Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

The US 2020 Presidential Election & Attempts To Overturn It

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Op-Ed: What others see as Joe Biden's mental slips, I see as the tricks of a master stutterer

    You don’t notice Joe Biden’s stutter when he’s speaking most of the time. He didn't stutter during Sunday night’s debate, for example. But as a stutterer, I recognized the fingerprints of a master stutterer at work.

    Seeing Biden on stage takes me back to my childhood. I've watched him for years and recognize the familiar tricks. Noticed him struggling with a phrase or name he's uttered a million times before.

    I've heard him use overly complicated or quirky phrasing and immediately recognized the method of a master stutterer: the almost savant-like ability to rephrase a thought or paragraph, on-the-fly, to avoid a problematic word or syllable.

    I've listened to his critics and heard echoes of my past. He's senile, they insist. He forgot Obama's name. He's mentally defective. Dementia. But I know better.

    At a campaign stop on March 5, Biden "forgot" Obama's name, identifying him simply as "the last guy." At other events he’s said, "President my boss." Some see this as evidence of a man losing his mental faculties. I see the familiar trick of calling a last-second audible for an easier syllable or phrase, the in-the-moment wordplay stutterers use to navigate their speech.

    Stuttering is fickle. A word might come naturally the first million times, then get stuck without warning. So we make substitutions. Sometimes it's nicknames. Sometimes it's slang that sounds awkward or out-of-place, like Biden uses.

    I started stuttering when I was 7. First a little. Then a lot. I hoped it would go away. It never really did, though I didn’t let it stop me from having a full life. I speak in public all the time now. I enjoy it.

    Growing up is hard. Stuttering makes it harder. You can't do what other kids do, and they don’t understand why. They'd ask me to say things, knowing I couldn't. Sometimes it was to my face, other times when they didn't know I could hear them.

    People didn't always mean harm. Yes, I have seen "A Fish Called Wanda." Yes, Michael Palin’s character stuttered, too. And "My Cousin Vinny," when the free lawyer stuttered so badly he couldn't get through an opening argument? Hilarious! Thank God I'm not that bad, right?

    Those moments stung. But they didn't hurt as much as the good intentions, the people trying to help, that reminded me that I was incomplete. Sometimes teachers would skip over me in class so I wouldn’t have to try to speak. Sometimes I had things to say, ideas to share, jokes to tell. They became my secrets.

    In fifth grade, I auditioned for the lead role in the school play (quite well, I might add), only to be cast as a nonspeaking extra. Better that than stumble over a word in front of 300 kids, they explained. Part of me was relieved. The other part was sad to see another door close. Another thing I could never do, etched onto my permanent record.

    As stutterers do, I found ways to manage it. Speech therapy helped a little. The real method was word craft similar to what Biden does, the self-trained ability to re-architect language in real time to avoid a word or syllable you know will stop you cold.

    In high school I discovered the art of performance — singing and dancing. These short-circuited the stuttering pattern. When I sang I could be loud. When I acted on stage, I could be confident. Strong. Clear. I could be someone else.

    People would find me after performances and congratulate me on finally overcoming the stutter. I would smile, but I knew the truth. It was still there, lingering, waiting.

    People who have never stuttered may look at Biden and see a man who can’t say simple words, remember simple names, or use the obvious phrase in every occasion. While they see a mental defect, I see a man who has survived decades on the political stage, still working to overcome a disability he’s carried his whole life.

    Biden is an example that doors don’t have to stay closed. Proof that people can manage disabilities and excel at the very things others thought they could never do.

    There are would-be Joe Bidens everywhere. Looking down. Avoiding attention. Afraid to raise their hands in class. He shows that they don’t have to be afraid to speak up.
    ____________
    “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

    Comment


    • How a bill co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren and signed by Trump could reshape the next presidential transition

      WASHINGTON — In approximately 10 months, a new presidential administration will take shape. It could be a second term of the Trump administration, or an entirely new one led by Joe Biden. It may come as the coronavirus epidemic still rages or, more likely, in the epidemic’s fraught aftermath.

      And just how that administration takes shape could have great consequences in the years to come. That’s why there’s reason to cheer a little-noticed bill that could ensure that the transition is conducted with the proper ethical strictures in place — the kinds of strictures that did not exist in 2016.

      No, the transitions bill won’t cure the coronavirus, but advocates of the legislation say it’s an unlikely success story, particularly given who championed it.

      President Trump branded one of them “Pocahantas,” while she, in turn, calls him Vladimir Putin’s “elf on the shelf.” Earlier this month, in an unlikely act of bipartisanship, Trump signed a bill written, in part, by Elizabeth Warren, one of his most stinging critics in the Senate. What’s more, the bill seems to directly address the accusations of corruption she has leveled against him.

      Trump may not have even known he was signing a bill written by Warren.

      That’s because the bill, the Presidential Transition Enhancement Act of 2019, was principally sponsored by Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, who is a Democrat, and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Republican. The legislation is identical to a bill Warren and Carper had earlier introduced that was also supported by Rep. Elijah Cummings, the House Oversight Committee chairman who recently died. Cummings was as determined an adversary of Trump as Warren has been.

      The bill would require every presidential transition to have — and release to the American people — an ethics plan. In effect, the new law amounts to a codified message that incoming presidents have to take ethics seriously.

      Crucially, the law must also say what the president will do to resolve his or her own conflicts of interest. The measure was obviously written with Trump in mind, and was a provision especially dear to Warren. Like many Democrats, she remains dismayed by the president’s nebulous arrangement with the Trump Organization, the real estate and marketing business he founded, which is now operated by his sons.

      Trump promised that his business interests would be placed in a “blind trust” after he took office, but he does not appear to have followed through with that promise.

      Even supporters of the president admit the Trump transition was chaotic, ethically challenged and not always confidence-inspiring. “We could have done a much better job,” former White House chief political strategist Steve Bannon remembered in 2018. “Absolutely, much better job. It's one of the things that Trump didn’t fight,” he said, referring to Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” that was official Washington and to stock his White House with “the best people.”

      This turned out to be difficult for a campaign that had made little preparation because it thought it had little chance of winning. “The swamp draining, we had all these potential things,” Bannon lamented of lost opportunities to enact an agenda aligned with his populist principles, which had helped Trump win the White House. “They just got ground up, and it just turned out not to be a priority.”

      The bill passed the Senate with unanimous consent, which means there were no objections to the measure. It then passed the House with a voice vote, as its passage was never in doubt.

      The legislation — the 15th law signed this year by a president who has spent most of 2020 fighting off impeachment and, now, the escalating coronavirus outbreak — places greater ethical strictures on how a president-elect puts in place key members of an administration in the critical weeks between election and inauguration. It amends the original 1963 law on presidential transitions and is part of a broader, yet-unrealized government ethics proposal introduced by Warren. That proposal would put strict new rules on public service, thus probably leading to the kind of swamp-draining Trump had promised. But that broader ethics plan is unlikely to be realized anytime soon, given Republican opposition to such measures.

      The new law, relatively modest in scope, requires every presidential nominee to have a concrete, public ethics plan, one that will stipulate how the campaign will handle the hiring of lobbyists, potential conflicts of interest and restrictions on access to classified information during the transition period. It also stipulates how the candidate will address his or her own conflicts of interest if elected president.

      Trump signed the bill into law on March 3. Warren had hoped to be the first president to have to abide by the new ethics provisions, but she ended her campaign two days after those provisions became law. Trump could also be the first who is subject to its strictures, since incumbent presidents have transitions.

      While it may lack teeth — a president could simply create a plan that suits his or her own needs — the legislation will at least force the incoming administration to address potential conflicts of interest in a transparent fashion.

      Trump and Warren did not celebrate with a round of golf at Mar-a-Lago. Instead, Warren noted the bill by bashing the man who signed it. “The Trump transition team was absolutely awash in conflicts and corruption, and now the American people can celebrate new rules to ensure that never happens again,” the Massachusetts senator told Yahoo News.

      “I know he would be proud today,” she said of Cummings.

      The bill received praise from the Partnership for Public Service, a bipartisan center focusing on good governance. A policy director there described it as an encouraging sign that a Capitol Hill that can agree on almost nothing found it can agree on something, and that that something turned out to be presidential ethics reform, of all things. Upon passage of the bill, the group praised legislators for codifying “lessons learned in the 2016 transition.”

      Those lessons could probably fill a legal tome — and have already made for several popular books about how the days and weeks after Trump’s victory resulted in chaos in the months and years to come.

      Trump’s transition was spearheaded by then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who did not believe Trump would win. Christie was fired after the election, and his plan — however flawed — was discarded. The transition was then divided between presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, campaign manager and Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon and incoming chief of staff and GOP head Reince Priebus.

      The transition was a “shallow hole,” says one campaign staffer who stayed on with Trump and served some time in the White House.

      Because none of the three had high-level executive branch experience, Washington and Wall Street got to shape an administration that had promised to be beholden to neither. “The time we needed to put an apparatus around Trump, that gave him some time to work himself in to be commander in chief,” Bannon explained in 2018. But that involved many Republican operatives who had spent the previous eight years working in private industry. They were the very “deep state” whom Bannon feared, the people Trump was never going to pick.

      “Here’s the brutal reality,” Bannon said. “There is not a deep bench of talent that could step into the government and run things.”

      Once in office, Trump signed an executive order that would have seemed to close the revolving door between private industry and public service. But he has routinely granted waivers to officials with industry ties, robbing the executive order of any power it may have had.

      What motivated him to sign a new ethics bill is not clear, though it may be that Johnson is a Trump ally, Carper is not a nemesis and Warren’s hand in the legislation simply went unnoticed by the White House. The White House declined to talk about the bill.

      Warren, conversely, has wanted to talk about this since roughly the day Trump was elected. “Within days of your election, you have elevated a slew of Wall Street bankers, industry insiders, and special interest lobbyists to your transition team,” she wrote to him on Nov. 15, 2016, as the new administration was starting to take shape at Trump Tower.

      And she reminded him of the now-famous refrain that had become the rallying cry of his campaign’s final stages. “Maintaining a transition team of Washington insiders sends a clear signal to all who are watching you — that you are already breaking your campaign promises to ‘drain the swamp’ and that you are selling out the American public,” Warren wrote. Trump did not answer.

      _____

      Of course, laws mean nothing if they aren't enforced. But Trump has known this his entire life.
      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

      Comment


      • Republicans block most aid to help states plan for presidential election amid coronavirus pandemic

        WASHINGTON — Voting reforms that would make it much easier to cast ballots by mail in the fall presidential election were left out of the $2 trillion rescue package that was unveiled Wednesday, but key lawmakers vowed to keep pushing for a series of measures that would prepare the country for an election in the likely scenario that the coronavirus will still be a major presence in the country.

        Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said that while the $400 million included in the current package is “a step in the right direction,” it fell well short of what they and other Democrats had pushed for.

        The money included for now will be available to states “to increase the ability to vote by mail, expand early voting and online registration and increase the safety of voting in-person by providing additional voting facilities and more poll workers,” one House Democratic staffer told Yahoo News.

        But it’s a fraction of the $4 billion that House Democrats had pushed for. Those measures, along with the reforms in the “Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act” proposed by Klobuchar and Wyden, would radically expand the ability of Americans to vote by mail in this fall’s elections, and would also expand early voting for up to two weeks prior to Election Day.

        It’s still not clear where the country will be with the coronavirus pandemic in November, but one thing is certain: There won’t be a vaccine. Given that reality, these moves would be aimed at avoiding any kind of large gatherings at polling places this fall, to help prepare states for a nationwide election with outbreaks still happening.

        “In times of crisis, the American people cannot be forced to choose between their health and exercising their right to vote,” Klobuchar and Wyden said in a statement. “We must enact election reforms across the country as well as secure more resources to guarantee safe and secure elections. We will continue to fight to pass the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020 to ensure every eligible American can safely and lawfully cast their ballot.”

        On Monday, Wyden told reporters on a conference call that “it’s either going to be vote-by-mail or nothing if we have to deal with a worst-case scenario.”

        Klobuchar announced Monday that her husband, John, had tested positive for the coronavirus.

        Among Republicans who actually run elections at the state and local level, there is growing recognition of the need for such planning. A number of Republican elections officials signed a letter to Congress this past weekend calling on lawmakers to “include substantial funding in the coronavirus stimulus package so that we have the ability and resources to ensure that our voters can participate safely and with confidence in our elections.”

        Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had proposed $140 million in the current package for elections, but state and local officials said this was “simply not enough.”

        The idea of broadening access to voting by mail has yet to be embraced by Republican politicians in Washington. No GOP members of Congress have backed the reforms, and some hard-line Republicans have railed against the idea.

        Conservative think tankers said universal mail voting would “make it easier to manipulate election outcomes and commit fraud.”

        “The next president would be determined by ballots that have been marked behind closed doors by who knows who, perhaps collected and dropped in the mail (or not) by another who knows who, and then swiftly processed by the U.S. Postal Service, the same organization that routinely delivers us our neighbor’s mail,” wrote Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

        Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., tweeted that “universal vote by mail would be the end of our republic as we know it.”

        The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group at New York University, has already warned that Congress is wasting precious time by not immediately deploying resources to plan for the fall.

        “They need the money now,” Wendy Weiser, director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, told the Washington Post. “If we wait a couple of months, it will be too late. They won’t be able to use it effectively or make the changes needed to avoid significant chaos on Election Day.”

        The Brennan Center has released a detailed plan for how to safeguard the ability of all citizens to vote in the fall without fearing contagion of the coronavirus. Their proposal estimated a cost of at least $2 billion, and includes conservative cost estimates for each provision: between $54 and $89 million for printing mail-in ballots, $413 million to $593 million for prepaid postage, $82 million to $117 million for secure drop boxes and $120 million to $240 million for equipment to facilitate a massive influx of mail-in ballots.

        “Implementing that plan,” the Brennan Center said, “must begin now.”
        _____________

        Can't make it easier for people to vote, no matter if their life is on the line or not.
        “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

        Comment


        • Trump camp threatens local TV stations over Democratic ad

          https://apnews.com/5251611364ef032adb1de2d467f15726


          WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is threatening legal action against local TV stations in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin if they don’t pull a Democratic anti-Trump commercial that uses clips of the president talking about the coronavirus outbreak. The campaign says the ad is false. ISN'T THAT RICH

          Priorities USA Action Fund, the Democratic super PAC that created the 30-second spot and supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, responded by soliciting financial contributions to keep the ad on the airwaves.

          Trump’s campaign said the commercial contains the “false assertion” that Trump called the coronavirus a “hoax.”

          The ad strings together audio of recent comments by Trump in which he attempts to minimize the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak, including a snippet in which he says “this is their new hoax.”

          Trump’s campaign said Wednesday that it had delivered “cease and desist” letters to the stations demanding that they pull the ad or face legal action. The stations were not named in a news release announcing the action or in a copy of the letter accessed by a hyperlink included in the emailed release.

          Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, tweeted Wednesday that Trump wants to block the ad “because he doesn’t want Americans to know the truth.” He included a link for donations to pay to keep the ad on the air.

          Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are among states where Trump’s is spending heavily in his bid to win a second term.

          Comment


          • https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52219756

            Bernie Sanders out.

            Comment


            • Originally posted by snapper View Post
              Took him long enough. *smh*
              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

              Comment


              • Originally posted by DOR
                So, are you keeping score?
                I make it one to a dozen, in “favor” of Putin’s BFF.
                One sided score, yes. Can't defend Donald Trump on...anything. (Let's face it, he was seriously musing about using disinfectant internally on COVID patients.)

                So, resort to deflection and whataboutism. Same ol' story, different day.
                “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                Comment


                • Former Clinton advisor calls on Biden to withdraw from the race.
                  https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cli...lt-allegations

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by surfgun View Post
                    Former Clinton advisor calls on Biden to withdraw from the race.
                    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cli...lt-allegations
                    OMG.
                    A Bernie Bro wants Biden to quit.
                    Who would have thunk it?
                    https://newrepublic.com/article/1558...ned-peter-daou
                    https://www.politico.com/news/2019/1...rs-2020-074723

                    (Pro Tip of the Day: Next time, ignore Fox News!)
                    Trust me?
                    I'm an economist!

                    Comment


                    • Nervous Republicans See Trump Sinking, and Taking Senate With Him

                      WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate if Trump does not put the nation on a radically improved course.

                      The scale of the GOP’s challenge has crystallized in the last week. With 26 million Americans now having filed for unemployment benefits, Trump’s standing in states that he carried in 2016 looks increasingly wobbly: New surveys show him trailing significantly in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he is even narrowly behind in must-win Florida.

                      Democrats raised substantially more money than Republicans did in the first quarter in the most pivotal congressional races, according to recent campaign finance reports. And while Trump is well ahead in money compared with the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, Democratic donors are only beginning to focus on the general election, and several super political action committees plan to spend heavily on behalf of him and the party.

                      Perhaps most significantly, Trump’s single best advantage as an incumbent — his access to the bully pulpit — has effectively become a platform for self-sabotage.

                      His daily news briefings on the coronavirus outbreak are inflicting grave damage on his political standing, Republicans believe, and his recent remarks about combating the virus with sunlight and disinfectant were a breaking point for a number of senior party officials.

                      On Friday evening, Trump conducted only a short briefing and took no questions, a format that a senior administration official said was being discussed as the best option for the president going forward.

                      Glen Bolger, a longtime Republican pollster, said the landscape for his party had become far grimmer compared with the previrus plan to run almost singularly around the country’s prosperity.

                      “With the economy in free-fall, Republicans face a very challenging environment, and it’s a total shift from where we were a few months ago,” Bolger said. “Democrats are angry, and now we have the foundation of the campaign yanked out from underneath us.”


                      Trump’s advisers and allies have often blamed external events for his most self-destructive acts, such as his repeated outbursts during the two-year investigation into his campaign’s dealings with Russia. Now there is no such explanation — and, so far, there have been exceedingly few successful interventions regarding Trump’s behavior at the podium.

                      Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., said the president had to change his tone and offer more than a campaign of grievance.

                      “You got to have some hope to sell people,” Cole said. “But Trump usually sells anger, division and ‘we’re the victim.’”

                      There are still more than six months until the election, and many Republicans are hoping that the dynamics of the race will shift once Biden is thrust back into the campaign spotlight. At that point, they believe, the race will not simply be the up-or-down referendum on the president it is now, and Trump will be able to more effectively sell himself as the person to rebuild the economy.

                      “We built the greatest economy in the world; I’ll do it a second time,” Trump said earlier this month, road-testing a theme he will deploy in the coming weeks.

                      Still, a recent wave of polling has fueled Republican anxieties, as Biden leads in virtually every competitive state.

                      The surveys also showed Republican senators in Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina and Maine trailing or locked in a dead heat with potential Democratic rivals — in part because their fate is linked to Trump’s job performance. If incumbents in those states lose and Republicans pick up only the Senate seat in Alabama, Democrats would take control of the chamber should Biden win the presidency.

                      “He’s got to run very close for us to keep the Senate,” Charles Black, a veteran Republican consultant, said of Trump. “I’ve always thought we were favored to, but I can’t say that now with all these cards up in the air.”

                      Republicans were taken aback this past week by the results of a 17-state survey commissioned by the Republican National Committee. It found the president struggling in the Electoral College battlegrounds and likely to lose without signs of an economic rebound this fall, according to a party strategist outside the RNC who is familiar with the poll’s results.

                      The Trump campaign’s own surveys have also shown an erosion of support
                      , according to four people familiar with the data, as the coronavirus remains the No. 1 issue worrying voters.

                      Polling this early is, of course, not determinative: In 2016 Hillary Clinton also enjoyed a wide advantage in many states well before November.

                      Yet Trump’s best hope to win a state he lost in 2016, Minnesota, also seems increasingly challenging. A Democratic survey taken by Sen. Tina Smith showed the president trailing by 10 percentage points there, according to a Democratic strategist who viewed the poll.

                      The private data of the two parties is largely mirrored by public surveys. Just last week, three Pennsylvania polls and two Michigan surveys were released showing Trump losing outside the margin of error. And a pair of Florida polls were released that showed Biden enjoying a slim advantage in a state that is all but essential for Republicans to retain the presidency.

                      To some in the party, this feels all too similar to the last time they held the White House.

                      In 2006, anger at President George W. Bush and unease with the Iraq War propelled Democrats to reclaim Congress; two years later they captured the presidency thanks to the same anti-incumbent themes and an unexpected crisis that accelerated their advantage: the economic collapse of 2008. The two elections were effectively a single continuous rejection of Republican rule — as some in the GOP fear 2018 and 2020 could become in a worst-case scenario.

                      “It already feels very similar to the 2008 cycle,” said Billy Piper, a Republican lobbyist and former chief of staff to Sen. Mitch McConnell.

                      Significant questions remain that could tilt the outcome of this election: whether Americans experience a second wave of the virus in the fall, the condition of the economy and how well Biden performs after he emerges from his Wilmington, Delaware, basement, which many in his party are privately happy to keep him in so long as Trump is fumbling as he governs amid a crisis.

                      But if Republicans are comforted by the uncertainties that remain, they are alarmed by one element of this election that is already abundantly clear: The small-dollar fundraising energy Democrats enjoyed in the midterms has not abated.

                      Most of the incumbent House Democrats facing competitive races enjoy a vast financial advantage over Republican challengers, who are struggling to garner attention as the virus overwhelms news coverage.

                      Still, few officials in either party believed the House was in play this year. There was also similar skepticism about the Senate. Then the virus struck, and fundraising reports covering the first three months of this year were released in mid-April.

                      Republican senators facing difficult races were not only all outraised by Democrats, they were also overwhelmed.

                      In Maine, for example, Sen. Susan Collins brought in $2.4 million, while her little-known rival, House speaker Sara Gideon, raised more than $7 million. Even more concerning to Republicans is lesser-known Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Republican officials are especially irritated at Tillis because he has little small-dollar support and raised only $2.1 million, which was more than doubled by his Democratic opponent.

                      “These Senate first-quarter fundraising numbers are a serious wake-up call for the GOP,” said Scott Reed, the top political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

                      The Republican Senate woes come as anger toward Trump is rising from some of the party’s most influential figures on Capitol Hill.

                      After working closely with Senate Republicans at the start of the year, some of the party’s top congressional strategists say the handful of political advisers Trump retains have communicated little with them since the health crisis began.

                      In a campaign steered by Trump, whose rallies drove fundraising and data harvesting, the center of gravity has of late shifted to the White House. His campaign headquarters will remain closed for another few weeks, and West Wing officials say the president’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, hasn’t been to the White House since last month, though he is in touch by phone.

                      Then there is the president’s conduct.

                      In just the last week, he has undercut the efforts of his campaign and his allies to attack Biden on China; suddenly proposed a halt on immigration; and said governors should not move too soon to reopen their economies — a week after calling on protesters to “liberate” their states. And that was all before his digression into the potential healing powers of disinfectants.

                      Republican lawmakers have gone from watching his lengthy daily briefings with a tight-lipped grimace to looking upon them with horror.

                      “Any of us can be onstage too much,” said longtime Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, noting that “there’s a burnout factor no matter who you are; you’ve got to think about that.”

                      Privately, other party leaders are less restrained about the political damage they believe Trump is doing to himself and Republican candidates. One prominent GOP senator said the nightly sessions were so painful he could not bear watching any longer.

                      “I would urge the president to focus on the positive, all that has been done and how we are preparing for a possible renewal of the pandemic in the fall,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y.

                      Asked about concerns over Trump’s briefings, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said, “Millions and millions of Americans tune in each day to hear directly from President Trump and appreciate his leadership, unprecedented coronavirus response, and confident outlook for America’s future.”

                      Trump’s thrashing about partly reflects his frustration with the virus and his inability to slow Biden’s rise in the polls. It’s also an illustration of his broader inability to shift the public conversation to another topic, something he has almost always been able to do when confronted with negative storylines ranging from impeachment proceedings to payouts to adult film stars.

                      Trump is also restless. Administration officials said they were looking to resume his travel in as soon as a week, although campaign rallies remain distant for now.

                      As they look for ways to regain the advantage, some Republicans believe the party must mount an immediate ad campaign blitzing Biden, identifying him to their advantage and framing the election as a clear choice.

                      “If Trump is the issue, he probably loses,” said Black, the consultant. “If he makes it about Biden and the economy is getting better, he has a chance.”

                      This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
                      ________________

                      This article is certainly interesting as a thought exercise, but it all boils down to the last couple of months and weeks prior to Election Day. And that's still a long ways off.

                      Still, some pretty interesting tidbits, including an amusing admission from Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK): “You got to have some hope to sell people...But Trump usually sells anger, division and ‘we’re the victim.’”
                      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                      Comment


                      • "Released" ?

                        Apparently the Congressional Record isn't adequate to inform as to which way he voted on what.

                        By the way, where oh where are The Trumpet's tax returns?
                        Trust me?
                        I'm an economist!

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by DOR View Post
                          "Released" ?

                          Apparently the Congressional Record isn't adequate to inform as to which way he voted on what.

                          By the way, where oh where are The Trumpet's tax returns?
                          Appreciate the hypocrisy while you can...

                          Comment


                          • Trump Erupts At Campaign Team As His Poll Numbers Slide

                            WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump erupted at his top political advisers last week when they presented him with worrisome polling data that showed his support eroding in a series of battleground states as his response to the coronavirus comes under criticism.

                            As the virus takes its deadly toll and much of the nation's economy remains shuttered, new surveys by the Republican National Committee and Trump's campaign pointed to a harrowing picture for the president as he faces reelection.

                            While Trump saw some of the best approval ratings of his presidency during the early weeks of the crisis, aides highlighted the growing political cost of the crisis and the unforced errors by Trump in his freewheeling press briefings.

                            Trump reacted with defiance, incredulous that he could be losing to someone he viewed as a weak candidate.

                            “I am not f—-ing losing to Joe Biden,”
                            he repeated in a series of heated conference calls with his top campaign officials, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.

                            The message to the president was sobering: Trump was trailing the former Democratic vice president in many key battleground states, he was told, and would have lost the Electoral College if the election had been held earlier this month.

                            On the line from the White House, Trump snapped at the state of his polling during a series of calls with campaign manager Brad Parscale, who called in from Florida; RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, on the line from her home in Michigan; senior adviser Jared Kushner; and other aides.

                            Echoing a number of White House aides and outside advisers, the political team urged Trump to curtail his daily coronavirus briefings, arguing that the combative sessions were costing him in the polls, particularly among seniors. Trump initially pushed back, pointing to high television ratings. But, at least temporarily, he agreed to scale back the briefings after drawing sharp criticism for raising the idea that Americans might get virus protection by injecting disinfectants.

                            Trump aides encouraged the president to stay out of medical issues and direct his focus toward more familiar and politically important ground: the economy.

                            Even as Trump preaches optimism, the president has expressed frustration and even powerlessness as the dire economic statistics pile up. It's been a whiplash-inducing moment for the president, who just two months ago planned to run for reelection on the strength of an economy that was experiencing unprecedented employment levels. Now, as the records mount in the opposite direction, Trump is feeling the pressure.

                            “We built the greatest economy in the world,” Trump has said publicly. “I’ll do it a second time.”

                            Trump's political team warned that the president's path to reelection depends on how quickly he can bring about a recovery.

                            “I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again," Kushner told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. But other aides, business leaders and economists predict a far longer road toward recovery.

                            Representatives for the RNC and the Trump campaign did not comment on the polling or last week's phone calls.

                            According to people familiar with the incident, Trump vented much of his frustration at Parscale, who served as the bearer of bad news.

                            Trump has long distrusted negative poll numbers — telling aides for years that his gut was right about the 2016 race, when he insisted that he was ahead in the Midwest and Florida. At the same time, Parscale and other Trump aides are talking up the sophistication of their data and voter outreach capabilities this time.

                            The president and some aides have had simmering frustrations with Parscale for a while, believing the campaign manager — a close Kushner ally — has enriched himself from his association with Trump and sought personal publicity. Trump had previously been angered when Parscale was the subject of magazine profiles. This latest episode flared before the campaign manager was featured in a New York Times Magazine profile this week.

                            Aides have grown particularly worried about Michigan — which some advisers have all but written off -- as well as Florida, Wisconsin and Arizona.

                            Trump announced Wednesday that he will visit Arizona next week — his first trip outside Washington in a month — as he looks to declare that much of the nation is ready to begin reopening after the virus.

                            The president has mocked Biden, his presumptive general election rival, for being "stuck in his basement" in his Delaware home during the pandemic.

                            Trump said Wednesday that he hopes to soon visit Ohio, a battleground state that Trump carried handily in 2016 but that aides see as growing slightly competitive in recent weeks.

                            Aides acknowledged that the president's signature rallies would not be returning anytime soon. Some have privately offered doubts that he would be able to hold any in his familiar format of jam-packed arenas before Election Day, Nov. 3.

                            Link
                            _______________

                            I occasionally wonder what kind of person would work for Donald Trump.

                            I can only assume they're either dyed-in-the-wool masochists, or they're so money/power hungry that they'll willingly sacrifice any sense of self-esteem, not to mention whatever morality they have left, as long it gets them a little further up the ladder.
                            “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                            Comment


                            • Midwesterners were already doubting Trump. Covid could seal his political fate

                              Drake Custer is a union man who, along with about 30 of his buddies, had an Old English “K” tattooed on their chests about 15 years ago. It stands for “Keokuk”, a deflated Mississippi River manufacturing town of 10,000 tucked into the south-east corner of Iowa that Washington and Des Moines forgot.

                              “We know who we are,” said Custer.

                              They make syrup from corn starch, steel wheels and rubber seals at an average wage of $18 per hour. People keep leaving in search of something better – in 1960, the town was 60% bigger. It’s the story of the midwest, decline and depopulation, frustration and anxiety.

                              “A lot of voters wanted to believe Trump – that out there in Washington it’s all BS, and that a savvy businessman could straighten it out,” Custer said.

                              It’s hard for many to admit that it didn’t work out. A tragic comedy of lawlessness mixed with buffoonery nears its epilogue.


                              About 10 of those 30 branded Keokuk men voted for Donald Trump. This year, Custer figures maybe five of them will.

                              “The vibe is: a lot of people figured out that the boss isn’t worried about them. My veteran friends, they don’t like what’s going on. They’re looking for leadership in government and the workplace. Really, everybody is.”

                              Folks from Milwaukee to Muskegon were having their misgivings before the pandemic shut us down in March. Trade wars with China, Mexico, Canada and Europe knocked the wind out of steel wheels and soybean prices. Workers at John Deere, the huge tractor builder, were getting pink slips in Davenport. Ethanol plants were idled. Farmers in north-west Iowa’s Sioux county, where Trump took 90% of the vote, said last fall they would not vote for him again. The 23 proclaimed they were “fed up” after Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency allowed 31 petroleum refineries to shun ethanol blending requirements. Ethanol comes from corn. Corn is a religious totem in these parts.

                              Trump’s approval ratings sank underwater in key midwestern swing states he won: Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. Any number of polls showed Trump and Joe Biden in a dead heat in about a dozen purple states, or with Biden in a comfortable lead. Bluster and blunder were coming home to roost.

                              Then the pandemic that Trump ignored hit and the bottom dropped out.

                              Corn prices dived 19% since January. Meatpacking plants are exploding with the coronavirus – 60% of the pork plant workers in Perry, Iowa, are infected. The sheriff for Waterloo, Iowa, said he wanted to stomp a boot on Tyson’s plant. The mayor of Sioux Falls argued with the South Dakota governor to shut down a Smithfield pork facility overrun with the virus. About 65% of people polled think folks should stay home and not dine in at the restaurant buffet. Although the Iowa governor allowed churches to reopen, they aren’t taking her up on the offer with Sunday services. They would just as soon wait until we can get some tests done around here. Republican leaders are not in tune with voters.

                              The Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat on Biden’s VP shortlist, held forth ably against armed men in the capital lobby and remains far more popular than Trump. In Wisconsin, Democrats were outraged when Republicans forced a primary election involving a key state supreme court race. Voters stood up for democracy, in line for hours braving Covid-19 infection to cast their vote. The Democratic-backed court candidate won. Wisconsin unseated the Republican governor, Scott Walker, in 2018 and elected a gay woman to the US Senate, Democrat Tammy Baldwin, before that. It is the land of La Follette, after all.

                              Trump hopes to flip Minnesota in November. He can forget about the land of Hubert H Humphrey if he can’t swing Wisconsin. Iowa is on the pink side of purple but clearly is in play if the Democrats don’t just fly over again as Clinton did. The Iowa Republican senator Joni Ernst has an approval rating near 37% for joining at the cranium with Trump while he routed ag markets. The Democrats doubtless could screw this up, but …

                              A reckoning is due for incompetence and neglect. Farmers are disconsolate. Every dairy worker suicide resonates. Hogs are backed up when one of the huge, consolidated slaughterhouses goes down for lack of healthy help. Producers are left to shoot them and bury them. People in nice SUVs line up for free food. It makes everyone nauseous. Everyday people can’t understand why NBA players can get tested but packinghouse workers ordered to keep the pork loins rolling can’t. Rural communities prone to vote Republican live under a cloud of fear that virus from immigrant workers will spread to them – that the health of your neighbor is in fact your health. Immigrants become human, and their treatment is realized as shameful. We’re waking up, all right. When 30 million people can’t get through to the unemployment system, and half of them lose their health insurance by fall, incumbents should cover their flanks.

                              Polls show that in the upper midwest, blue urban voters are more motivated to vote than rural red voters by fair margins. Armed people of color escorted an African American legislator into the Michigan capitol last week in response to the white armed men. Talk about stuff getting real. Do you think every African American in Flint is not motivated?

                              “The iron is hot,” Custer said. “This is the time to make permanent change.”

                              Even while sitting in his basement unheard, Biden is winning the midwest for all Trump’s blather. The genius may think we are suckers, but in Iowa we don’t ruin good corn liquor with Clorox. The gig is up.

                              Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book: Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland
                              ________________

                              I get the feeling that being "the anti-lefty" isn't a sufficient qualification for the President of the United States.

                              If there is any silver lining to this horrific pandemic, it'll be that it's exposed Trump for what he's always -obviously- been: A congenitally rich failure that cares about nothing - nothing - but himself and his ego.
                              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                              Comment


                              • There is so much discontent and unease running through the Midwest right now that this November election could be a stunner. A better than 50/50 chance that everything goes to the Democrats.

                                Comment

                                Working...
                                X