Voters will decide whether to give President Trump a second term in just 11 months.
The most divisive president of modern times has endured historically low approval numbers, but he cannot be counted out for reelection — in part because polling in the key battleground states indicates he is competitive with his would-be Democratic challengers.
What are the big questions that will affect Trump’s chances? Continue reading
President Trump’s race to rack up accomplishments heading into an election year is giving conservatives heartburn, with some worried he is striking deals that include giveaways to Democrats.
Several Senate Republicans this week vented their frustration with Trump’s trade deal with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during meetings with the administration’s top trade official, Robert Lighthizer.
There’s also grumbling among conservative lawmakers over an agreement to expand benefits for federal workers in exchange for a costly Space Force military branch and a spending deal that is projected to add nearly $2 trillion to the deficit.
It’s one of several nightmare scenarios for markets: A Trump administration failure to complete the China and USMCA trade deals could wreck the 2020 economic outlook. But Trump’s team remains optimistic.President Donald Trump needs two big achievements to keep markets and the economy as glittering assets in his challenging 2020 reelection bid: passage of a new NAFTA and a trade deal with China.
But Democrats are stringing him along on the first — the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement — and he’s engaged in a seemingly endless rope-a-dope with China on the second with no guarantee of success. That’s left the economy as a major wild card for next year.
Businesses are sitting on cash instead of making investments. Growth is stalled at around 2 percent and expected to slow. Jobs numbers are decent but far from “yuge.” And big campaign promises remain unfulfilled. Even Trump’s most ardent supporters acknowledge the president’s reelection bid would face enormous risks if the economy turns down next year.
View the complete November 29 article by Ben White on the Politico website here.
New battleground state polls sent tremors through Democratic circles Monday, underlining that President Trump has a fighting chance of reelection despite his mediocre national standing.
The polls, from The New York Times and Siena College, tested the three leading Democratic 2020 candidates — former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — against Trump in the six states that Trump carried by the narrowest margins in 2016.
Those states are Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
View the complete November 5 article by Niall Stanage on The Hill website here.
GOP strategist on white suburban voters: ‘He hasn’t given them much reason to vote for him’ANALYSIS | Donald Trump walked slowly into the White House just after 1:30 a.m. Friday even more embattled than when he left it some 15 hours earlier. During a rally in Dallas hours before, he dropped the “I-word” (impeachment) just once as he described himself and conservatives as victims of an “overthrow” conspiracy.
Gordon Sondland, the hotelier-turned-ambassador to the European Union, told the House lawmakers leading an impeachment inquiry that he came to realize Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, likely was trying “to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the president’s 2020 re-election campaign.”
Also during what was a remarkable Thursday, his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, acknowledged for the first time that the White House linked a $400 million military aid package to a desire for Ukraine’s government look into the 2016 U.S. election — a seeming quid pro quo Trump has denied.
View the complete October 18 article by John T. Bennett on The Roll Call website here.
President Trump’s reelection campaign says it is hiring staff and opening field offices in Minnesota and New Mexico, two traditionally blue states the president’s strategists have identified as having potential to flip in 2020.
Still, the Trump campaign believes that both states are in play this time around.
On a conference call with reporters, a senior official said the campaign is working on a “huge buildout” of paid staffers and a volunteer network in Minnesota that will dwarf their 2016 efforts there.
View the complete October 15 article by Jonathan Easley on The Hill website here.
President Donald Trump is purposefully humiliating his vice president with a series of loyalty tests as his daughter and son-in-law scheme to find a replacement as his 2020 running mate, according to a new biography.
Journalist Tom LoBianco, who has covered Mike Pence’s political career since its very beginning, previewed his new biography, “Piety & Power,” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“Over the summer he had two terrible events in July,” LoBianco said. “The weird thing where he flies out to New Hampshire, gets called back to the last minute. Then they send him to a detention camp and there is a terrible video of him with a grim face, which should have been Trump. That should have been the president, not the vice president, that’s what VP’s aides and allies are telling me. They see that as Trump yanking on the leash.”
View the complete September 23 article by Travis Gettys from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.
Bashful base: Pollsters say Trump closer to Dems than early 2020 surveys suggestProfessional pollsters say President Donald Trump and senior White House officials are rightly confident heading into his reelection bid because early 2020 surveys are likely flawed.
“We are going to keep on fighting, and we are going to keep on winning, winning, winning,” Trump told supporters this week during a campaign rally in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. “We’re going to win like never before. … I’ll tell you what: We’re going to win the state of New Mexico.”
That would mean flipping a state he lost in 2016 to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But just about every national poll and many key statewide surveys give the leading Democratic presidential candidates healthy leads over the president in hypothetical general election matchups, surveys Trump and his team dismiss almost daily.
View the complete September 19 article by John T. Bennett on The Roll Call website here.
Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman published a story Monday claiming that President Donald Trump’s team is considering replacing Mike Pence as vice president on the 2020 ticket.
Previous reports have made similar claims, including one from Axios reporter Jonathan Swan who found, like Sherman, that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are driving the discussions to replace Pence.
Even before this latest round of reports and speculation about a vice-presidential switch, rumors have long percolated about former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley joining the ticket in 2020. But readers may also recall that in 2011, similar rumors floated around about then-President Barack Obama dumping Vice President Joe Biden from the 2012 ticket and replacing him with Hillary Clinton. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
View the complete September 16 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.
“Together, we enacted the VA Accountability Act, so that anyone who mistreats or abuses our great veterans can be promptly fired. There was a time you couldn’t fire anyone, no matter how they treated our veterans, whether they stole or they were sadists. And we had some of them, too. You couldn’t fire them, and now we can do it very, very quickly and easily. They don’t treat our veterans well. We get them out. Since then, we’ve removed more than 7,600 employees who failed to give our vets the care they so richly deserve.”
— President Trump, in remarks to the House GOP conference retreat, Sept. 12, 2019
The president regularly touts his signing of the bipartisan Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act in June 2017, but he often overstates its impact.
In Trump’s telling, such as in his recent remarks to House Republicans, before the law there was no way for the agency to fire underperforming workers. That’s simply wrong. Government records show that hundreds of Veterans Affairs employees were fired every month before the law was enacted. In 2014, Congress passed a law that was said to make it easier to remove senior officials because of poor performance or misconduct.
Moreover, we were struck by a figure that has popped up in Trump’s rhetoric in recent weeks — that the administration has removed “more than 7,600 employees” as a result of the law. How credible is that number?
View the complete September 17 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.
