Tag: Trump re-election

Trump can’t beat the coronavirus — so now he wants to use it as a weapon in the November election

AlterNet logoIf you listen to Donald Trump, before him there was nothing.

According to Trump, before he was elected, the United States military, which was fighting wars in two countries, confronting foreign navies on the high seas, launching drone attacks willy-nilly, and had soldiers stationed in more than 100 outposts around the world, had no ammunition. In the Rose Garden on March 30, Trump said, “I’ll never forget the day when a general came and said, ‘Sir’ — my first week in office — ‘we have no ammunition.’”

On Oct. 9 of last year, he told the same story: “When I took over our military, we didn’t have ammunition. I was told by a top general — maybe the top of them all — ‘Sir, I’m sorry. Sir, we don’t have ammunition.’ I said, ‘I’ll never let another president have that happen to him or her.’ We didn’t have ammunition.” Continue reading.

Coronavirus spreads to Trump country

The Hill logoThe coronavirus pandemic that has hammered some of America’s largest cities is now spreading to smaller rural areas, a progression that will bring a virus President Trump once downplayed to the doorsteps of voters who sent him to the White House.

Early epicenters of the disease in the United States have concentrated in urban settings. The first major outbreaks struck Seattle and San Francisco, followed by the greater New York City area that has suffered hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases.

But in recent weeks, the coronavirus has spread to rural areas, especially southern states like Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia and the Midwest, hitting Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Continue reading.

Trump’s ‘secret stash’ of voters

Maybe they exist, but it’s hard to tell in the middle of a national health crisis

ANALYSIS — Writing in The Washington Post recently, columnist and veteran political analyst Henry Olsen suggested that we may all be missing something important: President Donald Trump’s showing in head-to-head ballot tests against expected Democratic nominee Joe Biden is lagging his job approval numbers in recent RealClearPolitics polling averages.

After noting the strong relationship between presidential job approval and election outcomes, Olsen wrote: “Biden leads Trump by nearly six points, 48.3 to 42.4 percent, in the most recent RCP average. Trump’s approval rating in the RCP average was 46.0 percent on Wednesday morning. If Trump’s true vote share approximates that, he only trails Biden by about 2 points. If that happens on Election Day, Trump could once again win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote.”

That’s the secret stash of voters that could help the president win a second term, apparently — voters who now say (in the middle of a health care crisis) they approve of the president’s job performance but don’t also say they will vote for him in the fall. Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Secretly Paying $180,000 A Year To His Sons’ Significant Others

Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle are each receiving $15,000 per month through the campaign manager’s private company, GOP sources said, to dodge FEC rules.

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump’s campaign is secretly paying one Trump son’s wife and another one’s girlfriend $180,000 a year each through the campaign manager’s private company, according to top Republicans with knowledge of the payments.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of eldest son Donald Trump Jr., and Lara Trump, wife of middle son Eric Trump, are each receiving $15,000 a month, according to two GOP sources who are informal White House advisers and who spoke on condition of anonymity.

They were unsure when the payments began but say they are being made by campaign manager Bradley Parscale through his company rather than directly by either the campaign or the party in order to avoid public reporting requirements. Continue reading.

Trump announces $19B program to help agriculture sector

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Friday announced a $19 billion program to help the struggling agriculture sector and distribute food to families in need amid the economic toll of the coronavirus pandemic.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will purchase crops and livestock from farmers and ranchers facing a steep decline in orders and massive supply chain disruption. Funding will come from the $2.2 trillion coronavirus economic relief bill and separate USDA funds to support commodity prices.

USDA will offer $16 billion in direct grants to farmers and ranchers to compensate for short-term drops in demand and oversupply driven by the coronavirus pandemic. The department will also purchase $3 billion in fresh produce, dairy, and meat to distribute to food banks, community organizations and charities. Continue reading.

Trump is working behind the scenes to cripple any investigations before the November election: columnist

AlterNet logoAccording to columnist David Lurie, writing for the Daily Beast, Donald Trump’s purge of inspector generals in the government is an attempt to make sure that he is not be subjected to any embarrassing reports or investigations before the November election.

As Lurie notes, the president has enlisted former bodyman John McEntee, who was previously booted from the White House by former Chief of Staff John Kelly, to purge critics and those considered not loyal to Trump from their posts, and that inspector generals are at the top of the list.

“In the midst of a deadly pandemic, Donald Trump has expanded his war on oversight by attacking the governments’ inspectors general, compounding the damage already done by his unprecedented stonewalling of congressional oversight investigations,” Lurie wrote, before adding that Trump and McEntee are dead set on “targeting IGs as part of a broader effort to purge officials who aren’t sufficiently personally loyal to Trump.” Continue reading.

Public health officials push back on May opening

The Hill logoPublic health experts are pushing back against suggestions the Trump administration could relax social distancing measures and open much of the country by May 1, warning that acting too soon will risk a resurgence of the virus.

The number of cases of COVID-19 nationally is starting to show signs of slowing, due in large part to the closure of thousands of business as people stay in their homes.

Yet this has also led to an economic catastrophe, with 16 million people filing unemployment claims over the past three weeks. And that has increased the pressure from some quarters to open the economy. Continue reading.

Trump’s horrendous last-ditch gambit to win re-election is scary as hell

AlterNet logoThursday night, the access journalism team at the Washington Post published a piece declaring that Donald Trump intends to “reopen much of the U.S.” in May.

“The Trump administration is pushing to reopen much of the country next month,” Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, Jose A. Del Real and William Wan report, noting that Trump, behind “closed doors,” has “sought a strategy for resuming business activity by May 1.”

This is, needless to say, scary as hell. We’re nowhere near conquering the coronavirus epidemic and, thanks to Trump’s deliberate negligence — born from his desire to conceal the spread of the virus — we have nothing close to the testing capacity necessary to start letting people congregate safely again. Unsurprisingly, the article caused a lot of panic and anger, and reasonably so: There is nothing but downside to “reopening” the economy without a plan to control the spread of the virus. Continue reading.

Trump’s new ad attacking Biden on China is a complete and utter mess

Washington Post logoThe big headline from a new Trump campaign ad is that it features an image suggesting that Gary Locke, former Washington governor and U.S. ambassador to China, is a member of the Chinese Communist Party. The image flashes for only a moment, but the suggestion is clear: Joe Biden is bowing deferentially to a person of Asian descent standing in front of Chinese flags. Except that the person of Asian descent is actually an American.

But that’s hardly the only way in which the ad obscures and misleads. It is a veritable smorgasbord of deception and disinformation. It attacks Biden for saying things about China that are extremely similar to what Trump himself has said. It also alters Biden’s comments about travel bans and other things to make it sound like he was saying something he did not say.

Let’s walk through it. Continue reading.

Trump’s campaign advisers ‘terrified’ the coronavirus outbreak will slam rural America

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump’s approval ratings may have gotten an early bump at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, but the Los Angeles Times reports that the president’s campaign hasn’t been nearly as confident behind the scenes that it will last through November.

One former Trump official interviewed by the Los Angeles Times claims that Trump’s campaign is “terrified” that the coronavirus pandemic that has mostly affected blue-state cities so far will sweep out across the country and hammer rural counties where the president’s support is particularly strong.

“The advisers have warned Trump that the political consequences at the ballot box in November will be even worse if he is seen as too lax,” the paper reports. Continue reading.