Tag: Trump re-election campaign

White House targets protesters with misleading video

Washington Post logo“Antifa and professional anarchists are invading our communities, staging bricks and weapons to instigate violence. These are acts of domestic terror. The victims are peaceful protesters, the residents of these communities and the brave law enforcement standing watch.”

— The White House, in a tweet, June 3, 2020

From the Rose Garden on June 1, President Trump warned that the voices of “peaceful protesters” against the killing of George Floyd, an African American man, in Minneapolis by police have been drowned out by “professional anarchists, violent mobs, or, arsonists, looters, criminals, rider rioters, Antifa and others.”

Two days later, the White House tweeted (and then later deleted) a 58-second video that appeared to offer evidence to support this claim. The video, which gained more than one million views in the less than three hours it was online, purported to show “Antifa and professional anarchists … staging bricks” for future nefarious use.

Yet a closer examination of the video tells a different story. Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Looks at Electoral Map and Doesn’t Like What It Sees

New York Times logoAs polls show President Trump significantly trailing his rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., his campaign is spending heavily in states, like Ohio, that it had hoped would not be competitive at all this year.

President Trump is facing the bleakest outlook for his re-election bid so far, with his polling numbers plunging in both public and private surveys and his campaign beginning to worry about his standing in states like Ohio and Iowa that he carried by wide margins four years ago.

The Trump campaign has recently undertaken a multimillion-dollar advertising effort in those two states as well as Arizona in hopes of improving his standing, while also shaking up his political operation and turning new attention to states like Georgia that were once considered reliably Republican. In private, Mr. Trump has expressed concern that his campaign is not battle-ready for the general election, while Republicans are concerned about whether the president can emerge in a strong position from the national crises battering the country.

Mr. Trump has been consistently unpopular as president with a majority of Americans; his advisers have long seen his effort to win a new term as depending on the loyalty of his conservative base and the Republican-friendly tilt of the Electoral College — factors that could allow the president to capture another thin victory despite the strong possibility of losing the popular vote again. Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Denies What America Watched In Horror

The Trump campaign sent the following request to Media Matters:

Hope you all are doing well, staying healthy and safe.
Saw your piece this morning on the use of tear gas at Lafayette Square. Wanted to make sure you saw our official statement on the false reports and would appreciate it if you would retract and correct your piece.
As always, happy to be a resource for you.

You can read the full statement from the campaign here.

Our response: No. Continue reading.

Trump blames Democrats for his grounded campaign, even as bipartisan restrictions ban his signature rallies

President Trump, approaching his longest stretch without a political rally since he announced his candidacy five years ago, has taken to blaming Democrats for grounding his campaign.

But even as several states begin relaxing their coronavirus restrictions, Trump has not scheduled any rallies in Republican-led states — and his campaign has not reached out to governors in swing states to inquire about holding large political events.

The claim of politically motivated closures was outlined most directly by Trump’s son, Eric, who accused Democrats of trying to strip the president of his greatest reelection weapon. Continue reading.

The Trump Campaign Brings Its Angry Tone to the Coronavirus Era

Donald Trump, Jr., the President’s eldest son, thinks that his father is getting a raw deal. In a recent appearance on “Team Trump Online”—a nightly video series that serves as a substitute for campaign rallies and often attracts more than a million viewers—he complained that his father is having to wage war against “the deep-state guys” and unchecked attacks from “influencers on the other side.” He said that each reporter at the White House briefings “has an agenda, and that is to destroy Donald Trump.” Joe Biden “can’t remember where he is fifty per cent of the time,” Trump, Jr., said, but he can count on the “media lackeys” who are the “marketing wing of the Democrat Party.” The Democrats, he added, are “becoming the party of socialism and communism.” That includes Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib—“you know, the Hamas caucus in Congress.” As for the covid-19 outbreak, which has caused more than eighty thousand deaths in the U.S. to date, he said, “China basically screwed the whole world.” Continue reading “The Trump Campaign Brings Its Angry Tone to the Coronavirus Era”

The Memo: Trump fights for second term amid the new abnormal

The Hill logoThe United States is not getting back to normal anytime soon — and the impact on the 2020 presidential election will be profound.

In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, a disoriented nation took some solace in the idea that the massive disruption might at least be short-lived.

This looks implausible now, even as many states move toward reopening their economies. Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Furious Over Secret GOP Memo Urging Senators To Avoid Defending President

As the death toll from coronavirus continues to soar in the United States, President Donald Trump is being lambasted by a variety of Democrats, liberals, progressives, centrists and Never Trump conservatives over the weeks he spent carelessly downplaying the severity of COVID-19. And in Politico, reporter Alex Isenstadt describes a recent conflict with the GOP over how Republican candidates should or shouldn’t defend Trump’s record on coronavirus.

“Earlier this month,” Isenstadt explains, “the Senate Republican campaign arm circulated a memo with shocking advice to GOP candidates on responding to coronavirus: ‘don’t defend Trump, other than the China travel ban — attack China.'”On Monday, April 27, according to Isenstadt, Trump campaign adviser Justin Clark expressed his “displeasure” to Kevin McLaughlin, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) — angrily telling McLaughlin that any Republican candidate who followed the advice of the memo should not expect the campaign’s support.

McLaughlin, Isenstadt reports, “responded by saying he agreed with the Trump campaign’s position and — according to two people familiar with the conversation — clarified that the committee wasn’t advising candidates to not defend Trump over his response.” According to Isenstadt, McLaughlin stressed to Clark that the memo wasn’t saying that Trump shouldn’t be defended on coronavirus but rather, was offering advice on how he should be defended. Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Sues Over Ad Reciting His Pandemic Failures

Donald Trump’s reelection campaign filed a lawsuit Monday against a local television station in Wisconsin, accusing it of airing a campaign ad the suit calls “false and defamatory” — even though the ad accurately relays Trump’s comments.

The ad, produced by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, uses audio clips of Trump downplaying the new coronavirus.

The audio accompanies a chart showing the number of cases of COVID-19 exponentially growing. Continue reading.

Trump team picks fight with Twitter, TV networks over political speech

The Hill logoPresident Trump’s reelection campaign is aggressively pressuring Twitter and broadcast outlets to sanction or pull misleading political attacks from Democrats, accusing the social media giant and the news media of using a double standard when it comes to policing political speech.

The Trump campaign has long been the subject of intense scrutiny from fact-checkers and reporters, who have called out its false or misleading claims and sought to have the content removed from the airwaves or social media platforms.

Trump’s team is now looking to turn the tables, making the case that the social media giants and TV networks are turning a blind eye to similar misleading claims from Democrats. Continue reading.

Trump campaign hires alum of controversial data company

Cambridge Analytica was called out by Facebook for misuse of user data and shuttered in 2018.

President Donald Trump’s campaign is bringing on an alum of the controversial data firm Cambridge Analytica, a move likely to raise alarms among Trump critics and data privacy advocates who worry the president will push the technological envelope to get reelected in 2020.

Matt Oczkowski, who served as head of product at Cambridge before it went bankrupt and shut down in 2018, is helping oversee the Trump campaign’s data program, according to two people familiar with the hire. Cambridge gained notoriety for its work on psychological voter profiling and because it allegedly improperly obtained the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users.

Oczkowski, who also worked on Trump’s 2016 effort, joined the reelection campaign in January, and payments to his company, HuMn Behavior, are expected to show up on Trump’s next campaign finance disclosure later this month. Continue reading.