Tag: Trump 2020

White House races to come up with health-care wins for Trump’s campaign

Washington Post logoWhite House advisers, scrambling to create a health-care agenda for President Trump to promote on the campaign trail, are meeting at least daily with the aim of rolling out a measure every two to three weeks until the 2020 election.

One of the initiatives would allow states to import lower-priced drugs from Canada and other countriesand another would bar Medicare from paying more than any other country for prescription drugs, according to two senior administration officials and lobbyists — controversial ideas in line with Democratic proposals. Yet it remains unclear whether the administration has the legal authority to execute some of these policies without Congress’s approval.

The White House is already facing fierce pushback on some proposals from Republicans on Capitol Hill and the pharmaceutical industry, which will probably go to court to challenge any measure it opposes.

View the complete July 31 article by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s tax returns required under new California election law

SACRAMENTO — President Trump will be ineligible for California’s primary ballot next year unless he discloses his tax returns under a state law that took effect immediately Tuesday, an unprecedented mandate that is almost certain to spark a high-profile court fight and might encourage other states to adopt their own unconventional rules for presidential candidates.

The law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on the final day he could take action after it passed on a strict party-line vote in the Legislature earlier this month, requires all presidential candidates to submit five years of income tax filings. They must do so by late November to secure a spot on California’s presidential primary ballot in March. State elections officials will post the financial

“As one of the largest economies in the world and home to one in nine Americans eligible to vote, California has a special responsibility to require this information of presidential and gubernatorial candidates,” Newsom said in a statement that accompanied his signature on the bill. “These are extraordinary times and states have a legal and moral duty to do everything in their power to ensure leaders seeking the highest offices meet minimal standards, and to restore public confidence. The disclosure required by this bill will shed light on conflicts of interest, self-dealing, or influence from domestic and foreign business interest.”

View the complete July 30 article by John Myers on The Los Angeles Times website here.

Adviser, son-in-law and hidden campaign hand: How Kushner is trying to help Trump win in 2020

Washington Post logoAfter Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale decided he wanted to make the recruitment of donors a top strategy in President Trump’s 2020 reelection bid, his first conversation was with someone not officially employed by the campaign at all: Jared Kushner.

Parscale expected the effort to cost $20 million or more in this year alone, so he knew he had to get buy-in from Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser before moving forward.

“It was something that could make a huge impact on our winning and losing,” Parscale said in an interview. “Once he was onboard, we went together to sell the president.”

View the complete July 26 article by Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Census question may be dead, but Trump’s backup plan could still reshape political map

President Donald Trump surrendered his legal fight earlier this month to ask about citizenship on the upcoming census, but his administration is marching forward on a Republican strategy that could upend the way legislative districts are drawn nationwide to the benefit of the party.

Trump nodded to policy issues such as health care and education as reasons he issued a July 11 executive order for the government to compile citizenship information in a different way. And he accused “far-left Democrats” of being determined to “conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.”

But he also referred to how it could be used in the next round of redistricting after the 2020 census — a move critics suggest is the real reason the Trump administration wants to find out where noncitizens reside.

View the complete July 23 article by Todd Ruger on The Roll Call website here.

Trump’s Electoral College Edge Could Grow in 2020, Rewarding Polarizing Campaign

President Trump’s approval ratings are under water in national polls. His position for re-election, on the other hand, might not be quite so bleak.

His advantage in the Electoral College, relative to the national popular vote, may be even larger than it was in 2016, according to an Upshot analysis of election results and polling data.

That persistent edge leaves him closer to re-election than one would think based on national polls, and it might blunt any electoral cost of actions like his recent tweets attacking four minority congresswomen.

View the complete July 19 article by Nate Cohn on The New York Times website here.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump campaign, RNC training army of volunteers in key 2020 states

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are mobilizing thousands of volunteers in more than a dozen battleground states, including a handful that President Trump lost in 2016, as they seek to expand the electoral map ahead of 2020.

Trump Victory, a joint operation comprised of the Trump campaign, the RNC and state Republican parties, kicked off a “National Week of Training” on Friday in a bid to train more than 6,000 volunteers and register voters in 14 states that Republicans have set their sights on for 2020.

At the same time, the committee is adding to its roster of state directors overseeing its organizing efforts, hiring staffers in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Virginia, Republican officials told The Hill.

View the complete July 19 article by Max Greenwood on The Hill website here.

Trump 2020: Loathing and Fear of Losing

The president is setting up his reelection run to be about socialism, ‘the squad’ and scaring voters about the Democratic Party.

THE ONLY SURPRISING aspect to President Donald Trump’s racially charged tirade this week is that some seemed surprised by it.

“Yet again this president finds a new low,” said Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota, a home state colleague to Rep. Ilhan Omar, the prime target of Trump’s invective.

But for a president who has shattered nearly every conventional rule of politics and endured a cascade of uproars – from his birther campaign to insulting a national war hero to the “Access Hollywood” tape to the two-year wide-reaching investigation into his curious relationship with Russia – Trump has been taught that survival requires brazen, line-crossing, double-fisted pugilism.

View the complete July 19 article by David Catanese on The U.S. News and World Report website here.

Even Trump’s best poll numbers show how unpopular he is: report

AlterNet logoNo one is a louder or more aggressive cheerleader for President Donald Trump than Trump himself. The president, now 73, uses his favorite social media outlet, Twitter, to not only attack and defame his political opponents but also, to brag about his “accomplishments” or his poll numbers. In a report for the Daily Beast, Julia Arciga and Sam Stein note that Trump has tweeted his poll numbers on 28 separate occasions during his time in office. But upon careful analysis, the Beast reporters stress, the polls that Trump is bragging about — when taken as a whole — actually illustrate how unpopular he is.

Analyzing the 28 polls that Trump has tweeted since being sworn into office in January 2017, Arciga and Stein report that they show an “average approval rating” of “49.07%.”

“In other words,” Arciga and Stein write, “even the president’s cherry-picked data shows that he hasn’t broken through with the majority of the country.”

View the complete July 5 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Minnesotans don’t owe Trump a second term

Minnesotans don’t owe Trump a second term

President Donald Trump recently kicked off his re-election campaign with a rally in Florida. Much like the first few years of Trump’s presidency, his next campaign is likely to be highly contentious and controversial. Through all the scandal, the president and his defenders keep returning to one issue they see as key to securing Trump’s re-election: the economy. The truth is, Trump’s economic policies are doing real harm to people in Minnesota, especially those that are already struggling to make ends meet.

The president and his supporters often point to gains in the stock market as proof of a booming economy, but almost half of all Americans have no money invested in the stock market. Most Americans don’t have extra money to invest, while a recent study found that an unexpected expense of $500 would force about half the country into debt. Trump’s golf buddies and Mar-a-Lago members may benefit from stock market gains, but those gains mean little for the millions of Americans who have been left behind in Trump’s economy. Continue reading “Minnesotans don’t owe Trump a second term”

Trump’s promise of a manufacturing boom has yet to materialize — putting these key battleground states up for grabs in 2020

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump’s promise to bring back manufacturing jobs in a huge way played a major role in the success he enjoyed in the Rust Belt in 2016. Trump carried Pennsylvania and Michigan, two Rust Belt states a Republican hadn’t won in a presidential race since President George H.W. Bush in 1988, as well as Wisconsin, which hadn’t gone for a GOP presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan’s landslide 1984 reelection victory. But a report by Michael Tackett for the New York Times describes Trump’s promise of a renaissance in U.S.-based manufacturing jobs as a campaign promise unfulfilled.

Tackett reports that from January 2017 to December 2018, the United States lost 9 percent of its manufacturing jobs. Citing analysis by the Brookings Institution, Tackett takes a look at counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — all of which are Obama-Trump states, meaning they were won by President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but rejected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In Wisconsin, Tackett reports, ten counties that Trump won in 2016 have since lost manufacturing jobs. The news isn’t much better in Pennsylvania, which in 2018, lost manufacturing jobs in eight counties that Trump carried, according to Tackett.

View the complete June 24 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.