Yesterday began with a New York Times poll that was pretty awful for President Donald Trump, and I was contemplating writing a complicated item about whether we should pay attention to such surveys at this point in the election cycle. But then the lobsters.
The president on Wednesday night announced some new initiatives to help the Maine lobster industry, and accompanied the plan with a false tweet claiming that “Pres. Obama destroyed the lobster and fishing industry in Maine. Now it’s back, bigger and better than anyone ever thought possible.”
In fact, people who know the industry noted that it was doing just fine until Trump’s trade war. But CNN’s Jake Tapper made a different point. He noted that presidential actions and communications are often carefully targeted — in this case, to Maine’s second congressional district, which has its own electoral vote. He concluded that “whatever you think of President Trump, and despite current crappy polls for him, he has the power of incumbency & many smart GOP operatives working hard to get him re-elected using all the levers of the most powerful government in the world.” Continue reading.