Tag: Trump 2020

‘Two years ago I compared Trump to Hitler’ — nobody listened

AlterNet logoOn Tuesday, Donald Trump held his 2020 re-election campaign kickoff rally in Orlando. It was nothing new: Trump has held dozens of such events since becoming president. His “speech” was repetitive and monotonous. That was precisely its appeal: For Trump’s supporters and other members of his political cult, white rage, violence, bigotry, nativism and lies are entertaining, cathartic and even life-affirming.

Throughout the rally Donald Trump engaged in scripted violence and stochastic terrorism, telling his followers that the Democrats were going to hurt them and only he can protect them:

“Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage and want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.”

Trump wallowed in racist lies about threatening and dangerous “illegal aliens” and how the Democrats want to let them run amok, raping, killing and otherwise preying upon “real Americans” — primarily meaning white women. Trump played his goon card, bragging that his ICE shock-troops would round up millions of “illegal” (black and brown) immigrants across the country in the upcoming weeks. Trump’s people howled in delight. Eros, desire and violent lust are central to fascism. This is the libidinous aspect of political devotion between and among the followers and the leader in a cult of personality. Trumpism is no different.

View the complete June 21 article by Chauncey DeVega from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

A tale of two Trump announcement speeches

Washington Post logo“We accomplished more than any other president has in the first two-and-a-half years of a presidency.”

— President Trump, in his 2020 campaign kickoff speech, June 18, 2019

Trump touted many accomplishments — record-shattering, history-making feats — in a speech officially kicking off his reelection campaign.

We’ve been keeping track and, despite what he regularly says, Trump’s his economic record is far more modest than he claimed.

Four years ago, Trump described an economyin dire straits — soaring unemployment rates, a negative GDP, disappearing manufacturing jobs, a stock market hurtling toward a crash. According to the president, all of those negative economic trends were reversed — once he was elected. Now, he holds up the economy as “the envy of the world.”

View the complete June 21 article by Meg Kelly on The Washington Post website here.

Trump Trump calls of Iran strike, CNN Politics Trump threatens time journalist with prison over photo, BBC News Trump offers ‘anything’ to help Canada in rift with China, BBC News

The Hill logoPresident Trump is running for reelection as an outsider candidate. But it’s a knotty challenge for someone who holds the world’s most powerful office.

Trump’s speech in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday, which officially launched his 2020 bid, was rife with rhetoric portraying himself — and by extension his supporters — as victims of nefarious elites.

The president said that he and his allies were besieged by a “permanent political class” and “an unholy alliance of lobbyists and donors and special interests.”

View the complete June 20 article by Niall Stanage on The Hill website here.

Here are 7 wild, bizarre and pathetic moments from Trump’s ‘campaign launch’

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump held a rally that was billed as the official launch his re-election campaign — though he has never really stopped holding campaign rallies.

As expected, the president ranted, lied, and engaged in the raucous attacks that are central to his connection with Republican voters. Some of it was actually just sad, such as his continued obsession with Hillary Clinton.

Here are seven of the wildest, disturbing and pathetic moments from the rally:

1. He said Democrats “want to destroy our country as we know it.”

View the complete June 19 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Five takeaways from Trump’s 2020 kickoff rally

President Trump kicked off his 2020 campaign with a rally at the 20,000-seat Amway Center in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday night.

Here are five takeaways from his speech.

Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump

Trump’s campaign billed the rally as the official beginning of his reelection bid, but it was easy to mistake it for any one of the many other rallies he’s held over the past 2 1/2 years.

Trump appeared to be more interested in airing grievances with familiar enemies, such as Democrats, the political establishment, special counsel Robert Mueller and the “fake news media” — whom he accused of putting him “under siege” — rather than touting his accomplishments and laying out a second-term agenda, as would be typical for an incumbent president.

View the complete June 18 article by Jordan Fabian and Jonathan Easley on The Hill website here.

‘Every hero becomes a bore at last’

With 2020 underway, Donald Trump needs to keep the ‘Trump Show’ interesting.

Hillary Rodham Clinton could not stop him, and Robert Mueller so far has landed something less than a fatal blow. So the task of defeating Donald Trump in 2020 may now fall to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Every hero,” wrote 19th-century America’s foremost man of letters a century before Trump was born, “becomes a bore at last.”

And every villain, too, Democrats are urgently hoping from their own vantage point.

View the complete June 18 article by John F. Harris on the Politico website here.

Trump tries to upend the 2020 map

The president’s reelection campaign is making moves to expand his reelection path beyond three treacherous Rust Belt states.

President Donald Trump is targeting a trio of states that he lost in 2016 — a move aimed at widening his path to reelection that comes as he’s struggling in the Rust Belt states that propelled him to the White House.

Trump officials are zeroing in on New Mexico, Nevada and New Hampshire, where they insist there’s an opening despite heavy losses Republicans suffered there in the midterms. They’ve deployed around a half-dozen staffers to New Hampshire and several to Nevada, an unusually early investment in places that favor Democrats. And the campaign is doing polling to tease out Trump’s level of support in New Mexico, a focal point for campaign manager Brad Parscale, and they have discussed dispatching aides to the blue state.

The maneuvering underscores how Trump is trying to capitalize on his vast financial and organizational advantage over Democrats. Yet it also illustrates how the president, whose own polling shows him falling behind in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, is seeking out additional routes to a second term.

View the complete June 4 article by Alex Isenstadt, which includes audio, on the Politico website here.

Trump targets 2020 Democrats as energy speech turns into campaign stop

A six-pack of eyebrow-raising POTUS quotes, just in time for happy hour

ANALYSIS | President Donald Trump went to Louisiana to talk about his energy policies, but as frequently happens, an official White House event at times sounded a lot like a campaign stump speech.

Trump used parts of his speech to describe a booming economy with low unemployment — weeks after acknowledging to reporters he intends to run on the state of the economy. Of course, Trump did not bring up his trade “squabble” with China, which Democratic lawmakers and economists warn could help spawn an economic slowdown just as he revs up his reelection bid.

The president won Louisiana by nearly 20 percentage points over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (58.1 percent to 38.4 percent) in 2016. But that comfortable margin did not stop Trump from promising the citizens in the Hackberry area a little gift if they help him win a second term.

View the complete May 14 article by John T. Bennett on The Roll Call website here.

Jared Kushner is illegally running the RNC and Trump’s re-election campaign from the White House

Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner is running the Republican National Committee (RNC) and President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign from his perch as a White House senior advisor, Vanity Fair correspondent Gabriel Sherman reported Tuesday.

“While Trump relishes the prospect of going after his opponents, his family is acting emboldened in the post-Mueller environment,” Vanity Fair reported. “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, in particular, are taking a more aggressive approach to internal politics, sources said.”

“He’s running the RNC. He’s running the campaign,” a former West Wing official explained.

View the complete April 16 article by Bob Brigham on the Raw Story website here.

Trump’s second term would be terrifying — here’s why

If President Trump manages to win re-election it will be in no small part due to the fact that he’s exhausted the opposition with so much outrageous conduct that regular people simply can’t find the emotional energy to engage in the fight anymore. This week we are expecting to see the result of Attorney General Bill Barr’s redacted version of the Mueller report. It’s very possible that it will leave us with that now familiar feeling that we can believe the president or believe our lying eyes.

We know we saw Trump praising Russian President Vladimir Putin in truly odd fashion throughout the 2016 campaign. We know we saw him deny the Intelligence community’s unanimous conclusion that the Russians interfered in the election, and we know he lied repeatedly to the public about a major real estate deal he was negotiating during the campaign, all of which was at best suspicious and at worst disqualifying. Yet, even if the report lays out in colorful detail that although investigators “did not establish” that Trump committed a crime but did establish that he was ignorant and unethical, it will go down as a victory for him. That’s how degraded our standards have become in just two short years. Continue reading “Trump’s second term would be terrifying — here’s why”