Tag: Trump re-election

Why The Lincoln Project Strikes Terror In Trump

Dear never-Trump Republicans: Would you adopt me? I’m a centrist with left-leaning tendencies. I get along with cats, dogs and most libertarians. But I’m best off in a political home without small children.

Most of all, I dearly want President Donald Trump gone. You — knowing how he got elected in the first place — are best equipped to defeat him. Democrats seem to have had the good sense to make Joe Biden their candidate. Now you have to get him elected.

One of Trump’s bigger nightmares is the growing pack of organized anti-Trump Republican groups. The Lincoln Project is the alpha dog. Its operatives are former Republican strategists who perfected the cultural weaponry deployed against liberals for decades. Continue reading.

Trump Is Selling White Grievance. The Suburbs Aren’t Buying It.

New York Times logoAs the president casts himself as a bulwark against “angry mobs,” there are signs that he is alienating voters in bedroom communities who view him as a deeply flawed messenger on issues of race.

CORNELIUS, NC — On a humid Wednesday morning in this leafy lakeside suburb of Charlotte, American flags fluttered from porches along Main Street, traffic was slow, and the occasional resident ambled out for a walk.

There was only one visible sign of the anger and anxiety that have coursed through this community and so many others across the nation in recent weeks: “Racist,” read the faded black graffiti at the base of a Confederate memorial, the kind of statue President Trump has vowed to preserve amid a national discussion of racism in America.

Down the street, as she loaded groceries into her car, Elizabeth Stewart vented her frustrations about Mr. Trump’s incendiary approach. Continue reading.

If these are the polls he’s using, no wonder Trump thinks 2020 is going well

Washington Post logoAs far as ledes go — the anecdotes that journalists use to compel readers at the outset of a story — few I’ve encountered in my life have been better tailored to my interests than one that Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen used this week.

Thiessen got a chance to interview President Trump in the Oval Office and began his description of that conversation by explaining what the president was doing when Thiessen entered. Continue reading “If these are the polls he’s using, no wonder Trump thinks 2020 is going well”

What Will Trump’s Rally in New Hampshire Be Like? It’s Anyone’s Guess

New York Times logoThe governor, a Republican, isn’t attending. It isn’t clear how many other G.O.P. elected officials will come. The turnout could be low, or expansive. And fears of the virus hang over the event.

Three days before President Trump’s latest rally, in a state that Hillary Clinton narrowly won in 2016, the only thing that seems clear is that the president’s team has no idea what to expect.

Mr. Trump’s campaign is planning an event at an airport hangar in Portsmouth, N.H. But the state’s governor, Chris Sununu, a Republican, has said he will not be attending. It isn’t clear how many other Republican elected officials will come. The number of attendees could be low, or it could be expansive. There could be lots of people drifting in from Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts.

Campaign officials believe they will be able to prevent the kind of ticket prank that helped turn Mr. Trump’s rally last month in Tulsa, Okla., into a far smaller event than expected — but they still cannot say for sure. And most significantly, there is the looming threat of the coronavirus spreading in a crowd where attendees will be in relatively close quarters, despite being mostly outdoors. Continue reading.

Trump could sink the House GOP in suburbia

President Donald Trump’s continuing erosion among well-educated voterslooms as perhaps the most imposing headwind to Republican hopes of recapturing the House of Representatives in November — or even avoiding further losses in the chamber.

In 2018, a suburban revolt against Trump powered Democrats to sweeping gains in white-collar House districts from coast to coast. The backlash left the GOP holding only about one-fourth of all House districts that have more college graduates than the national average, down from more than two-fifths before the election, according to a new CNN analysis of census data.

Now, recent national and district-level polls signal that many of the well-educated voters souring on Trump are also displaying more resistance to Republican congressional candidates than in 2018 — potentially much more. Continue reading.

Trump’s attacks on mail voting are turning Republicans off absentee ballots

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s relentless attacks on the security of mail voting are driving suspicion among GOP voters toward absentee ballots — a dynamic alarming Republican strategists, who say it could undercut their own candidates, including Trump himself.

In several primaries this spring, Democratic voters have embraced mail ballots in far larger numbers than Republicans during a campaign season defined by the coronavirus pandemic. And when they urge their supporters to vote by mail, GOP campaigns around the country are hearing from more and more Republican voters who say they do not trust absentee ballots, according to multiple strategists. In one particularly vivid example, a group of Michigan voters held a public burning of their absentee ballot applications last month.

The growing Republican antagonism toward voting by mail comes even as the Trump campaign is launching a major absentee-ballot program in every competitive state, according to multiple campaign advisers — a delicate balancing act, considering what one strategist described as the president’s “imprecision” on the subject. Continue reading.

Mary Trump book: How she leaked Trump financials to NYT

Axios logoIn her new memoir, President Trump’s niece reveals how she leaked hordes of confidential Trump family financial documents to the New York Times in an effort to expose her uncle, whom she portrays as a dangerous sociopath.

Why it matters: Trump was furious when he found out recently that Mary Trump, a trained psychologist, would be publishing a tell-all memoir. And Trump’s younger brother, Robert, tried and failed to block the publication of “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

  • Axios obtained a copy ahead of the expected release later this month.

Behind the scenes: In what reads like a scene out of Spotlight, Mary Trump tells the story for the first time of how she secretly gave the New York Times much of the source material for its 14,000 word investigation of how “President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents.” Continue reading.

Trump’s worldview forged by neglect and trauma at home, his niece says in new book

Washington Post logoA tell-all book by President Trump’s niece describes a family riven by a series of traumas, exacerbated by a daunting patriarch who “destroyed” Donald Trump by short-circuiting his “ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion,” according to a copy of the forthcoming memoir obtained by The Washington Post.

President Trump’s view of the world was shaped by his desire during childhood to avoid his father’s disapproval, according to the niece, Mary L. Trump, whose book is by turns a family history and a psychological analysis of her uncle.

But she writes that as Donald matured, his father came to envy his son’s “confidence and brazenness,” as well as his seemingly insatiable desire to flout rules and conventions, traits that brought them closer together as Donald became the right-hand man in the family real estate business. Continue reading.

Trump got his crowd and his fireworks, and peddled his fiction

Washington Post logoThe setting for President Trump’s early Fourth of July celebration was magnificent, as the Black Hills of South Dakota tend to be. The scene was also full of painful history, willful ignorance and deliberate fearmongering.

Friday night, in an amphitheater in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, a military band played smooth jazz on snare drums and trumpets as the country sank under the rising number of coronavirus infections. Thousands of unmasked guests, awaiting the arrival of the president, sat shoulder-to-shoulder in black folding chairs tethered together in a kind of coronavirus chain of denial. The VIPs would, of course, be seated separately onstage — not six feet apart but not amid the storm of exhalations, coughs, vociferous cheers and sneezes. And just to add to the upside-down, inside-out madness of the mass gathering, Ivanka Trump, the president’s adviser and daughter, tweeted a reminder to be safe over the holiday weekend by social distancing and wearing a mask. Her nearest and dearest did not listen to the plea.

Mount Rushmore is painfully complex — much like America itself. The faces of four revered but profoundly flawed presidents were carved into the stone by a talented sculptor who sympathized with the Ku Klux Klan. The majestic monument — a testament to human tenacity — scars land considered sacred by Native Americans. Continue reading.

Trump struggles to say what he would do with another term for second time in a week

WASHINGTON — It was a do-over of a softball question, but President Donald Trump still seemed to struggle to answer what he would do with a potential second term in an interview that aired Wednesday evening.

The President said he hadn’t heard the criticism of his answer the last time he was asked the question, by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, but said there was still “more to do” in his next term, again without naming any concrete policy goals.

“We’re going to make America great again. We’re doing things that nobody could have done,” the President told Sinclair’s Eric Bolling, before listing achievements from his first term.

At one point, Trump said, “We’ve got to bring back our manufacturing,” before immediately claiming he already had, saying he had “brought it back very big.” Continue reading.