President Donald Trump gave a fear-filled and factually inaccurate campaign rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin on Thursday.
The rally, held in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic, featured a large crowd closely packed together.
Here’s some of what people were saying about Trump’s speech, which lasted approximately 95 minutes: Continue reading.
The single most consistent defining characteristic of an emerging dictatorship in a country that started as a democracy is that the dictator regularly holds elections and always wins, because he uses the instruments of government to make sure he wins.
Trump has now done this with the Justice Department, the Post Office, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Reserve, and our intelligence agencies.
Over at Justice, Attorney General Bill Barr has already said that he intends to investigate Joe Biden and his son’s activities in Ukraine and may report on that just before the election. Continue reading.
President Trump, as he himself will tell you in a heartbeat, wasn’t supposed to win. Pundit after pundit predicted time and again that his comments would doom him, that his rhetoric was too virulent, that his tone was too aggressive. But he built a following among Republican primary voters that carried him (however bumpily) to the nomination and then, using the same rhetoric of danger and fear, leveraged partisan loyalty to squeak past Hillary Clinton by enough votes in enough places and prove everyone wrong. Trump can’t win the presidency? He just did, running the same race at the end as he had at the beginning.
There was a lesson Trump took from that, clearly: The pundits are wrong, and villainizing immigrants from Mexico and the Middle East works. He internalized the importance of holding the same core base of support that was with him early on and, however overtly, has maintained a focus on offering the same rhetoric that earned their love in the first place.
From that perspective, it’s not a surprise that Trump’s first Oval Office address to the country focused on stoking visceral fear of people crossing America’s southern border. Sure, there was, as expected, the sort of misleading data on the flow of drugs from Mexico, failing to note that (as his administration admits) the majority of those drugs and that heroin comes through existing checkpoints. Sure, he argued that the revised NAFTA agreement that hasn’t yet been ratified would somehow mean Mexico will pay for the wall, which it doesn’t. But that’s not really what he wanted Americans to focus on.
View the complete January 8 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.
What do women want? President Donald Trump thinks he knows.
“Women want security,” Trump said about the caravan of migrants heading to the U.S. border with Mexico during a rambling press conference on Thursday. “Women don’t want them in our country. You look at what the women are looking for: They want to have security.”
He again proclaimed, without evidence, that the migrants were “tough people,” and warned that if they throw rocks at troops he’s sending to the border, “I say, consider it a rifle.”
President Trump criticized Georgia Democratic governor candidate Stacey Abrams at a Nov. 4 rally in Macon, Ga. (The Washington Post)
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — President Trump is painting an astonishingly apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic control in the campaign’s final days, unleashing a torrent of falsehoods and portraying his political opponents as desiring crime, squalor and poverty.
As voters prepare to render their first verdict on his presidency in Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump is claiming that Democrats want to erase the nation’s borders and provide sanctuary to drug dealers, human traffickers and MS-13 killers. He is warning that they would destroy the economy, obliterate Medicare and unleash a wave of violent crime that endangers families everywhere. And he is alleging that they would transform the United States into Venezuela with socialism run amok.
Trump has never been hemmed in by fact, fairness or even logic. The 45th president proudly refuses to apologize and routinely violates the norms of decorum that guided his predecessors. But at one mega-rally after another in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump has taken his no-boundaries political ethos to a new level — demagoguing the Democrats in a whirl of distortion and using the power of the federal government to amplify his fantastical arguments.
