In a barrage of 40 tweets and retweets by Sunday evening, Trump didn’t mention Eddie Rispone’s loss to Gov. John Bel Edwards (D), even though the president had held two campaign rallies in the state in the 10 days before the election aimed at boosting his chances.
View the complete November 18 article by David Nakamura on The Washington Post website here.
One of the biggest problems Republicans face as they struggle to defend President Donald Trump from impeachment is President Donald Trump himself.
That was as evident on Friday as it has ever been when, in the middle of the House Intelligence Committee’s hearing with former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) told the witness that Trump had attacked her on Twitter while she was testifying.
Schiff said that this behavior constitutes witness intimidation. While there was some dispute about whether the tweets would mee the legal standards for such a criminal charge, they could clearly be considered witness intimidation in the scope of articles of impeachment.
View the complete November 15 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.
An internal memo which has been circulating among House Republicans has been made public, having been obtained by outlets including CNN and Axios. This memo outlines four points of evidence which will serve as the crux of the GOP’s argument against impeaching President Donald Trump. But the strategy presented in the plan, according to one CNN commentator, is comically bad.
Appearing on CNN’s New Day Tuesday, John Avlon completely shredded the GOP strategy — which will lean on the president’s “state of mind” in his conversations with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“These are zombie impeachment talking points,” Avlon said. “This is slavish devotion to Donald Trump’s bar which is, ‘I did nothing wrong.’ And they’re going sort of in search of brains because the arguments they’re making are really easy to blow up.”
View the complete November 12 article by Joe DePaolo on the Mediaite website here.
Responding to the conventional wisdom that Republican lawmakers defend President Donald Trump because they are afraid of his wrath — mainly expressed via Twitter attacks — Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman claimed it goes beyond cowardice and into something much deeper — the fear of losing power over Democrats.
In a series of tweets on Thursday morning that highlighted reporting in USA Today that Republicans in Kentucky are searching for ways to overturn the voting on Tuesday and hand the governorship back to ousted Matt Bevin, the NYT columnist said the GOP no longer cares about what is right or legal.
“Seeing a lot of pieces about why GOP politicians are standing behind Trump even though they know he grotesquely abused power and betrayed US interests. Usually framed in terms of primary challenges, etc. But is this overthinking?” the columnist suggested.
View the complete November 7 article by Tom Boggioni from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.
I’ve been waiting almost three years to see some significant slippage in the president’s approval numbers among Republicans, and I’ve been consistently disappointed. This isn’t political disappointment. It’s more about maintaining some small amount of faith that humanity can survive through the end of my son’s natural lifetime without a class of scientists culling the herd and moving out to colonize space.
I need some sign that the mass of humanity has a future, and Republicans who respond to surveys just don’t afford that kind of confidence. But I got a glimmer of hope with my morning coffee on Friday morning. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll (see full results here) provided what I’ve been looking for:
Trump is the first president since the early days of modern polling more than 70 years ago never to have achieved majority approval in office, and his average rating is 21 points below the average for his predecessors dating to Harry Truman at this point in their presidencies. Closest to Trump was Jimmy Carter, at 48 percent average approval.
The impeachment vote wasn’t just another party-line exercise. It’s about to get ugly in Washington.DEMOCRATS CALLED IT A sad and solemn day – a prayerful one, even. Republicans made it a day of outrage. Democrats wanted to talk about the substance of the allegations against President Donald Trump. Republicans railed against the process. Democrats said they were upholding their oath to the constitution and democracy; Republicans said Democrats were trying to undo a democratic election.
There’s little left on Capitol Hill that is conducted in a bipartisan manner, with most legislation being approved or defeated with few or no crossover votes. But as the House voted Thursday to formalize an in-progress impeachment inquiry, it became clear that this was not just another party-line exercise. It’s the start of something very ugly and very personal, with Trump characteristically in the center of it all.
“The names are bigger than the rest of the question” about whether Trump committed impeachable offenses, says Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute of Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie, New York. “For lack of a better phrase, facts are going to take a back seat to rooting. No matter what happens, you’re with your guy.”
Surely he was describing one Donald J. Trump to a T?
On the contrary, Nunes applied these Trumpian signatures to Democrats. “What we’re seeing among Democrats on the Intelligence Committee,” he said, “is like a cult. These are a group of people loyally following their leader as he bounces from one outlandish conspiracy to another.”
View the complete October 31 commentary by Dana Milback on The Washington Post website here.
Political scientists have studied what our democracy is going through. It usually doesn’t end well.For decades, Republicans and Democrats fought over the same things: whose values and policies work best for American democracy. But now, those age-old fights are changing. What was once run-of-the-mill partisan competition is being replaced by a disagreement over democracy itself.
This is particularly evident as the president and many of his allies crow about the illegitimacy of the House impeachment inquiry, calling it an attempted coup, and as the White House refuses to comply with multiple congressional subpoenas as part of the probe.
This marks a new phase in American politics. Democrats and Republicans might still disagree about policy, but they are increasingly also at odds over the very foundations of our constitutional order.
View the complete October 31 article by Thomas Pepinsky on the Politico website here.
Conservative writer Charlie Sykes is a passionate critic of President Donald Trump, but he remains deeply immersed in the world of right-wing ideology and media. In a segment on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” with host Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday, he pointed out that as Trump’s impeachment crisis expands, his usual defenders are growing desperate.
“You do get the sense … among Republicans that they’re back on their heels,” he said. “I’m reading a lot of conservative media, and they’re flailing angrily because it is more and more difficult. They’re raging about the process, but that has an expiration date on it. That fig leaf is going to be torn off, and then they have to confront the reality.”
In his view, it will only go downhill from here on out for the president’s supporters.
View the complete October 31 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.
Republican concerns are mounting about President Trump as damaging information piles up regarding his dealings with Ukraine.
The dam is not yet at the bursting point, but anxiety — fueled by the sense that more revelations could emerge at any moment — is rippling through the GOP.
“It’s fair to say my conversations with members continue to go to a worse place,” said Doug Heye, a former communications director of the Republican National Committee.
Heye added that, for the moment, there was a sizable gap between “private consternation versus public consternation.”
View the complete October 30 article by Niall Stanage on The Hill website here.
When Kentucky’s Republican governor lost his bid for reelection two weeks ago despite President Trump’s active endorsement, the president and his allies brushed it off by declaring that Trump had nearly dragged an unpopular incumbent across the finish line.