Category: 2020 Election

Trump-friendly columnist warns he ‘needlessly drove his presidency into the ground’ with insane tweets

AlterNet logoTrump-friendly conservative columnist Rich Lowry is warning that President Donald Trump’s unhinged tweets are destroying his chances of being reelected.

Writing in Politico, Lowry laments that Trump has once again completely failed to meet Americans’ expectations of calm and steady leadership during crises ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to civil unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police.

“The president has worsened his position with his profligate tweeting, unpresidential conduct and refusal or inability to step up to the magisterial aspect of his office,” Lowry argues. “Sounding sober and factual from the presidential podium at a time of crisis should be easy — any halfway accomplished conventional politician could do a pretty good job at it.” Continue reading.

Trump seeks to regain 2020 momentum with campaign rallies

The Hill logoPresident Trump is returning to the campaign trail after a three-month hiatus that has seen his reelection prospects weakened over his handling of the novel coronavirus and police brutality protests.

Trump will attend a fundraiser in Dallas on Thursday and is scheduled to resume his campaign rallies next week, events that are sure to energize the president as he embarks on a five-month fight for reelection and seeks to draw a contrast with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

The president has been eager to restart normal campaign activities after weeks of being cooped up at the White House amid the coronavirus pandemic. He eased back into occasional travel in early May — making trips roughly once a week — but Thursday’s fundraiser will be his first foray into in-person campaign business since March. Continue reading.

Joe Biden warns that President Trump ‘is going to try to steal this election’

Washington Post logoJoe Biden on Wednesday night had a blunt warning about President Trump and the lengths he would take to limit access to ballots in November, sharply escalating his rhetoric about his Republican rival five months before voters head to the polls.

“This president is going to try to steal this election,” Biden said in an interview on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.” The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said of ensuring that the voting process is fair: “It’s my greatest concern, my single greatest concern.”

Biden was also asked whether he has considered what will happen if he wins but Trump refuses to leave office. Continue reading.

Republicans are engineering an electoral disaster this fall

Washington Post logoAFTER A shambolic election two years ago — and several examples of poorly run primaries leading up to this week — one might have imagined that Georgia would have prepared better for its Tuesday primary vote. Instead, polling places in and around Atlanta were swamped and lines stretched for hours as poll workers struggled with new voting machines and sanitation procedures. Georgia’s experience confirmed that the coronavirus pandemic, combined with the sort of Election Day incompetence that has for years been a sad fixture of American democracy, threatens the integrity of the November presidential election. There is hardly anything more important than getting voting procedures and technology right over the next five months.

Unfortunately, many Republican politicians continue to manipulate voting rules for partisan advantage, exploiting the pandemic as an opportunity to suppress voting. The latest example is in Iowa. The state held a notably successful primary last Tuesday that smashed turnout recordsdespite the closure of many polling places, in large part because the state’s Republican secretary of state sent every voter an absentee ballot application. That allowed local officials to consolidate in-person voting locations without causing the sorts of massive backups that marred primaries in Wisconsin, the District and Georgia. Continue reading “Republicans are engineering an electoral disaster this fall”

READ: CNN’s response to Trump campaign’s demand for an apology over poll that shows Biden leading

David Vigilante, CNN’s executive vice president and general counsel, issued a pointed response Wednesday to the demand by President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign that the network retract and apologize for a recent poll that showed him behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The demand, which contained numerous incorrect and misleading claims, was immediately rejected by the network, which stands by its poll.

“To my knowledge, this is the first time in its 40-year history that CNN had been threatened with legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s polling results,” Vigilante wrote in his response. “To the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media.” Continue reading.

What Republicans really mean when they talk about ‘law and order’

AlterNet logoIt is worth remembering what Donald Trump said about law enforcement during his speech at the 2016 Republican convention.

An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans. I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order our country.

I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job done. In this race for the White House, I am the Law And Order candidate.

For a party that vacillated between being post-truth and post-policy, the mantra of “law and order” has always served as a dog whistle to the racists in their ranks, which effectively rallied the troops when Trump promised to crack down on “those people.” Continue reading.

Trump campaign demands CNN apologize for poll that shows Biden leading

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s campaign is demanding CNN retract and apologize for a recent poll that showed him well behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The demand, coming in the form of a cease and desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker that contained numerous incorrect and misleading claims, was immediately rejected by the network.

“We stand by our poll,” said Matt Dornic, a CNN spokesman. Continue reading.

Georgia election disaster condemned as result of deliberate GOP voter suppression: ‘This is by design’

AlterNet logoPhotos of would-be Georgia voters standing—and, in some cases, sitting—in long lines after 11 pm to cast their ballots in the state’s primary on Tuesday encapsulated what rights groups and lawmakers decried as a disastrous day for democracy and an entirely predictable result of years of deliberate voter suppression efforts by Republican lawmakers and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The myriad issues that plagued Georgia’s primary Tuesday—malfunctioning new voting machines, an insufficient number of paper ballots, too-few poll workers, polling places opening late—are hardly unheard of in the state, given that similar problems threw the 2018 midterm contests into chaos, sparking calls for better preparation and stronger protections against disenfranchisement.

The coronavirus pandemic added another layer of hurdles, and provided Republicans with additional opportunities to limit ballot access. Continue reading.

Trump May Compare Himself to Nixon in 1968, but He Really Resembles Wallace

New York Times logoThe president has employed the same kind of inflammatory language as George Wallace did in the 1968 campaign. Richard Nixon ran that year seeking the middle between the Alabama governor and Hubert Humphrey.

President Trump said last month that he had “learned a lot from Richard Nixon,” and many interpreted his hard-line response to the street protests of recent days as a homage of sorts to the 1968 campaign. The president’s Twitter feed has been filled with phrases famous from the Nixon lexicon like “LAW & ORDER” and even “SILENT MAJORITY.”

But if anything, Mr. Trump seems to be occupying the political lane held that year by George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama who ran as a third-party candidate to the right of Nixon. While he does not share Wallace’s most extreme positions, Mr. Trump is running hard on a combative pro-police, anti-protester platform, appealing to Americans turned off by unrest in the streets.

Mr. Trump’s talk of “shooting” looters, his bellicose denunciation of “thugs” and “terrorists,” his threats to unleash “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” and his vow to call in troops to “dominate” the streets all evoke Wallace’s inflammatory language more than Nixon’s that year. Mr. Trump has offered little empathy for the goals of peaceful protesters against racial injustice, emphasizing instead the sporadic looting and violence even as he has sought to discredit the victims of police brutality. Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Targets TV Ads To Make Trump Feel Better

Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on targeted campaign ads not to swing voter sentiment, but to mollify Trump, who is angry about his poor poll numbers, the Daily Beast reported on Monday.

According to the report, the campaign spent $400,000 to run ads on cable news channels Trump watches. The ads are running in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia — all of which Trump lost in 2016 and has little shot of winning in 2020.

Hillary Clinton won Maryland in 2016 with 60 percent of the vote, and Virginia with 50 percentof the vote. The last time a Republican won Virginia at the presidential level was in 2004, while a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won Maryland since 1988. Continue reading.