Tag: Trump re-election campaign

Kushner’s Global Role Shrinks as He Tackles Another: The 2020 Election

New York Times logoIvanka Trump’s husband will now supervise her father’s re-election campaign, but he continues to weigh in with advice to the president on a range of other matters.

WASHINGTON — When senior administration officials gathered in the Situation Room on Tuesday for a meeting to discuss the repercussions of the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Vice President Mike Pence had a seat at the table. So did Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, and Mark T. Esper, the defense secretary.

But the White House aide whose portfolio is the Middle East was notably absent from the meeting.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was sitting for a photo shoot for a planned Time magazine cover story. He was also absent from the Situation Room later in the day when it was clear Iran was launching an attack on American forces and the same officials rushed back, joined by Mr. Trump and West Wing aides like Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff, and Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary. Continue reading.

Trump’s 2020 Strategy: Fighting Dirty

“Never wrestle with a pig,” says the old maxim. “You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.” That’s the risk facing Democrats who hope to impeach and remove the president or defeat him at the polls. But sometimes, pig wrestling is a task that cannot be avoided.

Donald Trump is not typical of politicians or human beings. When accused of wrongdoing that they actually committed, most of them would either deny the behavior or admit and repent of it. Trump is unusual because his defense is not that he didn’t do it, or that it wasn’t bad, but that there are no standards of good and bad that mean anything.

The evidence is abundant that he tried to extort the president of Ukraine to come up with incriminating information about Joe Biden by withholding $391 million in security aid.

View the complete September 28 article by Steve Chapman on the National Memo website here.

Trump faces difficult balancing act with reelection campaign

The Hill logoPresident Trump is facing a host of difficult decisions on foreign and domestic policy as the presidential campaign season gears up.

The administration is confronting a new crisis with Saudi Arabia and Iran, approaching new trade talks with China that will be crucial to the global economy, and faces pressure to come forward with a proposal on gun violence following a string of mass shootings.

Trump also must find someone to replace John Bolton, the national security adviser he ousted just last week. And then there’s the matter of signing a government funding bill before Oct. 1 to prevent a new shutdown.

View the complete September 18 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Trump promotes new video, complete with white supremacist symbol

It’s the latest in the long line of far-right interactions that Trump has had.

President Donald Trump promoted a new video Wednesday that featured some of his favorite hits. Job creation, stock market growth, low unemployment rates, regulatory rollbacks, high approval rating among Republicans — all pretty obvious content. Trump himself posted the video on Twitter, with the comment “Thank you for your support as we MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

But toward the end of the video, the video uses a symbol of a lion’s head, which, as writer Dustin Giebel and former Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski first noted on Twitter, was also used by the far-right publication VDARE.

Dusty@DustinGiebel

the image at the end of the video Trump tweeted earlier was popular amongst the fascists of Lion Guard and the white supremacists of Vdare in 2016

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

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View the August 29 article by Luke Barnes on the ThinkProgress website here.

Trump campaign official bizarrely compares president to Mother Teresa: ‘Who has done more for women?’

AlterNet logoA former “Apprentice” contestant-turned-Iowa campaign official compared President Donald Trump to Mother Teresa.

Tana Goertz, the key primary state’s Trump Team coordinator, claimed the president had done more for women than possibly anyone else in history than the sainted Calcutta nun, reported CBS News.

“There’s not a person alive that literally has done so much for a female, for the female population,” Goertz said. “I can’t think of one person that I could go, except for Mother Teresa. I mean, literally, who has done more for women in office than Donald Trump?”

View the complete August 23 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Trump and his Minnesota mini-me set out to flip the state red

The president homes in on a 2016 near-miss. But Republicans haven’t won a statewide race there since 2006.

For President Donald Trump, Minnesota is the one that got away in 2016. Now he’s fixated on flipping the state in 2020 — with the help of a provocative ex-radio host whose rantings earned him the nickname “mini-Trump.”

Former GOP Rep. Jason Lewis is expected to launch his Minnesota Senate bid on Thursday with guidance from two of Trump’s top political lieutenants. After losing Minnesota by just 1.5 percentage points, the president has told aides repeatedly in recent weeks that he’s determined to win the Democratic stronghold, which hasn’t gone for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Continue reading “Trump and his Minnesota mini-me set out to flip the state red”

Trump and the culture wars: Here are the divisive themes the president will focus on as his economic policies crumble

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump, in recent weeks, has been stressing both economic themes and culture war themes. The economic themes were evident during a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire on August 15, when Trump tried to frighten 401(k) owners into reelecting him and insisted, “You have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(k), everything is going to be down the tubes (under a Democratic president). So whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.” But if the U.S. does go into a recession in the months ahead, Trump will have a harder time selling himself as the salvation of the American economy — in which case, he would likely become even more aggressive in pushing divisive culture war themes.

Although Trump is wildly unpopular in heavily Democratic areas of the U.S., he is still quite popular among his hardcore base — and one saw that playing out in the 2018 midterms. Democrats enjoyed a net gain of 40 seats in the House of Representatives, but Republicans slightly increased their majority in the Senate thanks, in part, to Trump’s ability to rally his base in conservative areas. And Trump’s rally-the-base approach has been painfully evident in recent weeks. Continue reading “Trump and the culture wars: Here are the divisive themes the president will focus on as his economic policies crumble”

Nightmare scenario: What do we do if Trump actually loses in 2020 — and refuses to quit?

AlterNet logoIt is somewhere on the outer edges of conceivable that a sitting president will refuse to step down if he loses his re-election campaign. Nothing close to that has ever happened before. If that scenario plays out, America could still be saved from tyranny — but our democratic institutions would need to rise to the challenge.

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently published a an article arguing that it’s possible — perhaps even likely — that President Trump will try to stay in office if he loses in next year’s election, most likely by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the results and hoping that Republicans, once again, will close their eyes tight and back him up. We should also remember that Trump ominously said during the 2016 campaignthat he would only accept the results of the election “if I win,” essentially making a veiled threat that he was likely to question the validity of any victory by Hillary Clinton, regardless of the circumstances.

Trump’s reasoning was perfectly circular: The only explanation he would require to “prove” that he had been cheated was that he didn’t win. Something vaguely resembling an actual case that he had been robbed could be constructed after the fact — which Trump did anyway with his repeated false claims that he had only lost the popular vote in 2016 because of millions of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants.

View the complete June 23 article by Matthew Rozsa from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

‘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.