Tag: Trump re-election

Two Trump campaign staffers who attended rally test positive for coronavirus

Axios logoTwo members of the Trump campaign staff who attended the president’s rally in Tulsa on Saturday have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the campaign’s communications director Tim Murtaugh.

The big picture: The campaign says the two staffers wore face masks during the entire event, which drew thousands of supporters. Health officials, including several in Tulsa, had urged the campaign to delay the rally, warning of the risk of spreading the virus. Six campaign staffers for the president were quarantined after testing positive before the rally last week,.

What they’re saying:

“After another round of testing for campaign staff in Tulsa, two additional members of the advance team tested positive for the coronavirus. These staff members attended the rally but were wearing masks during the entire event. Upon the positive tests, the campaign immediately activated established quarantine and contact tracing protocols.”

— Communications director Tim Murtaugh

Continue reading.

Bolton says he hopes Trump is 1-term president, warns country imperiled by his reelectionBolton says he hopes Trump is 1-term president, warns country imperiled by his reelection

Here are the many headlines from ABC’s interview with Trump’s former top aide.

President Donald Trump‘s longest-serving national security adviser John Bolton condemned his presidency as dangerously damaging to the United States and argued the 2020 election is the last “guardrail” to protect the country from him.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Bolton offered a brutal indictment of his former boss, saying, “I hope (history) will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can’t recall from. We can get over one term — I have absolute confidence, even if it’s not the miracle of a conservative Republican being elected in November. Two terms, I’m more troubled about.”

In the interview with ABC News Chief Global Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz and in his new book, “The Room Where It Happened,” Bolton paints Trump as “stunningly uninformed,” making “erratic” and “irrational” decisions, unable to separate his personal and political interests from the country’s, and marked and manipulated by foreign adversaries. Continue reading.

‘You guys look silly’: Fox News’ Chris Wallace annihilates Trump spokeswoman for ‘denying reality’ in Tulsa debacle

AlterNet logoFox News host Chris Wallace challenged Trump 2020 campaign spokesperson Mercedes Schlapp for making “campaign speeches” during an interview on Sunday.

On his Fox News Sunday program, Wallace noted that President Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally on Saturday had been sparsely attended despite the fact that the president claimed nearly a million people had requested tickets.

“We all saw the pictures last night,” Wallace explained. “The arena was no more than two-thirds full. And the outdoor rally was cancelled because there was no overflow crowd. What happened?” Continue reading.

Does Trump Want to Fight for a Second Term? His Self-Sabotage Worries Aides

New York Times logoAdvisers and allies say the president’s repeated acts of self-destruction have significantly damaged his re-election prospects, and yet he appears mostly unable, or unwilling, to curtail them.

In a recent meeting with his top political advisers, President Trump was impatient as they warned him that he was on a path to defeat in November if he continued his incendiary behavior in public and on Twitter.

Days earlier, Mr. Trump had sparked alarm by responding to protests over police brutality with a threat that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Mr. Trump pushed back against his aides. “I have to be myself,” he replied, according to three people familiar with the meeting. A few hours later, he posted on Twitter a letter from his former personal lawyer describing some of the protesters as “terrorists.” Continue reading.

Trump tries to plot a political comeback based on the economy. Biden says not so fast.

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s advisers are trying to plot a political turnaround centered on his stewardship of the economy, seeking to exploit a rare issue on which voters trust him as much as Joe Biden and vowing to usher in the “great American comeback” after the country plunged into a financial free fall on his watch.

Biden, under growing pressure from Democratic allies to wage a more aggressive rebuttal, plans to sharpen his economic focus in coming weeks with the rollout of new proposals to stimulate job creation, according to a senior campaign adviser. The campaign also plans to intensify its drive to remind voters of Trump’s sluggish response to the novel coronavirus and the unemployment spike that followed.

The dueling efforts come less than five months before Election Day. By almost every indicator, Trump’s bid for a second term is in peril, with Biden sprinting out to leads in battleground states and into competition in some conservative strongholds. But in a twist, the economy, which has been a bellwether in the modern history of presidential races, is one major domain where voters still give Trump encouraging marks, bolstered by occasional bright spots like Tuesday’s report that retail sales jumped 17.7 percent in May. Continue reading.

Trump’s Approval Slips Where He Can’t Afford to Lose It: Among Evangelicals

New York Times logoPolls and private concerns from top social conservatives show the president’s standing with the cornerstone of his base isn’t what it used to be. A photo op with the Bible was supposed to help fix that.

President Trump needs every vote he got from white evangelicals in 2016 — and then some. Hoisting a Bible in the air may not be enough.

Unnerved by his slipping poll numbers and his failure to take command of the moral and public health crises straining the country, religious conservatives have expressed concern in recent weeks to the White House and the Trump campaign about the president’s political standing.

Their rising discomfort spilled out into the open this week when the founder of the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson, scolded the president for taking such a belligerent tone as the country erupted in sorrow and anger over the police killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis. Continue reading.

Trump confronts a culture war of his own making as election looms

The president and his top allies are trying to fit his election-year interests in black voters into a political career filled with encouragements of police power.

President Donald Trump is throwing himself into a culture war he has long stoked, and a battle for voters he has eagerly pursued, as he navigates national outrage over the brutal killings of two black men — one at the hands of police, the other at the hands of white civilians.

Trump’s reelection coalition leans heavily on support from law enforcement and the MAGA base, including many supporters eager to promote police officers and immigration agents as heroes. At the same time, campaign aides believe his path to victory in November relies, in part, on drawing in black voters, particularly black men, for whom encounters with police could become matters of life and death.

The president and his top allies are trying to fit his election-year interests in black voters into a political career filled with encouragements of police power. The latest moves come amid outcry over Minneapolis resident George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man who died in police custody on Monday after being pinned to the pavement by a white police officer who kept his knee pressed on Floyd’s neck. In the aftermath of the incident, Trump called for an expedited federal investigation into Floyd’s death. The move drew praise from some longtime supporters of the “Blue Lives Matter” movement, who suggested the president could identify with the perceived injustice because of his own history of being investigated by law enforcement. Continue reading.

McConnell’s GOP takes Trump’s election-year cues

Senate Republicans are embracing the president’s most explosive attacks after previously sidestepping them.

Mitch McConnell can’t afford any tension with President Donald Trump. So he’s doing everything he can to keep his fragile majority in sync with Trump and his explosive election-year playbook.

Just three days after Trump berated McConnell on Twitter to “get tough” with Democrats and probe the 2016 Russia investigation that ensnared Trump’s campaign, the Senate majority leader took to the floor to echo the president’s misgivings in a way he declined to do last week. Trump’s campaign “was treated like a hostile foreign power by our own law enforcement,” McConnell said Tuesday, subject to “wild theories of Russian collusion.”

In the days to come and with McConnell’s public blessing, GOP committee chairmen plan to follow Trump’s lead and approve a series of subpoenas for documents and testimony that could hit some of Trump’s favorite targets, including Hunter Biden and dozens of Obama administration officials. Continue reading.

Are Older Voters Turning Away From Trump?

There are different “gaps” in American politics, but one that has consistently shown up in recent presidential elections is the age gap. That is, younger voters tend to vote more Democratic and older voters tend to vote more Republican.

In 2016, for instance, President Trump performed best among voters 65 years and older. He also won among those between the ages of 45 and 64. So looking ahead to November, you might expect Trump to once again do well with older voters. However, recent public polls — and the president’s own private polling — suggest that Trump may be doing worse among older voters against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

In national head-to-head polls conducted since April 1, Trump is barely breaking even with most older Americans — and in some age groups, he’s even trailing Biden by as much as 1.4 points (see 45- to 64-year-olds). (Pollsters don’t all use the same age brackets, so there is some overlap in the different age categories.) Continue reading.

Trump is stuck in 2016, but older voters are panicked by the 2020 virus

President could heading for Herbert Hoover territory this fall if virus fears endure

Well into the 1970s, denunciations of Herbert Hoover were a routine ingredient in Democratic Party oratory. When you are president during an epic failure of government, as Hoover was at the onset of the Depression, impressions can linger for more than four decades.

That is why it is easy to imagine that in 2060, the name Trump will still be synonymous with blithering incompetence in the face of a pandemic. And the word “McCarthyism” will be a historical artifact since the more recent label “Trumpism” would now define fact-free vitriolic smear campaigns.

Rueful confession: These are time- capsule predictions since I, alas, will probably not be around to find out if I was right.  Continue reading.