Category: 2020 Election

Trump tries on MAGA 2.0 for a pandemic era

The president’s argument, which has been met with skepticism from economists, is essentially: I’ve already built the economy once, I can build it a second time.

With an economic crisis gripping the nation, President Donald Trump is reprising his 2016 slogan, with a twist: Make America Great Again, Again.

Trump is trying to defy history by convincing Americans he can restore a coronavirus-decimated economy and become one of the only U.S. presidents to win reelection during a recession. His argument, which has met with skepticism from economists, is essentially: I’ve already built the economy once, I can build it a second time.

“We had the greatest economy ever, and we’re going to do it again,” Trump says regularly. Continue reading.

Overwhelmed and losing, Trump is melting down in a narcissistic rage

AlterNet logoReports of Trump flying into a rage behind closed doors–shouting at aides, turning on former allies and at one point threatening to sue his campaign manager for failing to deliver good polling numbers–have been ubiquitous over the last three years. But this past week feels qualitatively and quantitatively different, as has fired a series of inspector generals, lashed out at the reliably sycophantic Sen. Lindsey Graham, pushed a number of snake-oil cures for Covid-19 and threatened to cut off federal funding to several states for the “crime” of sending voters applications for absentee ballots, which he insists against all evidence are rife with fraud. He’s lurched between falsely bragging about the number of people we’re testing for Covid-19 and saying that we’re testing too many; between claiming that we’ll have a vaccine by November and insisting that the pandemic will just disappear without a vaccine.

Never a stable genius at the best of times, he’s really melting down before our eyes.

Part of the story is that when the Mueller report didn’t sink his presidency and Senate Republicans acquitted him for a brazenly corrupt and well-documented abuse of power, it gave him a sense of impunity. Impunity always breeds more lawlessness. Continue reading.

Why Trump, GOP are running into trouble in Arizona

The Hill logoPresident Trump and Republicans are running into trouble in Arizona, where polls show them trailing in both the presidential race and in a key Senate battle that could help determine the balance of power in the upper chamber.

Arizona has been a reliably Republican state in presidential and Senate contests and has only voted for a Democratic president once in the past 70 years, when former President Clinton won the state in 1996.

But things are changing. Continue reading.

McConnell’s GOP takes Trump’s election-year cues

Senate Republicans are embracing the president’s most explosive attacks after previously sidestepping them.

Mitch McConnell can’t afford any tension with President Donald Trump. So he’s doing everything he can to keep his fragile majority in sync with Trump and his explosive election-year playbook.

Just three days after Trump berated McConnell on Twitter to “get tough” with Democrats and probe the 2016 Russia investigation that ensnared Trump’s campaign, the Senate majority leader took to the floor to echo the president’s misgivings in a way he declined to do last week. Trump’s campaign “was treated like a hostile foreign power by our own law enforcement,” McConnell said Tuesday, subject to “wild theories of Russian collusion.”

In the days to come and with McConnell’s public blessing, GOP committee chairmen plan to follow Trump’s lead and approve a series of subpoenas for documents and testimony that could hit some of Trump’s favorite targets, including Hunter Biden and dozens of Obama administration officials. Continue reading.

The sad and pitiful case of Republican Sen. Martha McSally

AlterNet logoIf the newest poll of the 2020 Arizona Senate race is accurate, Republican Sen. Martha McSally is set to go down in a humiliating defeat.

OH Predictive Insights found that she is trailing her opponent, Democrat Mark Kelly, by 13 points. He’s up 51 percent to her 38 percent, the poll found.

And in an opinion piece for The Arizona Republic, Laurie Roberts argued the poll is even worse than the topline results look: Continue reading.

Even in these unprecedented times, Trump’s playbook never changes

First Read is your briefing from “Meet the Press” and the NBC Political Unit on the day’s most important political stories and why they matter.

WASHINGTON — Ignore the experts, attack the referees and undermine global institutions.

That’s the unmistakable takeaway from President Trump’s recent actions after he’s fired multiple inspector generals.

After he’s — once again — railed against the news media and cheered on supporters who curse at local reporters. Continue reading.

Scarborough Spots Moment Trump Hurt 2020 Chances More ‘Than Any Democrat Ever Could’

The MSNBC host predicted how historians will one day judge Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Joe Scarborough on Tuesday pointed out when he believes President Donald Trump did the most damage to his 2020 reelection campaign.

According to the co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Trump likely doomed himself in April and May when he pondered injecting disinfectant to treat COVID-19, talked about taking an unproven cure and declared war on various government agencies and “every doctor or every scientist or every person who had spent their entire life planning for this moment when it came to vaccines.”

If Trump ends up losing the election in November, Scarborough predicted it would be those two months that would go down in infamy. Continue reading.

‘Trump is caught in a box’: Reporter details how the president made the US an ’emblem of global incompetence’

AlterNet logoWhat President Donald Trump had to say about coronavirus in April and the first half of May was considerably different from what he had said about it in January and February. But journalist Edward Luce, in a Financial Times article, stresses that even though Trump’s tone has changed, his response to the crisis has continued to be erratic and unfocused — seriously damaging the United States’ credibility as a world leader.

In early March, Luce recalls, Trump claimed that “within a couple of days, (infections are) going to be down to close to zero.” And after 15 cases had been reported in the U.S., Trump said, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Trump, Luce notes, later acknowledged how dangerous COVID-19 was, but his response to the crisis was inadequate. Luce writes that for his article, he interviewed “dozens of people,” from Trump associates to World Health Organization officials — and found that “the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie.” Continue reading.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of people who paved the way for Trump

AlterNet logoThe folks at Atlantic Studios have produced a video that demonstrates Trump’s lack of leadership on the coronavirus crisis by comparing him to the leaders of other Western democracies. It’s brutal.

Commenting on the video, Anne Applebaum writes this:

Americans, as a rule, rarely compare themselves with other countries, so convinced are we that our system is superior, that our politicians are better, that our democracy is the fairest and most robust in the world. But watch this video and ask yourself: Is this the kind of leadership you expect from a superpower? Does this make you feel confident in our future? Or is this man a warning signal, a blinking red light, a screaming siren telling all of us, and all of the world, that something about our political system has gone profoundly awry?

Continue reading.

Are Older Voters Turning Away From Trump?

There are different “gaps” in American politics, but one that has consistently shown up in recent presidential elections is the age gap. That is, younger voters tend to vote more Democratic and older voters tend to vote more Republican.

In 2016, for instance, President Trump performed best among voters 65 years and older. He also won among those between the ages of 45 and 64. So looking ahead to November, you might expect Trump to once again do well with older voters. However, recent public polls — and the president’s own private polling — suggest that Trump may be doing worse among older voters against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

In national head-to-head polls conducted since April 1, Trump is barely breaking even with most older Americans — and in some age groups, he’s even trailing Biden by as much as 1.4 points (see 45- to 64-year-olds). (Pollsters don’t all use the same age brackets, so there is some overlap in the different age categories.) Continue reading.