Category: 2020 Election

Trump is stuck in 2016, but older voters are panicked by the 2020 virus

President could heading for Herbert Hoover territory this fall if virus fears endure

Well into the 1970s, denunciations of Herbert Hoover were a routine ingredient in Democratic Party oratory. When you are president during an epic failure of government, as Hoover was at the onset of the Depression, impressions can linger for more than four decades.

That is why it is easy to imagine that in 2060, the name Trump will still be synonymous with blithering incompetence in the face of a pandemic. And the word “McCarthyism” will be a historical artifact since the more recent label “Trumpism” would now define fact-free vitriolic smear campaigns.

Rueful confession: These are time- capsule predictions since I, alas, will probably not be around to find out if I was right.  Continue reading.

Freed by Court Ruling, Republicans Step Up Effort to Patrol Voting

WASHINGTON — Six months before a presidential election in which turnout could matter more than persuasion, the Republican Party, the Trump campaign and conservative activists are mounting an aggressive national effort to shape who gets to vote in November — and whose ballots are counted.

Its premise is that a Republican victory in November is imperiled by widespread voter fraud, a baseless charge embraced by President Trump but repeatedly debunked by research. Democrats and voting rights advocates say the driving factor is politics, not fraud — especially since Mr. Trump’s narrow win in 2016 underscored the potentially crucial value of depressing turnout by Democrats, particularly minorities.

The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and Mr. Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

Trump is gambling the health of the nation for his reelection

Washington Post logoMany of us are not surprised to see President Trump putting his own welfare above that of the nation. But why would he embrace a policy that seems to jeopardize his own reelection? That is more of a puzzle.

Trump is busily inciting people across the country — and especially in swing states— to ignore public health guidance on limiting the spread of covid-19 and resume socializing and working in the riskiest of ways. Modeling masklessness, he welcomes any sabotage of orderly reopening. “The place is bustling!” he exulted, after Wisconsin’s Supreme Court struck down stay-at-home orders.

Such recklessness, in defiance of his own administration’s guidance, risks igniting new waves of the disease. That could lead not only to thousands more deaths but also to further devastation of the economy. It’s not far-fetched to think that this blowback could arrive with the cooler weather next fall — just as people are voting in the presidential election. Continue reading.

Swing-state Republicans warn Trump’s reelection is on shaky ground

Attacking Joe Biden will only get the president so far, they say: Ultimately, the election will be a referendum on him.

Donald Trump has made clear he will attack Joe Biden unmercifully in order to ensure the election is a choice between him and Joe Biden — rather than an up-or-down vote on the president’s handling of the coronavirus.

Scott Walker has a different view, at least when it comes to Trump’s chances in the all-important battleground of Wisconsin.

“I think it still boils down to a referendum on the president. They’ll beat up on Biden and they’ll raise some concerns,” said the former two-term Republican governor of Wisconsin, who lost his seat in 2018. But in the end, if people felt good about their health and the state of the economy, Trump will probably carry Wisconsin. If not, Walker said, “it’s much more difficult” for the president. Continue reading.

Billionaire MAGA Fan Peter Thiel Has Had It With Trump’s COVID-19 Response

More than a dozen sources in Trump’s orbit said they could not say whether the Silicon Valley luminary was going to play any meaningful role in the election, like he did in 2016.

During the last presidential campaign, Facebook board member and billionaire Peter Thiel was among Donald Trump’s most important backers, campaigning for the future president as a “proud,” openly gay supporter of the Republican nominee and even speaking at the Republican Party’s 2016 convention. Four years later, Thiel has taken on a dramatically reduced—if not altogether nonexistent—role in pushing for Trump 2020.

Though Thiel declared a year and a half ago that he supports Trump’s re-election, he so far hasn’t donated large sums to any of the major Trump campaign committees, and it is unclear to various Trump lieutenants if those contributions are forthcoming. Top officials in the president’s political orbit say that Thiel has been absent from 2020 discussions, with one proclaiming the famous investor had “ghosted” Team Trump lately. And several people familiar with the situation say he has privately criticized Trump in recent months and contemplated limiting his support to other GOP or conservative-nationalist politicians such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, to whom he donated the legal maximum of $5,400 in 2017.

Thiel’s cold front has come as the data-mining firm that he co-founded has been raking it in from federal contracts with the Trump administration, including a recent deal to help build what the government hoped would be “the single source” for data to understand and mitigate the effects of the coronavirus. But, as it were, sources say the heart of Thiel’s disaffection with the president is Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. Continue reading.

Trump and Biden signal bitter general election with latest attack ads

The Hill logoThe negative ads released this week by the Trump and Biden campaigns foreshadow a bitter and deeply personal White House race heading into November, with each contender seeking fertile ground to launch attacks on his opponent.

Both campaigns and their affiliated outside groups have already poured millions of dollars into attack ads, a sign that the negativity will only ramp up as the election gets closer.

“Scorched-earth city. Are you kidding me?” GOP strategist and former Republican National Committee spokesman Doug Heye said when asked what the recent spate of ads means for the coming months. “This is already portending to be, and to some extent already has been, as nasty a campaign as we have seen in modern times. And if we thought 2016 was nasty, buckle your seat belts.” Continue reading.

Paul Krugman offers an elegy for the ‘thousands about to die for the Dow’

AlterNet logoIt’s not entirely clear what is motivating Republican politicians across the country to agitate for the premature reopening of businesses, boldly ignoring the all-but-certain increase in human deaths from the COVID-19 virus that will doubtlessly follow. But Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, writing for the The New York Times, tries to distill it into three possible rationales.

The first is that Republicans, sensing an electoral disaster looming for their party in November, are desperately offering up American citizens as human sacrifices in a ritualistic obeisance to their Dow Jones deity, in hopes that Americans flooding back into an infected and potentially deadly work environment will magically “turn around” the economy.

One answer is that thousands of Americans may be about to die for the Dow. We know that Trump is obsessed with the stock market, and his long refusal to take Covid-19 seriously reportedly had a lot to do with his belief that doing otherwise would hurt stock prices. He may now believe that pretending that the crisis is over will boost stocks, and that that’s all that matters.

Joe Biden: How the White House coronavirus response presents us with a false choice

Washington Post logoThe coronavirus, to date, has taken the lives of more than 79,000 Americans. One of every 5 U.S. workers has filed for unemployment — with the unemployment rate now the highest since the Great Depression. It is an extraordinary moment — the kind that begs for urgent, steady, empathetic, unifying leadership.

But instead of unifying the country to accelerate our public health response and get economic relief to those who need it, President Trump is reverting to a familiar strategy of deflecting blame and dividing Americans. His goal is as obvious as it is craven: He hopes to split the country into dueling camps, casting Democrats as doomsayers hoping to keep America grounded and Republicans as freedom fighters trying to liberate the economy.

It’s a childish tactic — and a false choice that none of us should fall for. Continue reading.

Trump Lackeys Know Their Boss Is Losing His Grip

The bully-in-chief keeps issuing taunts on Twitter that accuse former President Barack Obama of some unspecified grand conspiracy. In what may be more evidence of a deteriorating mental state, President Donald J. Trump has made up “Obamagate,” apparently to account for the incompetence and malfeasance of his own administration.

On Thursday, Trump tweeted out a call for his congressional lackeys to force President Obama “to testify about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA, by FAR … Do it, @LindseyGrahamSC, just do it.”

But even the lackeys seem to understand this is another example of the president’s inability to stop heaping damage upon himself. While White House aides have not been able to stop Trump from appearing at coronavirus “briefings,” where he dishes out dangerous advice, distorted data and downright lies, Republican senators are quite unlikely to try to subpoena Obama. That would bulldoze what remains of Trump’s re-election campaign. Continue reading.

The Trump Campaign Brings Its Angry Tone to the Coronavirus Era

Donald Trump, Jr., the President’s eldest son, thinks that his father is getting a raw deal. In a recent appearance on “Team Trump Online”—a nightly video series that serves as a substitute for campaign rallies and often attracts more than a million viewers—he complained that his father is having to wage war against “the deep-state guys” and unchecked attacks from “influencers on the other side.” He said that each reporter at the White House briefings “has an agenda, and that is to destroy Donald Trump.” Joe Biden “can’t remember where he is fifty per cent of the time,” Trump, Jr., said, but he can count on the “media lackeys” who are the “marketing wing of the Democrat Party.” The Democrats, he added, are “becoming the party of socialism and communism.” That includes Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib—“you know, the Hamas caucus in Congress.” As for the covid-19 outbreak, which has caused more than eighty thousand deaths in the U.S. to date, he said, “China basically screwed the whole world.” Continue reading “The Trump Campaign Brings Its Angry Tone to the Coronavirus Era”