decision sparks new race controversy

The Hill logoPresident Trump will begin campaign rallies again next week but the first event on his schedule is drawing accusations of racial insensitivity — even as his allies make a very different case.

Trump’s first rally since the nation went into a coronavirus-related lockdown in March will be held in Tulsa on June 19. The Oklahoma city was the site of one of the worst racial massacres in modern U.S. history back in 1921, while June 19 is “Juneteenth,” which marks the end of slavery.

Democrats are outraged by Trump’s decision, especially following a series of controversial comments the president has made about nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. Continue reading.

John Bolton’s new book will allege Trump misconduct with other countries — not just Ukraine: report

AlterNet logoFormer Trump national security adviser John Bolton’s long-delayed book will reportedly allege that President Donald Trump’s corruption of American foreign policy went beyond his attempts to shake down the Ukrainian government for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.

According to Axios, Bolton’s book will argue that there was “Trump misconduct with other countries” besides Ukraine, although the publication’s source did not go into specifics about which countries are involved.

Trump’s attempts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden by putting a hold on its military aid led to him being impeached on abuse of power charges in the House of Representatives last year. Continue reading.

If Trump loses in November, he will thrust the U.S. into a legitimacy crisis

AlterNet logoOne month ago, the polling aggregator at RealClearPolitics showed Joe Biden with a four-point lead over Donald Trump. As of Wednesday, that lead had jumped to eight points. Additionally, Gallup reports that Trump’s approval rating has dropped ten points in the last month. In other words, things aren’t looking very good for the president’s re-election.

In the month before the 2016 election, this is what Trump was tweeting.

It is probably fair to say that, at the time, Trump was preparing an excuse for why he lost—something that everyone was expecting. But the stakes are much higher in 2020. Failing to win a second term would brand Trump as a loser, something his narcissistic ego cannot tolerate. Even more importantly, it is very possible that the president could face criminal charges once he is out of office. So he’s picked up the mantra of a rigged election once again. Continue reading.

Trump’s most loyal media ally promised a pro-Trump poll. It didn’t deliver — and then pulled its story.

Washington Post logoCNN’s release of a poll this week showing President Trump trailing former vice president Joe Biden by 14 points nationally clearly rattled the president and his reelection campaign. In short order, Trump tweeted out a memo making various allegations about how and why CNN conducted the poll, each assertion ludicrous and easily debunked. On Wednesday, the campaign escalated its efforts to portray CNN’s poll as unfair, demanding that CNN retract the poll and issue an apology.

CNN’s attorneys, with complete and understandable justification, declined to do so.

The network is one of Trump’s most frequent targets for criticism. He has repeatedly bashed CNN’s reporting and on-air talent, disparaging the network as hopelessly biased against him. Trump’s taste in television coverage runs more along the lines of Fox News’s Sean Hannity, a fervent supporter of the president, and, in recent months, One America News. Continue reading.

Coincidence? Date And Location Of Trump’s Return Rally Echo Racist History

Democrats are criticizing Donald Trump’s decision to hold his first campaign rally since coronavirus lockdowns began on a holiday commemorating the effective end of slavery in the United States, in a city with a violent and racist past.

The Trump campaign announced on Wednesday that it would hold a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 19 — a holiday known as Juneteenth or Black Independence Day. The date marks the anniversary of Union Gen. Gordon Granger’s announcement to enslaved black people in Texas, the last state to emancipate, that they had been officially freed.

Tulsa is an odd choice for multiple reasons. Oklahoma is not expected to be a competitive state in 2020 — typically a consideration when deciding where campaign rallies will be held. Trump carried the state by a 36-point margin four years ago.

But Tulsa also has an ugly racist past. Continue reading.

Divide and Conquer the Election

Many presidents spend campaign seasons speaking to their base. Trump never stopped.

AFTER BEING COOPED UP in the White House for months because of the pandemic, President Donald Trump is back on the trail, attending a high-dollar fundraiser, playing golf and being the defiantly unmasked man touring factories producing coronavirus-related materials and machines.

It’s a welcome shift for the president who has never warmed up to his temporary home of Washington, D.C. – a city that has made clear he’s not welcome, either – and who loves a big rally with an adoring, chanting crowd.

And as he seeks a second term in a highly competitive battle against Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump is reverting to a familiar approach: feed the desires of the base and ignore or insult voters, officials and states which haven’t been on his side. Continue reading.

‘Not capable of showing empathy’: Trump aides reportedly feel ‘increasing alarm’ as his polls tank

AlterNet logoWhen GOP allies of President Donald Trump appear on Fox News or right-wing talk radio programs, they typically express confidence that he will defeat former Vice President Joe Biden in November and are dismissive of recent polls that show the president trailing the presumptive Democratic Party nominee. But what Trump allies say publicly and what they say in private can be two different things. And according to an article published by ABC News this week, Trump’s campaign is seriously worried about internal polling that looks very good for Biden.

ABC reporters John Santucci , Katherine Faulders and Will Steakin explain:

One week ago, President Donald Trump met with advisers from his 2020 reelection campaign, who greeted him with bad news: the campaign’s internal poll numbers showed the president down in swing states — and down with key demographics of voters, including women and independents…. Top aides warned that former Vice President Joe Biden, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, was positioned to defeat the president by a significant number of electoral votes based on the campaign’s analysis.

‘That really just happened’: Trump slammed for describing the US Secret Service as the ‘SS’

AlterNet logoThe abbreviation commonly used for the U.S. Secret Service is USSS, but President Donald Trump used a different abbreviation in a June 11 tweet: SS. And he is being slammed for it on social media, as SS is typically used to describe Adolf Hitler’s notorious Schutzstaffel of Nazi Germany.

In German, Schutzstaffel means “protection squadron.” And in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, Hitler’s paramilitary SS were known for being incredibly vicious.

Trump tweeted, “Our great National Guard Troops who took care of the area around the White House could hardly believe how easy it was. ‘A walk in the park’, one said. The protesters, agitators, anarchists (ANTIFA), and others, were handled VERY easily by the Guard, D.C. Police, & S.S. GREAT JOB!” Continue reading.