Tag: Joe Biden

Farm support holds for Trump, but Biden may find inroads

End to aid payments in 2021 could cut deeply into incomes

President Donald Trump tenaciously courted farmers and ranchers with an anti-regulatory agenda and a confrontational trade approach that opened some markets.

But he also relied on billions in federal aid to compensate them for retaliatory tariffs and a pandemic that took a deep gouge out of the economy.

Despite the mixed performance, Trump’s policies on trade, regulation and other areas maintained his popularity in rural and farm communities, winning their support in the Nov. 3 election. Continue reading.

Democratic anger rises over Trump obstacles to Biden transition

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Democrats and public health officials are furious at President Trump for obstructing President-elect Joe Biden’s transition to the White House, warning that the Trump administration is endangering lives and threatening national security by refusing to cooperate with the incoming administration. 

The president-elect has warned that “more people may die” because he’s been blocked from coordinating the coronavirus vaccine rollout and other public health measures with Trump’s team, which is moving ahead on its own.

Biden aides routinely point to the 9/11 Commission report to warn that national security is at risk as the president-elect continues to be shut out of government intelligence briefings. The 9/11 report determined that the drawn out legal battle between former President George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election left a temporary power vacuum that al Qaeda was able to exploit in planning its terror attack against the U.S. Continue reading.

Biden says it’s a good thing his ‘colleague’ Kamala Harris is still on the Senate Intelligence Committee

But warns ‘more people may die’ if Trump administration doesn’t coordinate on vaccine

President-elect Joe Biden said Monday that perhaps it was less of a concern that he was not getting top secret intelligence as part of the stalled presidential transition because his vice president-elect is still on the Intelligence Committee.

“The good news here is my colleague is still on the Intelligence Committee, so she gets the intelligence briefings I don’t any more,” Biden said in Wilmington, Del., after a meeting with business executives and labor leaders focused on the economy and the COVID-19 pandemic response. “I am hopeful that the president will be mildly more enlightened before we get to January 20.”

Biden’s penchant for Senate-speak aside, his remarks point to the curious reality of the moment: Vice president-elect Kamala Harris may know more about emerging threats to America than the next commander-in-chief. Continue reading.

Biden: ‘More people may die’ if Trump refuses to coordinate on vaccine plans

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President-elect Joe Biden warned Monday that “more people may die” from COVID-19 if the Trump administration does not begin to engage in a smooth transition of power.

“More people may die if we don’t coordinate,” Biden told reporters following a speech on his economic plan in Wilmington, Del., emphasizing the pressing need for his transition team to gain access to the Trump administration’s plan for distributing a future vaccine for the coronavirus.

“A vaccine is important. It’s of little use until you are vaccinated. So how do we get the vaccine, how do we get over 300 million Americans vaccinated? What is the game plan? It is a huge, huge, huge undertaking to get it done,” Biden said. Continue reading.

We opposed each other in Bush v. Gore. Now we agree: Biden won.

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David Boies is chairman of the law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner. Theodore B. Olson, a former U.S. solicitor general, is a partner of the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Twenty years ago, we represented the opposing sides in Bush v. Gore. We still don’t agree about how the Supreme Court ruled, but we completely agree that nothing in that case — or in the Supreme Court’s decision — supports the challenges now being thrown about in an attempt to undermine President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Yet, over the past week, we have heard repeated assertions that the outcome of this election is somehow in doubt, as it was in 2000.

It is not. Biden will be president. There are many areas of policy on which we disagree. But no matter how you voted in this election, that is the clear outcome. The nation’s laws and shared values dictate that Americans now unite to support democracy, national security, the public trust in institutions and the urgent work of the next administration. Continue reading.

John Kelly criticizes Trump over delay of Biden transition

“It’s about the nation,” Trump’s former chief of staff says in an interview with POLITICO. The wait “hurts our national security.”

President-elect Joe Biden should start receiving intelligence briefings, and the delay in allowing the transition to officially get started is damaging U.S. national security, President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly told POLITICO in an exclusive interview.

“You lose a lot if the transition is delayed because the new people are not allowed to get their head in the game,” Kelly said Friday. “The president, with all due respect, does not have to concede. But it’s about the nation. It hurts our national security because the people who should be getting [up to speed], it’s not a process where you go from zero to 1,000 miles per hour.”

“Mr. Trump doesn’t have to concede if he doesn’t want to, I guess, until the full election process is complete. But there’s nothing wrong with starting the transition, starting to get people like the national security people, obviously the president and the vice president-elect, if they are in fact elected, to start getting them [up to speed] on the intelligence,” he said. Continue reading.

How Trump Won Florida With False Advertising And Fake News

In Florida, where President Donald Trump gained crucial support among Latino voters, his campaign ran a YouTube ad in Spanish making the explosive — and false — claim that Venezuela’s ruling clique was backing Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

YouTube showed the ad more than 100,000 times in Florida in the eight days leading up to the election, even after The Associated Press published a fact-check debunking the Trump campaign’s claim. Actually, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro expressed opposition to both presidential candidates.

The video was part of a broader Trump campaign strategy in heavily Latino South Florida that sought to tie Biden to Socialist leaders like Maduro and the late Cuban President Fidel Castro. Trump won Florida by about 375,000 votes, the largest margin in a presidential election there since 1988. He carried about 55 percent of the Cuban American vote, according to exit polls by NBC News. Continue reading.

Trump Floats Improbable Survival Scenarios as He Ponders His Future

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There is no grand strategy. President Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next.

At a meeting on Wednesday at the White House, President Trump had something he wanted to discuss with his advisers, many of whom have told him his chances of succeeding at changing the results of the 2020 election are thin as a reed.

He then proceeded to press them on whether Republican legislatures could pick pro-Trump electors in a handful of key states and deliver him the electoral votes he needs to change the math and give him a second term, according to people briefed on the discussion.

It was not a detailed conversation, or really a serious one, the people briefed on it said. Nor was it reflective of any obsessive desire of Mr. Trump’s to remain in the White House. Continue reading.

Karl Rove gives Trump the bitter truth: You ‘certainly’ lost

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President Donald Trump is still refusing to concede to President-elect Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, and many of his sycophants have been joining him in making baseless claims that the election was stolen from him because of rampant voter fraud — never mind the fact that the New York Times contacted election officials in all 50 states and found no evidence of the type of widespread fraud that Trump is alleging. But veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove gives Trump and his supporters a dose of reality in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on November 11, stressing that Biden will become president whether Trump’s allies like it or not.

Rove notes that although the 2020 election was not the across-the-board blue tsunami that some pundits were predicting, one major Democratic victory was undeniable: Biden won.

He tried to couch the point in a an argument about Democrats underperforming, but the message was clear. Continue reading.

Is President Trump directing the GSA to decline to call Joe Biden the president-elect? They won’t say

Agency misses deadline for giving a response to Congress

The General Services Administration has missed a deadline to say whether the decision to not recognize President-elect Joe Biden is at the personal direction of outgoing President Donald Trump.

Three House Democrats wrote to GSA Administrator Emily Murphy on Monday questioning why the agency has not issued an ascertainment that Biden is in fact the president-elect.

Among the questions from Democratic Reps. Bill Pascrell Jr. of New Jersey, Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia and Dina Titus of Nevada were about specific interactions between GSA and White House personnel, up to and including the president himself. Continue reading.